New Spark Headquarters and Lobby

The new Spark Headquarters and Spark Lobby are finally here! After months of waiting, and empty promise after empty promise, the new Spark Headquarters and Spark Lobby are finally a reality! Many thanks to CrazyMofo, Gamer, Halow, Validir, Odoacer, and everyone else who worked very hard to make this happen!

Some of the bug fixes and updates include the ever-annoying grenade glitch being fixed, the addition of a patch manager integrated into the Spark lobby, a mute function, an in-game ignore function, and private message reply option (/r), private message notification when Spark is minimized to your system tray (in Windows), and of course, a brand new look for Spark Headquarters and the Spark lobby.

Now that the Spark Headquarters forums are back up, the Spark Forums that we've been running for the past couple months will transition back to just being the forums for the Spark Network, and will be re-themed to reflect this fact. There will be no downtime during this change, it'll just look different one day and you'll never be the wiser, unless you've been looking for it :)

-posted by Reaper Charlie on September 7, 2009

Spark Forum

After a few weeks, Spark Network is proud to formally introduce Spark Forum as its newest addition to the Network! The Spark Forum was originally conceived the day that Codemallet announced its discontinuation of Spark development, and took down Spark Headquarters and the Spark servers without warning. A few guys (including myself) on Spark got together one night, and decided that if there wasn't any place for us to meet and forum it up, then we'd make our own! And just a few weeks later, Spark Forum is thriving with new traffic, hosting great new contests, and much more, like providing a home forum for Spark Realm, S.W.A.T., Spark Faces, SparkCast! So drop by the new Spark Forum and show some love! We guarantee you'll find something that interests you!

Also, FingerS and BraVeHearT have started hosting a US | New Jersey server for us all to enjoy! If you see them in the lobby, thank them for their time and money spent getting that online!

-posted by Reaper Charlie on August 21, 2009

Codemallet to Discontinue Spark

Codemallet Entertainment has announced its intention to discontinue development or support for Spark. No warning was given of this decision until this morning, and as such, any attempts to create a replacement for Spark (in the case of this inevitable turn of events) have not been completed, or have lost community interest.

The players Nasacid and RareOps have been in contact with Codemallet Entertainment, and there is talk of them buying Spark from Codemallet, and re-opening Spark's development cycle so that the improvement of the game can progress. They report that, except for the change of ownership, management and administration teams will remain the same and the game should progress as usual.

There have been rumors of a purportedly well-funded and -staffed clone code-named Valkyrie, but as of this post, no concrete evidence has been given to the public of any such game existing in as complete of a state as has been reported.

In the meantime, head on over to our new forums at http://forum.spark-realm.net! Myself, DarkGrimz, Godzilla, and biLLa decided that since the Spark Headquarters forums had been taken down by remote, we would provide a forum for Spark!

-posted by Reaper Charlie on July 26, 2009

Star Wars & StarCraft sound patches

Hey all, we've got some cool new things going on Spark Realm! First off, we've just got in a couple of freshly-made and quite awesome sound patches by Godzilla, the Star Wars and StarCraft sound patches! He must have spent a bunch of time with Sound Recorder open, with Star Wars movies and StarCraft open in the background, I can only imagine! =P Thanks a mil, Godzilla, I hope everyone tries out your patches, they're spectacular and they make me laugh! If you're interested, check 'em out on the Downloads page, or watch Godzilla's demo videos on Spark-Tube!

Also, Patabugen has redesigned Spark Stuff a bit, and it looks better than it did before! Birdman is reportedly developing content for Spark Clans, and that website is supposed to be taking off soon! More content is being developed for S.W.A.T. as we speak, and more pictures are being added to Spark Faces every day! Keep sending in your faces, maps, and patches, so that we can get these websites all full of content for other Spark players! Cheers!

-posted by Reaper Charlie on June 25, 2009

Spark Realm transitions to PHP

I've rolled Spark Realm over to PHP now, many thanks to the help of a handy-dandy PHP book (Beginning PHP and MySQL, which I got for Christmas! Thanks, Dad!), and loose guidance from a few members of the Spark Community. The next step now is to begin rolling over all of the other Spark Network websites to PHP and automating them, and getting everything filled out with awesome content from all of you guys! So be sure to submit your maps to ma...@spark-realm.net and your patches to patc...@spark-realm.net!

-posted by Reaper Charlie on March 11, 2009

S.W.A.T.

The Spark Realm website is nearing completion, and as soon as it's done I will begin work on building out the content for the S.W.A.T. website. Once I get a pretty good handle on PHP, I will roll everything over to PHP, so that everything can be taken care of with server-side scripts and constant maintenance will no longer be necessary.

The S.W.A.T. website will be set up with three basic categories. The first, called Create Content, will be a haven for tutorials on how to create Spark maps, Spark patches, Spark websites, and in general, any and every kind of content that can be imagined for Spark. The Spark Tactics section will be like a guidebook to bettering your Spark-playing skills, from tightening your spreads to correcting your dodging patterns, and nipping bad habits in the bud before they harden into reflexes.

The third section will be a volunteer Tutoring Program, in which more advanced players can hook up with newer ones and teach them new things. Though a better way to do it might seem to be just asking in the lobby, this section of the S.W.A.T. will be dedicated for Spark Players looking to help others or get help. The Tutoring Program will have tools which will make coming here much more useful than just asking random people in the lobby for help.

When the S.W.A.T. website opens, you can expect the overall skill level of the community as a whole to increase noticeably, and new maps and patches to arrive with increasingly more regularity, and with noticeably better workmanship. If you're as excited about this as I am, then make sure to give your friends the link to www.spark-realm.net! :)

-posted by Reaper Charlie on January 5, 2009

Spark Realm

I have concurrently created five seperate designs, color coded as yellow (for Spark Stuff), green (for Spark Realm), turquoise (for Spark Clans), blue (for S.W.A.T), and white (for Spark Faces). The yellow one was originally for Spark Headquarters, but neither Dave nor remote made any attempt to secure the design for Spark Headquarters, though I designed it specifically for Spark Headquarters, and approached both of them numerous times offering to roll the site over to the new design for them. So I went to Patabugen with the design, and he opted to use it instead of the placeholder graphics which had sat like a blemish on the front page of Spark Stuff for so long. Tough luck, Spark Headquarters. You might have gotten some free design work :) Next time, be less apathetic!

-posted by Reaper Charlie on December 28, 2008