Macsen

I also get to join the Gorsedd of Druids.

Strange, it still works OK for me. Maybe the BBC blocks people from outside the UK? Try this direct link.

Well the publisher told me that having won the award I'm in a good position to get a grant to take time off to write another novel, another £5000 or so. But I don't really want to take time off work, I enjoy being a journalist and creative writing is just a hobby really.

I just sent the book in to see what the judges thought and it was a real surprise when I won. There's a tradition of writing quite serious realism in Wales so it's nice to get some comedic fantasy out there! Here's a pic of me looking really smug. You get a medal and a hardback copy of the book too.

Hey guys, I won an award for best unpublished novel at a Welsh festival. The award is £5000 plus publishing the novel. You can watch a video of the ceremony and an interview here. I'm the second clip along at the moment, the guy sitting down on a chair. It's in Welsh but it's fun to watch.

You could reinvest the profits back into the mod, so that you can host more missions and content for fans to download. I presume hosting hunderds of giga bytes of dark mod stuff oce this mod is released is going to cost something.

Of course I don't mean charging for the toolkit, but charging companies who need a bunch of textures and models for their games/images but don't have the time or the staff to create them. You could make your content free to use in the Dark Mod but charge companies to use them for commercial purposes.

This site got me thinking. Since you guys have slaved away at this mod for quite some years now, I was wondering how you could go about making money from the Dark Mod. Obviously you couldn't sell the game, because you don't have the rights to the engine. But is there anything stopping you selling all the 3D models, textures and whatnot you've created? Presumably these would work with any game and engine, and are all of very high quality. Don't know how you'd split the money between you though.

Happy 21st birthday Dram! To think, you were only 12 when this mod started...

Well let's not go overboard, you need to seperate the blatant plagiarism from coincidence and unoriginality. There are very few original ideas left in the world, so you'll always find a title that matches another, or a similar scene in any book, film or game. People are inspired by art to create similar art. Just look at the Dark Mod. World of Wacraft seems happy with being essentially an exact copy of Warhammer which is pretty much an exact copy of LOTR!

Well after working on a game for 15 years and investing so much in it, and desperate to see it out there.... maybe you sort of just brush things under the carpet of your mind. But in my opinion they were just really naive geezers who thought they could bend the rules and get away with it.

It may be a crap game but the ending is the best ever!

I hope no one notices my Dark Mod FM is based on Limbo of the Lost...

A steampunk game we like to play around here is Drive the Steam Engine! Join Ussss!

'No longer'? *does backstroke in cesspool of own making*

I didn't know you wrote for the Onion Unstoppable!

Well I suppose the more teams you support the more chance you have of winning.

What? You were a Miami Dolphins fan a few weeks ago! I don't follow this 'foozball' but I think that's what they call a 'fumble'. But all is forgiven since I'm not sure how American Football teams manage to hold on to their fans at all given that they can just move shop to a more profitable area at the drop of a hat. Why, the rugby team I support (formed in 1872) tried to move half a mile from one stadium in the centre of town to one just on the side of town and there's been a three year campaign to keep them where they are.

OK football fans are uncouth morons, but as the old saying goes: 'Rugby is a thug's game for gentlemen, football is a gentlemen's game for thugs.' But seriously if you can't surrender to your base instincts to have a little fun once in a while, you're probably some tibetan monk.

Oh please, again with this 'anyone who likes anything popular that I don't like must be a mindless sheep' claptrap that infects this forum. I don't give a toss about American Football, or real football for that matter, but it's not hard to work out why people enjoy it. Watching a good game of sport is like watching a good film - you have the emotional ups and downs, the stories, the twists, the flashes of raw excitement. Watching sport has been popular for thousands of years so you can't blame it on 'teh evil corporations' telling us what to think. Right, I'm off the the hippodrome to watch two roman centurions try to behead each other. Sponsored by the goddess Nike of course.

Haha, gutted for the New England Patriots after all that. However there was a far more important game going on this weekend where a team with 'England' in their title were taught a thing or two by some underdogs!

"At night it gets down to -30 degrees!" "Celsius or Fahrenheit?" "First one, then the other."

Here in the UK there's no discernible difference between winter and summer. It's cloudy and rainy the whole time. About once every year we'll get 'Travel Chaos' as snow stops traffic for a few hours, but that's about the only indication that winter is here.

Better to invest your time and energy in creating something new. What I've always wanted to see though is actually the opposite of updating - Thief DS missions on the Thief II engine. There's a decent game in there somewhere and I want to play it without sluggish controls, loading points, etc. Send a PM if you're interested.

Does it really matter what we think? Even if global warming is man made, our small efforts to prevent it is just pissing into a volcano. Apparently even if everyone in the UK recycled and took public transport every day climate change would only be slowed by about 7 hours. All we can really do is vote for people who take their lead from scientists and not big business or religion.