Archives
July 2006
It's backwards. Deal with it.
July 24, 2006 - Monday
Oh lawl, IE doesn't support ' for apostrophes, making the stuff below look like a catastrophe. Well, it's fixed now. I hope.
July 22, 2006 - Saturday
Added some interesting quotes to the randomiser. I switched from SuSE Linux to Ubuntu Linux (6.06 LTS Dapper Drake), which is what I'm working in right now. I found that trying to compile Sphere from scratch was a bad idea, so I'll just run it under Wine like I did before. I'm due back at university next Monday, and I still haven't made any progress in any of the projects I've wanted to work on yet. I'm still looking at giving the site a revamp. I realise that Pete's going to run out of stickblob comics soon, and I haven't touched it since several months ago. And I only found out a few minutes ago that apostrophe characters are disallowed in strict XHTML text elements. Bleh.
I'm trying to do too many things at once. Help!
July 17, 2006 - Monday
Found something rather interesting in my perusal of the MT Forums. Apparently, some Arabian (?) blogging service had plagiarised Fred's artwork for use in a flyer, and passed it off as their own. Sure enough, they had indeed done that, and there were a bunch of comments stating that fact. One commenter had actually checked from which panels of the online webcomic the art was taken from.
I took it a step further. I downloaded the ad with plagiarised artwork, as well as Fred's original comics, and proceeded to copy and paste a side-by-side comparison. Here's the result:
I posted a link to my version in a comment, let it sit for about a day, and next I knew, the ad and all the comments had vanished. I guess that's a job well done. I guess that's a victory. Here's the page as it stands now, for those interested.
In regards to my RPG engine "middleware" for Sphere, I've decided that the file system is best-suited for organising maps and scripts. Strings for dialog will still be external to the scripts, but they'll live in the same directory, with a different extension. Translations will have slightly different extensions. Global strings will be stored in a globbed table with the same filename extension standards as the local strings.
I'm also contemplating making my own map engine. The current Sphere map engine has too many features I don't need, and not enough that I do. Needlessly complex, but without stuff like terrain support or tile-by-tile movement. I'll be making my own scripting language as well, not because JavaScript is too abstract... well, it is, but I mostly want to make it easier to write events and cutscenes without fiddling with the JS syntax and messy functions. It organises it better as well, since scripts can be localised. You know the saying: "Think global, act local."
A week left until I return to uni. I have a clash in my timetable, which I want to get sorted out tomorrow. Serves me right for choosing advanced IT study units and getting distinctions.
Well, time to hammer out what I want in my map engine!
Oh, almost forgot. Might be switching over to Ubuntu soon, after a particularly nice experience with it in LiveCD form, plus I've got a site redesign at the back of my mind. Mostly just needs a better backend.
July 05, 2006 - Wednesday
Finished those dang exams. I'm in holidays, which is the perfect time to get programmer's block. I do have a couple of announcements though.
After much deliberation, I've decided that After Dark should be moved to the Sphere RPG Engine. That means that pure DOS users will lose out; sorry guys. I'll make the corresponding announcement in the relevant page.
I've made icons for GearHead and GearHead 2, based on the cool wallpaper that skulkraken submitted to the mailing list. They're currently available in the mailing list files section, but if people care enough, I might make them publicly available. SVG, PNG and ICO formats have all been made. It's fairly simple, just a two-coloured gear, but it took me three hours to mangle it with Inkscape.
What's been keeping me up way past my bedtime (which is late enough as it is) is the thought of making an RPG system for Sphere. I know, Rhuan's already handling that, but I'd like to try my hand at making my own. Sphere has a nice API which protects the user from having to deal with graphics, files and audio, but not much in the way of anything else.
The problem that's been keeping me awake for hours is not so much how I'm going to implement everything, but what. The only hard-and-fast rule I've set on myself is that it isn't going to be restricted to fantasy, which means that magic will have to be grouped into the superclass of skills. I want there to be a way to "memorise" skills. I want there to be a way for equipment to become more effective the longer it is used, but have limited durability and require the occasional repair, which reduces maximum durability a little bit each time. And hit rate will be based on two numbers rolled against each other.
Lots of ideas, but this is one thing the late hours won't help me to work with.