Archives
January 2006
It's backwards. Deal with it.
January 31, 2006 - Tuesday
I did it. I actually did it. I completed something by a deadline. I'm a little bleary-eyed, and a bit tired. But After Dark now has a demo worth presenting to the internet-going public! Read more about it in the relevant section.
PS: Jaw-dropping season finale of The Shield last Saturday night. Parts of it are still echoing through my head. It's one powerful cop drama, and I can safely say it's one of the defining shows of our generation. Can't wait until BattleStar Galactica makes its return!
January 27, 2006 - Friday
Wow, it's been a while. I recently took the dive and reinstalled my system from scratch. Unlike last time, I have Linux running at full speed with 3D, thanks to my installing of the NVidia drivers for my card. Read about it here.
About After Dark: there won't be battles in the release at the end of this month. Four days isn't enough time to produce a battle engine, and debug it sufficiently to deem it worthy of release. It's still going to have some content, however small it may be. Read about my progress.
Joseph Hewitt, the cornerstone of the GearHead and GearHead 2 projects, has returned from his holiday, and is back to work on getting GH2 off the ground. GearHead 1 I must say was a success, and was the first game I installed on my Linux box when I had it operational. My custom installation has cool things like proper box drawing, corrected recentering, and a retrofit of my GH2 quickfire patch, which allows me to press a single key to fire a weapon. See the side bar for the GH_dev Yahoo! Group link, where us contributors and players hang out.
My installation story is interesting, but not that interesting, so I'll keep it brief. I wiped the hard disk, after backing up everything I cared about. I don't feel I'm missing anything, so I must have done a good job. I started by making a partition for Windows XP, and installing it. After an hour of repeating the same copying of files from the install CD, I realised that the installer was supposed to proceed from the copied files on the hard disk. I'm a dumbarse.
That done, I loaded it up to make sure it worked. My sound was borked, and it still is. My father does computer repair. I'll just consult him. Onto Linux. SUSE or Debian? I chose Debian initially. The installer is text-based, and varies in consistency like a rainbow melon (if they exist). Fortunately, it was still fairly easy to get things up and running, even if I did have to learn five different interface styles on the way. My biggest hurdle was the misjudging of my hard disk's size: I thought I had only 20 GB. Turns out I had nearly 40 GB. Playing with partitions takes a lot of time away from you, but Debian managed things.
Debian fell out of favour when I discovered that it couldn't detect that my monitor could go up to 1024 * 768, and my speakers just wouldn't work. And my USB FlashDrive didn't hotplug.
openSUSE was on the menu, and I jumped right in. The graphical installer at least was consistent, but, like the Debian installer, used auxiliary applications to do tasks it should have been able to handle independently, mostly in regards to package management. However, it found my monitor model, resolution and refresh rate to a tee. It mounted and unmounted my CDs, DVDs and my USB FlashDrive almost flawlessly (I had to tweak a few things by hand). And now I have 3D acceleration as well.
It's not all flowers and sunshine. The GUI still uses three (count 'em) different windowing toolkits. Most stick with GNOME and GTK+, but SUSE insists on KDE integration, and YaST uses its own tangent, not to mention the graphical greeter, which uses yet another GUI standard.
To finish my big update, I ask that television viewers in Australia, New South Wales tune into Channel Ten at 10:25 PM on Saturday night. The Shield is coming to its massive season finale, and with a show like this, and a director and actor like Michael Chiklis, you just know that this is gonna be sweeeet!
After Dark demo for January 31!
January 22, 2006 - Sunday
I finally did it. I hammered out the specs of the battle system behind After Dark. Read about it here.
Tonight was the second last episode of The Shield. As you may or may not know, I always make a big deal out of this show, and rightfully so. It's an awesome drama, head, shoulders and everything else above everything else. That means that... *deep breath*... the season finale of The Shield will be airing next Saturday! I'm beside myself with glee. Hey, maybe Network Ten will be kind, and fill the timeslot with Battlestar Galactica, a high-quality revival of the original series. Heck, they're bringing back The O.C., my guilty little pleasure. This year's off to a surprisingly good and active start.
Thumb up for the crazy online MMO game, The Kingdom of Loathing. It's got stick figures, dire bunnies, anti-anti-antidote, and pastamancers! An adventurer is you!
January 16, 2006 - Monday
It's official. I hate summers. Today's relative humidity pushed 92 percent. The result is that everything feels sticky. Combined with the heat that's typically associated with summer, and it's nightmare in the making. Hell, at least I have a heater to deal with winter. The thing about excess heat is that there's nowhere for it to go. I used to have an air conditioner in my room... whatever happened to it?
Normally I don't do any development on these types of days. I've made an exception for After Dark by writing a palette swapping function for it.
I'd do more, but my keyboard is dying. Well, not the whole keyboard, just the only really important key on the thing: the space bar. Half of my space bar hits aren't registering. I have no idea how old it is. I had to use 'z' and 'x' as substitute keys in the After Dark interface, because this space bar wasn't working properly. That's in-game, but I can't swap whitespaces for 'z's and 'x's in my code! I'm going to lay my hands on a new keyboard, mark my words.
January 15, 2006 - Sunday
I did it. I put the finishing touches to the site. The Sphere Modules, though numbering only to two, are finally up, descriptions, screenies and all.
The IMHO page is now a proper section, thanks to my categorising skills.
And I recently added After Dark to RPGDX as an early development project. It's barely been two days, and it's already generating interest! I'll be moving onto the one-on-one battle engine soon, so watch out, world!
January 13 2006 - Friday
After Dark sees more progress, and so does its site, with a brand spanking new About section. And if you could take a look at the code, which you may have an opportunity to in the future, you'll see how simple the code really is. I can just clip little features on without worrying about the rest of the source and how it will react to it, because chances are, it won't have to.
This could be the first game you could look forward to a real demo of!
January 12, 2006 - Thursday
I couldn't resist. I made a section in the site for After Dark. There's a screenie, and things are going smoothly.
January 11, 2006 - Wednesday
The most immediately obvious change is the new links present in the Links and Haunts side boxes. I go online more often nowadays, and pursuing my interests with others is very satisfying.
Oh, and God Himself decided to drop in and add a few quotes of His own to the random quotes box at the top of each page. Can you spot them all? They're good for a chuckle.
I finally succumbed to my urges. I've gone ahead and started on a FreeBASIC RPG, in a style not unlike the Secret of Cooey. DarkDread may have left the scene years ago, but I still draw inspiration from his drive to complete the projects he begins. The Secret of Cooey was his first finished QuickBASIC RPG.
My game goes by the moniker of After Dark. It was originally meant to be a really short game, with crap graphics and sprites with only two frames, but it's ballooned a bit to encompass a proper storyline describing the problems faced by and between survivors locked in a city with the walking dead. The storyline will hopefully demonstrate that stress really does bring out and best and the worst in people. I'll make a section for this game soon, so you can slowly track its progress.
Recently, I unearthed a saved web page. It contained a thread from a forum I frequent regularly, the MT Forums. It was about job prospects in the field of computer programming. The outlook is grim, we all know that. But by the looks of things, I'm going to have to get my act together sooner or later. I'm in my second year of uni, or I'm about to jump in, rather, and I've found out that I hate physics. Why? Mostly due to the integral calculus involved. That's a problem, because the only other "hard science" that has much of a chance of backing me up is the linear maths.
Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against linear maths (vectors and matrices). It's the integral calculus that pisses me off. But the only conceivable field I can imagine using such maths is in mathematical modelling. Not fun.
So for the past few hours, I've been thinking about my career. I suppose I could always become a project manager. I was the project leader of two, wait, three projects out of four I've had in total. I hated the job, but I have to admit, I was good at it. Or maybe it was because I was the only one in my team that ever had any initiative?
Stay tuned for more information on After Dark!
January 05 2006 - Thursday
I've updated the welcome page some so that it'll now automatically redirect to this page. I also darkened the link blue so that it'll be a little easier to read against the lighter blue backgrounds.
Last night I had the crazy idea of making a more informative startup game for Sphere. I can't believe I stayed up until 4:00 AM thinking about it. It's these holidays. You totally lose your schedule. I can't remember the last time I actually woke up in the morning - well, woke up and stayed awake.
Over at the Spherical forums, I volunteered to write the editor script that would enable us Sphere users to take advantage of map terraforming. It's the funky thing in RPG Maker that prevents the maps from looking like total crap. Anyway, since I've taken on this task, I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how the algorithm is going to come together, given that I only have the tile indices and tile names at my disposal. I wrote an article on terraforming as it's going to appear in the editor script, so stay tuned!
I've been dabbling in FreeBASIC, the community-developed successor to QuickBASIC. It's cross-platform compatible, and it retains the procedural paradigm held so dear to QB programmers such as myself. The dream of making a crappy QB RPG isn't dead yet! I'm thinking something along the lines of the original Secret of Cooey, by DarkDread.
January 03 2006 - Tuesday
What better way to hail in the new year than with - PHP! Yes, the site conversion to PHP has begun. Well, it's nearly done, actually, so long as I haven't screwed anything up considerably.
This is the first time I've even touched PHP. I don't have a local webserver set up on my machine, so this really is going to be a hit and miss affair. I'll be incredibly surprised if this works without any problems. But this is a move that had to be made. I've saved kilobytes in storage, thanks to my included data hierarchy. Also makes things much easier to maintain.
In addition to the switch, I've also made a few minor cosmetic changes to the site, and I've rearranged it slightly, in order to take advantage of the included data hierarchy. That's why there's the welcome page that leads to the main news page. It's not the best workaround, but it'll do.
Outside the world of the box, the heatwave here is finally over! New Year's Day was a staggering 44 degrees Celsius (that's 111 degrees Farenheit for the rest of you)! And we know why. Turns out there was a rather unusual configuration of high and low pressure systems that was blowing air directly from inland Australia over the south-east coast, where I live. Of course, anybody who knows anything about this island would know that almost all of Australia is crusty crusty desert. Thanks to the Great Dividing Range, the south-east coast is mostly protected from such temperatures. Hell, there was no way I was going to go anywhere near work in such conditions.
But no more. The temperature has around the 25 to 26 mark, so here I am, tapping away.
Finally, I have some news. The Shield is returning to TV. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHH YYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! It's back! It's finally back! It was displaced from it's 10:30 PM Wednesday night slot by The Secret Life of Us, a mediocre life 'n' love drama. Looks like my hardcore cop drama is back. If anybody's living in New South Wales, it's on at 11:30 PM on Saturday night. Hey, just because I don't party doesn't mean I can't find entertainment on a Saturday night! I'm looking forward to this! :D