Monday, January 24, 2011

The future of Uvora

With February rapidly approaching, another month will pass without a word of Uvora's Alpha. In the past few days, little has happened with regard to Uvora, yet the community has become more active thanks in part to the rise of the forthcoming "MyVirtualKingdom," another knock off of the game which we've all forgot..

In short, "MyVirtualKingdom" is another Virtual Family Kingdom. It has all the clichés of Virtual Family Kingdom with slight "improvements" to the interface.. By improvements, I mean more "inspiration" from.. what's that game called again? The point being, MyVirtualKingdom is not threat to Uvora, but rather competition for Virtual Family Kingdom. I doubt that MVK will be able to successfully dent the popularity of VFK once the game is out of beta.. Their game will be pay to play with a free membership option which is far more limiting than VFK's plans. You can't even freaking trade in the game without paying them four dollars a month! But like Uvora, MVK "borrowed" some artwork for a certain fireplace from their friends over at VFK.

Is it just a coincidence? ..Did they both steal it from the same source?
http://www.myvirtualkingdom.com/myvk/rooms/MVKGallery.jpg
http://i56.tinypic.com/24n437o.jpg

Yet, Oatman is getting upset over at Uvora Forums because the community is turning their attention towards the new game.. And we all know how much Oatman hates to lose the limelight. Now would probably be the time to highlight Oatman's hypocrisy..

Okay I have no problem with MVK discussion because it does not pose any type of threat to Uvora. Though, is this forums a Uvora Forum or an MVK Forum?
Said the same Oatman who posted about Uvora on VFKForums..! I'm also loving how Mickeybeast was so quick to claim MVKForums.com! He's going to need to purchase another vBulletin license.. OR he could forget all about Uvora and shut down UvoraForums.

Now, let's forget about MyVirtualKingdom.. What the heck happened to the Uvora homepage?

Temporarily Disabled
Before you read this message, please know that this is NOT the end of Uvora.

Uvora Members,
Insight of recent events we have decided that in the best interest of our project, we feel that it is best to with-hold all community activity from our game. Uvora was not intended to be announced during the pre alpha stages of the game's development.
http://uvora.com/

Seems like Oatman is trying to walk back on his mistake to ever publicly announce Uvora before he ever got to even developing it! Now if only he could get rid of the forum and put his time into developing the game, rather then playing MVK or posting on the forums.. And just a side note, whose genius idea was it to force guests into registering for the forums to view the posts? Oh well, I guess that's less traffic from Google!

To indirectly quote Battery from Uvora Forums, is there even a point to Uvora? ..Now that MVK has come along and caught everyone's attention? Oatman this is your chance! Pull a fast one and blame MVK for the dismiss of Uvora!

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Oatman LOVES Wikipedia!

This post should be part of the "Oatman's funnies" post, but this is just too funny.. It deserves it's own post!

If you've ever google searched "Uvora" back in November, you might recall seeing the Uvora Wikipedia article.. Of course, that article was deleted since Uvora is considered insignificant.. BUT, Oatman kept trying to get the Uvora article back up.. Finally, the article was permanently deleted by the community voting against it.. Sawwe Oats!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvora

Oatman's even added insignificant Uvora to the Wikipedia article on TCP and UDP ports..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers

I guess this is what Oatman meant by "breaking new ground" and "going where no game has gone before.."

Responses to the blog

I decided to be a prick and post the blog on the forums.. Here's some of the responses I got.

From Etta:
This made me laugh. Your timeline is screwed up. Nobody deleted anything. The "thought" of Uvora was developed in January. The website wasn't even released in September, so not sure how the October is possible. You completely twisted Jared's "claims." I could keep going on, but not wasting my time. I give you C- for effort .
What claims, Etta? You can't even point out a claim that was altered.. So, for wasting my time, I give you an "F" for 'ffort.

I also love how the thread is still open.. Oatman is probably just trying to get his "gotcha" moment.. You know, getting that one minor detail that might be somehow inaccurate.. Of course, with historical events, you know who, will probably try playing revisionist to get those details in his favor..

Lord Jared has yet to respond..

Friday, January 14, 2011

Sources of "inspiration" in Uvora's "art"

The pictures speak for themselves..Yes, I used unnecessary shadows à la Etta.

1. From "Town Square"..


2. From "Main Street"..


3. From "Epcot Guest Room"..

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Oatman's latest walk test

I always wondered why Oatman heavily guards his SWF files from being decompiled. In his last walk test file, he used SecureSWF (http://www.kindisoft.com/secureSWF) to obfuscate his actionscript.. It's not like anyone wanted to steal his "work." Though, I did decompile his SWF just out of curiosity (no, you can't sue me for that Oats) and I found out that he's using a demo version of SecureSWF.. I thought the demo version placed a visible watermark on the final SWF? I wonder where it went..? It's also important to note that the demo only lasts 30 days, so how was Oatman using a demo version for four months?

Correction: You can view the watermark by right clicking and pressing "Forward" until disabled, and then pressing "Rewind."

https://server.uvora.com/Mall.swf

I also love how Oatman got a free SSL certificate from Comodo, you know the ones that are 2048-bit ready? Yep, that's the reason why Oatman's server is so secure.. He uses a free SSL certificate! Oh, that and CloudFlare Free!

http://www.instantssl.com/ssl-certificate-products/free-ssl-certificate.html
http://www.cloudflare.com/plans.html

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Oatman's funnies

1. Oatman claimed that Uvora is able to detect if your computer has viruses.

2. Oatman claims that he has a law firm working for him to ensure that his game is "legal." Yes, the same Oatman who believed that remaking VMK was legal.

3. Oatman claims that his game's "system" has superior fraud detection that it can catch any "fraudulent activations." It's so smart that it's almost like an actual human is behind it.

4. Oatman loves to talk about how secure his game is.. He mentions it whenever he gets a chance to.. In a thread about staff positions, he found a way to sneak "2048bit encryption with a salted SHA512 encryption" into his post.
http://www.uvoraforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1801&page=2

5. Oatman wants to sue the person who found out about play.uvora.com.. You know, the person who found proof that there's probably no game!

6. Oatman claims that Uvora will break new grounds..
Times have changed, people's Internet is getting faster. Computers are becoming more powerful. The days of old single core CPU's and Integrated GPU's are almost over. Just about everyone these days are running hyperthreaded, multicored repossessors and GPUs. So why in the world would a game still live in the 20th century? Games need to progress not digress in the genre of speed and performance... [Uvora] does exactly what other games in the past have not, we take advantage of all the power your computer has to offer to give you the most astonishing, high detailed game.
 How? By borrowing ideas from Virtual Magic Kingdom? It sounds like Oatman is making an operating system..

7. Oatman claims that he got over 300 unique visitors within 10 minutes..

Uvora has been in the works since January 1st 2010 behind the scenes. The game was not announced to anyone until April 1st of 2010. When this date hit we launched what we call our "wEngine" which aired and to our amazement we filled a room up with over 300 unique visitors within 10 Minutes!
According to "inside sources," Uvora only had around thirty people take part in their initial "walk test." I wonder how the extra zero got added in..

Uvora timeline

January 2010 - Oatman claims to have started Uvora back in January of 2010..

March 2010 - Oatman is spotted on http://www.actionscript.org/forums asking for help with basic flash.

May 2010 - Oatman conducts his first "walk test."

Summer 2010 - Oatman announces the Uvora alpha phase. He also announced the "family and friends alpha" phase, when a select few are chosen to participate in "pre-alpha." The alpha phase was meant to begin mid-September and "extended alpha" was meant to begin in October.

August 2010 - Oatman makes some great progress, he learns how to use cross domain XMLs, after only 7 months of learning flash.
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=244371

September 2010 - Uvora homepage is updated, claiming that the alpha phase was "postponed" until October.
http://i51.tinypic.com/2j34hep.png

October 2010 - No alpha test was released, instead Oatman finished the Uvora homepage and he created a Twitter! In addition, UvoraForums was introduced! The homepage's main SWF also contained actionscript similar to the actionscript in an article released under Creative Common in the Adobe docs. It was also discovered that Uvora's homepage led to an empty directory when the "play now" button was pressed when logged in.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Flash/CS5/AS3LR/fl/motion/Color.html
http://play.uvora.com (When Oatman discovered that his empty directory was found, he quickly added an index page to redirect it to the maintenance page.)

December 2010 - Members of the UvoraForums were first given alpha keys. Concept art is released, with some strikingly similar art from VMK. Bushes in Uvora resembled the VMK Town Central trees, a window was reflecting the background from the sky room in Fantasyland and characters were allegedly traced directly from VMK.
http://www.vfkforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=821590#post821590

January 2011 - Oatman allegedly deleted the UvoraForums.com forum after a feud between him and the administrators of the forum. Oatman's new favorite forum is probably UvoraFanSite, a forum made by Wings from VMKUnlimited/VAU to replace his LasuniForums.

Post by MoomaladeMuffin:
The below was posted by me, and deleted almost instantly for no reason at all. Everything posted was the truth, and none of it was deserving of its deletion.

Hello everyone. Most of you probably know me on here, and I would just like to ask ONE very important question. Please don't take this the wrong way, but WHY were Jared and Etta banned? I'd like to know how the creators of the game this forum is about could be banned. I realize this thread will probably be deleted soon, but I'd just like to get my message across before I, too, am banned for no apparent reason. It seems to me that a "certain" staff member is going a little power-hungry lately and going a little crazy, as Kfan had previously mentioned. I'm terribly sorry if any of this sounds rude, but it's just something to think about. I can't imagine how the administrators of this forum expect to have our continued support if they are going to be banning us and revoking our priveleges, on TOP of framing some of us for things we haven't done. That staff member knows who he is, and I'd just like to put it out there that this is a little bit ridiculous.

Thanks for your time, and please move this to the rants section if necessary.

http://uvorafansite.com/forum.php

Lastly, still no alpha test yet!