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February 2006

It's backwards. Deal with it.

February 27, 2006 - Monday

Please purchase the Serenity DVD. By doing so, you not only support the creators, you support the whole 'verse. The future is worth fighting for.

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't much to say, but I'd like for everything to settle some before I release the powder-keg of news.

Straight to the important stuff. I've uploaded the compatibility version of my startup game, for those complaining about getting the damn thing to work with the sphere_dx8 and sphere_gl drivers. It's bigger and slower, but it works for all drivers identically.

February 24, 2006 - Friday

ORSON SCOTT CARD LIKES SERENITY, SO WHY THE HELL DON'T YOU?!

It's been a busy week, and it's only going to get busier. There's been lots of activity in the GearHead mailing list, the Spherical forums and the FreeBASIC forums. I suddenly feel spread a little thin. Not to mention the hangers-on for After Dark, and the approaching commencement of university and the obligations that will and is already bringing.

First, GearHead. Joseph Hewitt has been trying to initiate a little project that will involve helping a relative for a project by sending a teddy bear to various locations around the world, complete with pictures. The response has been lukewarm. I'd like to help myself, but I really haven't the heart to tell him that I'm poor. That, and I don't leave the house unless it's on fire. Or if I have to.

GearHead 2 v0.220 has been made available, and it's chock-full of newness. The biggest changes by far involve the OpenGL frontend of the game, which now displays a richer variety of textures. This frontend will now work flawlessly under Linux. The Acrobatics and Taunt skills have been added to the game, which will add unique slants to the existing combat system. There's an extra area of the game to explore, as well as some new products, and a new brand, Hoeller Industries. Some bugs have been ironed out, and non-lethal combat has been added. All in all, shaping up very nicely.

The current buzz in the mailing list is Skulkraken's sister.

...

Her beautiful artwork, that is. Her latest initiative is having a go reworking the portraits of the original GearHead. Her current work is featured in GearHead 2, namely about 12 portraits. She's got a lot of artistic flair, but the colour mapping seems to be driving her batty. So I went into technical dump mode, and explained the issues in converting RGB bitmaps to paletted bitmaps, and why some pixels seem to remap themselves arbitrarily. I even provided some practical tips, like staying away from varying darker colours, and using brightening and darkening tools exclusively, and cell shading too.

Once QuickFire has been added to the list of features, guns will finally be viable weapons. Real-life, pull a trigger. In-game, press a button. It makes a lot of sense, particularly for long dungeon runs, when nobody gives a damn about the burst value versus a Deep Lobster.

And I've yet to lobby for an RSS feed of the mailing list. I swear we'd get more activity if people actually knew what was going on. We get about three or four postings to the mailing list a day, but since you have to have a Yahoo! account, lots of people simply can't find that out. I could go one step further and suggest a dedicated online forum, but there'd be migration issues.

The Spherical forums have been active as of late. The new startup game project voting is underway, and I look to be somewhat in the lead. Not bad for a few nights of idle pondering.

But the real news is centralised around the idea of the community game. Everybody there is capable of making some aspect of an RPG, but no one person has the ability to go through with it. Thus, the community game idea was born. Right now, there's a dilemma. In an unexpected twist, people are scrambling away from the leadership role. Now there's going to be a committee, but that raises the new question of who exactly will be the head of such a team? Without a leader to say yes to some ideas, no to others, and set deadlines and delegate tasks, nothing gets done. I've currently volunteered to be in the management team, but I'm not sure about where to go from there.

The FreeBASIC forums have always been busy, but there's some really exciting news. For this season's pie in the sky come down to Earth, jofers has been hard at work, messing around with a GUI toolkit for FreeBASIC. Which doesn't sound like much, until you realise a few things. Current GUI toolkits are large, slow and complicated to use. Such toolkits usually operate differently between operating systems, and look different as well. Did I mention they're not easy to use?

With this revolutionary new development, people will eventually be able to write a GUI in FreeBASIC, and from then on, be able to compile and run that GUI on any OS supported by FB. That currently covers DOS, Windows, and Linux, the major players. The GUI toolkit operates within the FB graphical window, which means a consistent look and feel, and it also runs under the current up-and-coming hardware-accelerated OpenGL libraries, MyGL and YAGL.

Also on the move is the new DRAW STRING command. The author of FreeBASIC's gfxlib and formerly the one man army behind DirectQB, lillo over in the forums has been kind enough to create an entire command to print strings with custom fonts and at pixel locations. Yes, you can print a string at pixel-level granularity! This should make room for much more creativity with text and fonts. It's too bad it wasn't in FreeBASIC v0.15b, otherwise After Dark would have started out looking much cleaner.

There's a bit of contesting over what the syntax of the new command should be. My proposal mimics jofers's, and looks a lot like that of the graphical PUT command. As a matter of fact, DRAW STRING and PUT share a lot in common. The only difference is that DRAW STRING accepts a string and a font, while PUT accepts an image buffer. Things are definitely looking on the up.

For the hangers-on, After Dark has seen more progress in the past few days than in the past few weeks combined. I'm diving head-first into the battle engine, most of it should be functional. The turn sorting is already operational. I don't want to go all interactive just yet. I need to write the level-up code, and dying code, the skill learning notification code... I think that's all, before I go into the nitty-gritty, like damage equations, the menu items, and other such things. The only thing that's still up in the air at the moment is the flags for choosing what enemy animations are chosen, what pseudo-strategy is used, and how I implement special boss attacks. Everything else is actually already written down in docs, in black and white. Fret you not.

Only other obstacle is the graphics for the battles. Having crappy graphics doesn't concern me. Having crappy graphics that take up a lot of time in creation does.

Finally, I'd like to point out that just because new versions haven't popped up every week or so, doesn't mean that development has ceased. A lot of people make that mistake when looking at the seemingly static GearHead homepage, while underneath the surface the game is undergoing improvement all the time. So it is with After Dark. Just because you can't download the version with a faint vestige of a battle system yet, doesn't mean one isn't in the works. Australian summers are made of evil. They've always been bad, but this year's has been one of the worst on record. Average temperatures have been rising, and just this month, I found out that we've only received a fraction of the usual rainfall for this month, February. Something like 12 millimetres, out of the usual 120. Just general figures, but it bodes ill. Such conditions don't help in a room which seems to have a permanently elevated temperature and humidity levels. It's an upstairs room, so it's really bad for development. The only progress I've honestly made was during the dead of night, and I need that time reserved for sleep soon, because my university time happens to be during the day.

A couple of Serenity quotes:

Kaylee: Have faith captain.
Mal: Not today.

The Operative: Secrets are not my concern. Keeping them is.

Oh, and I wasn't kidding when I said Orson Scott Card approved of Serenity. He gave it a glowing review in his column, stating that if a movie was ever to be made about Ender's Game, he would like it to be like Serenity, or at least as good as Serenity. How's that for commendation, eh? Really does give you the warm fuzzies...

In fact, there's new news. As some of you may know, Serenity's box office takings were undeservedly low. Well, thanks to the current sale of DVDs, it's now out of the red and into the black. For those not in the know, that means the possibility of a trilogy of movies is now out of the clouds, and right into the realms of reality! The future is worth fighting for, and we're pining for a sequel. In the words of Nathan Fillion, Joss is boss, and you'd better believe it!

And as an aside which doesn't have much to do with the online world, I finally got around to vacuuming my room. It only took me a whole year to get around to it. The situation was pretty bad. Walking around in my room constituted getting layers of dust stuck to the undersides of my feet. I couldn't even lie down without having to brush dust out of my hair afterwards. That was getting out of hand. So yesterday, I applied the vacuum to the floor. Most of the dust is gone, except the items to which it is still stuck to. I can lie in my bed without worrying about the volume of dust I'll collect. I just have to ship some boxes and papers out of my room, and I might even be ready for uni this year. Oh crap, I still need paper, pens, a student ID and a union Access card.

And I've found a reason to get up in the morning. Mew Mew Power is an oddly addictive little series about small girls who fight evil by becoming cat girls. It bears an odd element of awesome to it, and since it's on at 7:00 AM, it'll train me to wake up early in the morning again. If the dubbed version of the series is made of awesome, then the undubbed Japanese version of the series must be made of win! Not like the diluted, craptacular official dubbing of Cardcaptor Sakura. Most dubs in general are made of @ss and p00, but this series has an odd sort of appeal to it. Kinda like Samurai Jack.

And I modified the craptastic page to link back to this site. More importantly, I now link to the official GearHead site, which now provides downloads for GearHead 1 and GearHead 2 in the same place!

February 18, 2006 - Saturday

WHAT?! HAVEN'T GOT IT YET?! GO GRAB THE SERENITY DVD NOW!!!

Updated my Sphere startup game. Lots of shiny new fixes and adjustments, including a nice info ticker bar.

February 17, 2006 - Friday

GO GRAB THE SERENITY DVD NOW!!!

Ahem, right. There are some shiny new quotes in the random quote system. See if you can pick 'em.

I entered my half-baked Startup project into the Spherical Forums's Startup game competition. Funny thing was, I started after the competition had ended. This only took me a couple of days to put together. Really, the only reason I submitted it was because I felt that the ones already in the competition had no significant merits over the existing craptacular menu system that Flikky's startup game uses. Mine searches, sorts, switches resolution and has shiny animations.

University is looming a little closer. I got my student card template dealie in the mail today. I have to obtain/recycle a little photo before it can be laminated and used as ID. I don't like legwork. Not because I don't like walking, but because I haven't done any amount of it to speak of for a long time. And you know what happens when you exert yourself after not having done so for a long time. Muscles get stiff and sore. It lasts for days. Still, it's something that needs to be done, just like updating my mobile phone's prepaid service before it expires halfway through next month.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some pages that need maintenance.

February 12, 2006 - Sunday

I set up my own local server today! Yay! That admittedly may not mean much to the rest of you, except that there won't be any more shoddy pages. And long-neglected pages will hopefully be a thing of the past. The local server means I can try out my pages before I upload them, something static HTMLers take for granted. For one dabbling in PHP, the server is a necessity, and it's really cool I got one up and running.

Serenity is a science fiction movie set 500 years in the future. Not much has changed. The story is focused on the outer rim of established society, on a sundry crew headed by a former platoon sergeant Malcolm Reynolds. It's a remarkable story with sharp dialogue and exceptional acting. It's a story that deserves to be heard. Buy the DVD, and let everybody know about it.

It's too bad I don't have a movies category in the IMHO section. I recently laid my hands on the two-disc Serenity DVD boxset. This is the stuff of dreams-come-reality... I really can't quite do these emotions justice using just words. I gotta do a little jig!

The movie itself is tense where it needs to be, dramatic, occasionally heartwarming, and is thick with witty dialogue and character interaction. This is quite far departed from most science fiction movies, and many of the elements I find sadly lacking in the recent Star Wars films. The older Star Wars films were nice, BTW, if you're suspecting I'm biased in any way. Which I am, because I'm me, and I always think I'm right. Except when I'm wrong.

Poor After Dark. Hasn't seen much attention, since I've been working plenty with Pascal. Pascal? Are you nuts?! I hear you say. Well, it's the language of GearHead and GearHead 2's sources, so that's what I'm working with. These are mecha roguelike games. They're like RPGs, but everything takes place on the map. You need to eat and rest too. The best part about these games is the model complexity. Much like the PSX title Vagrant Story (damn that game kicks arse), the people, monsters and mecha that populate the game world can be of arbitrary complexity, possessing arms, legs, tendrils, wings and the kitchen sink (not really), and these can be individually armoured. There's layer upon layer of depth, and while the game world is randomly generated, the quests and over-arching goals of the game are varied and complex. Add to that the skill and stat symbiosis, and you have a roguelike to rival even Nethack.

What was I wasting my time on? As players of the game may be aware of, there's no easy way to fire a ballistic weapon. Smart-bumping allows easy application of melee weapons, which makes it the popular choice. In real life, pulling a trigger is just that. In the game, you have to wade through a menu that changes form, a concept that's proved unpopular with Windows' patented "personalized menus". More predictable gun use forces you through two menus. For such a common action, that's simply unacceptable.

Along came QuickFire, a concept born from the inner madness of my mind. It's tied around one major concept: one key, one shot. This would make it at least as easy to fire a gun as it was to swing a sword, perhaps even make the gun more convenient. By using my latent Pascal programming skills, I've crafted an intricate, yet simple little system that will do just that. You choose a weapon from your equipment or inventory, and flag it for firing quickly. From then on, you can just press 'f', and the game will automatically pick a suitable target and fire with that weapon. Simple as that.

The system is complete, and has been submitted to the mailing list. Hopefully, that means I'll have earned my sense of satisfaction, and will be able to work on my badly-neglected little RPG called After Dark.

One interesting note is that although I use a Unix-based system for this sort of development, I keep my distance from the diff utility. Why? It's far too sensitive is why. Change a line in the original source? Boom, patch refuses to apply itself. Change a character on a line? There'll be tears. Nope, I just post a precise set of instructions, along with the requisite code snippets from my work. Much easier, and works even if the source files have been changed, because the changes are done by hand. Only thing that could stop a hand is RSI. Or any number of explosives, but that's not likely to be a problem.

Enough of the verbal diarrhea. The site is now checked before uploads, and After Dark has experienced very minor changes. Modified my stylesheet slightly so my long runs of text are slightly easier to read. Till next time.

February 03 2006 - Friday

Happy birthday Kim! Yeah, I had to say it. If you don't get it, you don't need to get it.

I noticed, in a recent search on the Internet, the surprising lack of decent tools for small scale image editing. Not images as in those big photo-sized dealies, I mean small pixel-level graphics. I remember a few years back a concept application I was working on, going by the codename of pixeLink. It was going to be in the spirit of PixelPlus256, but it never got off the ground.

Whatever happened to the small graphics programs? The Gimp has a 10 second overhead that makes it unacceptable to make sprites of any size. It's a similar argument for Photoshop. MS Paint would suffice, were it not for the progress-impeding lack of even basic functionality. There's no middle ground, no in-between app with just enough power to make it usable, but slim enough to load when I asked it to, not several years later.

Will there ever be a rainbow?

...

Oh screw this, I'll make my own in-house tools. If you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself.