Archives
March 2006
It's backwards. Deal with it.
March 28, 2006 - Tuesday
I'm back from my holiday!
Well, actually, there was no holiday. I've been at uni for the past few weeks, and I've got assignments hovering over my head. When you can see those sheets of paper floating above you, that's the time you tell yourself that it needs doing.
Anyway, onto relevant matters. Development on my side of the connection has been rather slow as of late. Joseph Hewitt, the mind behind GearHead and GearHead 2 [1], has been on a sort of a holiday, having come back from a comic convention. Of course, this has spurred him into believing that his artwork needs reworking, and that the game entity structure needs adjustment. The latter has already been done, the former... I think his mecha artwork [2] is looking alright. The game is also looking at some new portraits (they're always welcome), and the latest release, GH2 v0.232, fixes a bug with the QuickFire patch, which incorrectly targetted inactive enemies. The fix itself was fairly small, but it makes a difference, and I was glad to help in the debugging of that.
QB Express 19 [3] is now available! The magazine for the QB community, by the QB community! It also contains an equal amount of stuff for and from FreeBASIC programmers too. Packed full of news and articles, to keep you informed while you try your hand at a new algorithm. The programmer of the month is redcrab, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty, and made some simple, yet addictive FB games, reminiscent of Nintendo's Game & Watch handheld series. I wonder if I still have the Donkey Kong game where the guy isn't Mario...
But the really exciting thing, at least in my opinion, is the inclusion of my new Stickblob webcomic! My sardonic humour now comes in crappy mouse-drawn graphics form. What started out as insane mouse-drawn etchings made at 3:00 AM in the morning has flourished into doodles that I draw in my otherwise dull information systems lectures. I may just make a section for the comic here, as soon as I figure out a layout that will accept 600 by 240 pixel images without borking.
Well, it's been six quiet months, but I'm finally back on the Daimonin [4] bandwagon again. This online game is centred around a small community of players and developers. The MMORPG itself is founded on the Crossfire codebase, a unique blend of Nethack (roguelike game) and Gauntlet (top-down 2D real-time combat dungeon hack), so it's got quite a history. One which I won't bore you with the details of. The biggest changes are the ones that occurred during my six-month hiatus: the addition of the Valentine's Day and Christmas maps (now here to stay), and the early development of a full 3D client for the game, which is current isometric. It's actually looking quite nice, with hand-designed 3D models and such, but I'll stick with the 2D client for now.
Another online RPG is currently in the works. It's Java-based, and it's lazy. Or so you would think, with a name like Sloth Online [5]. What really strikes me isn't the polished graphical style of the game at the moment, but the sheer simplicity of the code. Everything in the Java source is perfectly simple, at least, what I've looked at anyway. There's chatting and movement, and a rudimentary interface, but there's much more in the works, and the next in line is making the inventory system operable. This one game is worth keeping an eye on.
A rather impressive game I want to give mention to is Cave Story [6]. An action platforming adventure, completely free to download and play forever, it contains a rather charming adventure, and surprisingly sophisticated physics. The entire game takes place on an island, and though the story is simple at heart, it's presentation is captivating. Oh, and the bosses put up a good fight. And this is coming from a guy who has played through most of the Castlevania video game series.
What about After Dark? Very little progress, I fear, but I have a feeling that that's going to change pretty soon. Go to that section if you want some excuses for my shoddy handling of the project up until now. And why I think it's going to see some development in the near future.
So what have I been up to? Apart from replaying through some of the recent Castlevania games (brilliant stuff, thos games!), I've been doing some work in Java. Really basic stuff which never seems to work in the labs, but when I do them on my own system, they work flawlessly. And I managed to beat NetBeans IDE into actually formatting my Java code correctly as I type, so now I don't accidentally end up with two closing braces for each opening brace. I've only got a list implementation using an array, a solver for the Eight Queens puzzle, a stack implementation, and a program that changes infix expressions to postfix equivalents, but there will be more. I'll see if I can rustle up a page for them.
And, for your non-stop link shop, I've organised some sort of external link pool, just below. Footnotes, if you will.
Links: [1] GearHead and GearHead 2, [2] GearHead 2 Mecha List, [3] QB Express 19, [4] Daimonin MMORPG, [5] Sloth Online MMORPG, [6] Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari)
March 17, 2006 - Friday
Yay! CastlvaniaRL link! From the manual:
You are a Transylvanian who travels to the castle of count Dracula, seeking to finish his reign of blood over the land. On your quest inside the castle, you will face horrible monsters and find sacred relics, treasures and artifacts. Your abilities, granted as a gift to fight darkness, and your long years of training, are your only advantage against the carnage that awaits you!
Not quite as dramatic (or proofread) as the official Castlevania games, but it certainly is an interesting foray of an arcade game into the roguelike genre. Although it uses Java, the gameplay is simple and snappy. Kill everything in your path, except the friendly people. Run and jump (yes, you can jump in this game) over and onto platforms, traverse intricate yet randomly generated maps of Dracula's castle, battle over 90 different monsters (with their own different attack techniques), fight bosses (yeah, this game's got bosses), and generally kick some royal butt!
It may feel a little slow to you out there, but I feel exhausted. University and hot, humid nights do not mix. And Katie's distracting me in my Data Structures lab sessions. Again.
I make a point of always being the bearer of news when I update this site, so here goes. GearHead 2 has pushed forward to 0.230! Significant changes include more game content, an amended random battle mecha picker, unique content elements, and... my QuickFire patch, made ten times better by JH! That ain't too shabby, considering that over the few years that I've known the language, I actually haven't made anything useful of it up until now. Anyway, this should hopefully bring about a new revolution where players of the game can consider melee weapons and guns to be of equal usefulness.
I think the best thing about the GearHead games is their flexibility. Random content, selectable job classes, a nigh-infinite number of skill/talent combinations, and graphical and character-based frontends which operate on exactly the same backend. You wouldn't think that Pascal would be capable of that, but it is, and this game practically flagships the concept. And the source compiles right out of the box too. Joseph has made a point of commenting as he goes, so it's easy to tweak a thing or two if so required.
After Dark has an intermediate development version out. Version 0.0.5 includes touch ups to some of the opening cutscene and dialogue, and the beginnings of a battle system. Oh, and I went ahead and put the images in their own directory. That change took a whole ten seconds. Anyway, it's up for download if you want to try it. Somebody bug me to push this thing forward, what with my uni assignments bearing down on me and all.
Last Thursday was absolutely magical. One word. Firefly. Joss Whedon's Firefly. Loosely classified as a "space western" it was the very sci-fi series that sparked both the feature film Serenity and the massive online fanbase, scattered across cyberspace. The first time in nigh on five years now, I saw an episode of Firefly. And I'm happy to say that the show is as charming as when I first remember it. It also seems to be a lot funnier and wittier than I remember it, and that can only be a good thing.
Sydney Uni students, drop by Chemistry Lecture Theatre 2 at 1 PM on Thursdays. Bring a friend if you want.
I won't say too much about the episode that I saw, but it made me laugh on plenty of occasions. It made me think, and it made me empathise with the characters. It takes a special kind of show to do that, and I'm honoured to have the chance to see it all at last.
The Sphere community game is finally under way! There's a lot of discussion at the moment, but everybody's ready to fire up and make this dream a reality. I've the roles of the storyliner, debugger, and some parts of the world design for some reason. The game itself will be about a Sphere user that suddenly gets sucked into their own incomplete game. That person must then complete the development of the game in order for them to escape. That idea's thanks to BGenesis. Now it's my job to flesh that out some, along with the others.
March 07, 2006 - Tuesday
Just popping in to make a few minor updates. Added a new quote, tidied up here and there. And dealing with uni. 8:00 AM lectures don't sit well with me. Dealing with vector calculus later on isn't going to be pretty either.
Don't say a word. It just so happens that there's a roguelike game based on... Castlevania! As soon as I track it down, I'll link to it! Can't believe I've yet to play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night...
As part of the "get marks to be kinda proud of" initiative, I now have to draw up a couple of schedule charts and do a bit of revision. Ta.
Almost forgot, the surprise associated with After Dark was a FreeBASIC port of The Secret of Cooey. Unlike my game, SOC32 happens to be a port of a complete game, which, by logical induction, also makes this port complete. Heck, I might even consider porting The Secret of Cooey 2. What to do about the MIDIs...?
March 05, 2006 - Sunday
My apologies for not having done too much work on After Dark as of late. I've spent the better part of the past few days preparing my room for my return to university, which mostly translated to purging the boxes upon boxes of useless papers (there's a lot), letters, discarded packaging, and rearranging my books so that they don't get in the way.
I promised a little surprise, and I've delivered. Just hop over the After Dark section and take a peek.
I fixed a couple of stray Serenity quotes in the random quote system too, for those who care.
March 02, 2006 - Thursday
Okay, there seems to be a little misunderstanding about my heavy promotion of the classic movie Serenity. I'm promoting it, partly because it's awesome, and partly because us Browncoats need to assure the future of our series. I'm not watching it 24-7, as much as I'd like to, but there's such a thing called life. Anyway, the DVD has been successful in the US alone, and has made the charts consistently, popping up as number one in many of them. Thanks to our valiant efforts, the possibility of a trilogy of the series, maybe even a revival of the series itself, can still be considered.
If you watched the movie and/or bought the DVD, I salute you for supporting the cause. If you didn't because you lacked the money, then just keep it in mind when you go down to your video rental store or entertainment section, or wait a few years for the thing to appear on television. And if you didn't because you've judged it before seeing it, then STFU and GTF out of here, because you ain't welcome.
Now, real site news. The sidebar has been successfully ported to my new subsystem, which means that one change in the sidebar code reflects across the entire site now.
I think I forgot to mention that I coded a compatibility version of my Sphere startup game. It now works on the sphere_gl and sphere_dx8 graphics drivers, for those who can't live without these incomplete DLLs.
I won the Sphere startup game competition! Yay! It's been far too long since I last won anything. The only question that remains is whether the original game is packaged with Sphere, or the compatibility version.
Well well, into my second year of university. This time, I'm going to actually try to get decent marks in my subjects, as opposed to the "I'll study when I need to" approach taken last year. That means less free time for me, which unfortunately means less time to develop the stuff I want to develop. As if After Dark wasn't slow enough already. For those pining for another demo, an early March release simply isn't possible, but I've prepared something a little different, and a little old school.
Stay tuned!