waxor

found here:
http://hampshire.dailyjolt.com/pictures/picture.html?picture_id=35193


I think this is copyrighted?
http://hampshire.dailyjolt.com/pictures/picture.html?picture_id=36786

Like thats possible:
http://hampshire.dailyjolt.com/pictures/picture.html?picture_id=35329


Amazing:
http://hampshire.dailyjolt.com/pictures/picture.html?picture_id=36094

Obligatory
http://hampshire.dailyjolt.com/pictures/picture.html?picture_id=35933

I'm sure this one qualifies for SOMETHING:
http://hampshire.dailyjolt.com/pictures/picture.html?picture_id=36462
http://hampshire.dailyjolt.com/pictures/picture.html?picture_id=36460
http://hampshire.dailyjolt.com/pictures/picture.html?picture_id=36463

The audio is really bad so I would recommend no sound but I thought this needed to be shared.

http://waxor.com/img/tails.avi

Amazing what you can learn from the intarwebs.

I just set my phone ring to the victory music from the final fantasy games. All you gamers should know what I am talking about. If you have seen FF7: Advent Children you will know where the inspiration for this comes from. The quality is not great but I am going to figure out how to clean it up soon.

If you are interested (and your phone is supports qcq files, like most Sprint phones)you can go to this url:
http://waxor.com/ph/vff.gcd in your phone's web browser.

If it works for you and have always wanted some sound as your ringer I could set it up for you....


So exciting.

I ordered Jessica's fancy new (THING) two weeks ago. It was supposed to be at the local store on Friday. I had planned on leaving early today to get it but it has not arrived yet. Does it really take 2 weeks to ship something from a warehouse?

Come on.

I went surfing today. Really.

Actually I had a great time. we spent about 3 hours in the water, which just the right temperature, at a beach a little south of Laguna Beach. It took me about 4 tries to get it right but I did manage to stand up and ride a wave all they way to shore. I am told this is an impressive feat, most people require about 20 attempts to stand up and some people never get it, certainly not on the first day.

In other news, after 3 weeks my first game at Javaground, Balance Revolution, is wrapping up. we are porting it for a Korean company called eFusion. My next project is working on the Bodie Miller skiing game. I am told that Bodie Miller is some famous US olympic skier. The game sounds interesting but it looks like it will be a lot of work, We need to port it to 100 phones, which is a lot.

Javaground appears t o be in very good shape, I am really happy to be working with them. We just finished The Legend of Zorro for the new movie and Ratchet and Clank: Going Mobile. We will soon be starting a new game with EA and there are a couple companies who really, really want us to release our tools to them.

Also some huge company that makes Java VMs for phones wants to give out our tools to make their software more attractive. It would get a lot of money to Javaground.

Tomorrow we are celebrating Jessica's birthday. We are going to a show, Sweeny Todd, and then going out to dinner. Also I am getting her a (THING SHE CANNOT SEE YET) but dont tell her that.

Time for bed now.

Today is not starting off very well.

Today was my second day at Javaground.

I started the first day working on porting a Korean game called Balance. They made the game for an OLG phone and want it to run on a Nokia 6600. Javaground's tools make that easy except that all the specific code needs to be removed and generalized.

Balance is a well constructed simple game with a sleek mechanic. You gems with random weights, most are 2,3 or 5 with the occasional 10 thrown in. You have to place a gem in one column and when they balance they both clear. The game gets faster and new things are thrown in like bombs and such. Its fun, fast paced and short, making it a great mobile game. Once we are done with it I want to get it on my phone. :)

The first day was a bit daunting, I have to learn java syntax, J2me, which is small but very tight and Javagrounds build system and other tools at the same time.

Day 2 was a lot better. I had a handle on the code from the day before and actually got some things changed and working. There is just one major things to do tomorrow then we can ship the game back to the company. If they like it, which they should, we are going to port the game to a bunch of phones. Very exciting.

Work is long, from about 9am to 6pm, with a long ish lunch. Today I stayed until 7pm cause I needed to finish up fixing the fonts. Not so bad but I think Jessica will not be too happy.

So far so great,
Mikel

Interestingly the "crash" associated with sugar is not actually a deficiency of sugar.

When you ingest a large amount of sugar you body converts it into glucose really fast and it floods into your blood. To cope with this overdose your body releases lots of insulin. The insulin brings your blood sugar down but it goes down too far.

To compensate for low blood sugar your body releases adrenalin, which keeps you going until your blood sugar returns to normal. Once the adrenalin wears off you go into withdrawal. This adrenalin withdrawal is what people assume is the "sugar crash".

Cool, eh, p-chan?

So our 3195 lb. crate of stuff was due to arrive in Oakland today. We had happily rented a truck after being assured that our stuff was arriving wednesday and would be unpacked on tuesday and thus ready on friday.

On the way to pick up our Budget truck we were informed that our stuff was indeed not in Oakland. it was, in fact, in Las Vegas. Oops. Sorry.

I pretended to be very upset that I had been told I could get my stuff and now had to 50$ to Budget to cancel my reservation. I then convinced them to have our crate delivered to our house instead. YAY!

Jessica was then able to sweet talk the nice lady at budget into not charging us a cancellation fee. So all in all we ended up getting our stuff delivered to the house for free.

Then when we got home I split the nail on my 4th toe in half. : (

I think that I have bad computer karma. I am not sure why, I have fixed so many computers you wouldhtink that would get me in good. Apparently not.

Last week started off with me loosing ~65gb of data. That includes, all my music, most of my recent pictures, several movies, all that crap one collects off the internet and all of those personal files I would hate to loose. I foolishly tried to use Partition Magic because I was not sure if linux's parted would do it correctly. The irony is that had I used the tool I was unsure about I would not have lost my files. grrr.

A couple days later my server goes down, after being stable and happy for at least 6 months. Since I am moving across the country soon this worries me greatly because I was not planning on taking it with me. Turns out the one of the capacitors on the mother board has burst and caught on fire. Scorched black plastic and all. Fortunately Josiah has given me and old Hampshire server. It was built by VALinux to be a real linux server and has a 4+ year uptime in its past. All in all I am very happy that I got it.

The default walpaper for Windows, the one with the green field is named:

Bliss.bmp

I guess ignorance really is Windows.

Todays Topics:
Colabrative and Dual Genre games

( Read more... )

Things have progressed. As you can well see.

The two red cones are the current representation of a game character. Those should get much better looking at some point, perhaps someone will make models for me at some point.. *Hint*

The purple radius around the character is a movement range, its sort of a hack because it just adds rings out to the range the unit can move. Ideally this will use A* to computer movement cost over terrain.

The transparent red blob is a spell! yay!

That area was (poorly) generated by the spell generation system. Soon you will be able to construct spells by hand and see the in game effects.

All is excitement.

The next thing I will be working on is game implementing game mechanics. Once this is done you will actually be able to "play" my div3. Units will move around and attack each other. Oh boy!

I was reading some business page somewhere that talked about the 80/20 rule. It was a bunch of stuff like 80 percent of your work comes from 20 percent of your employees and such.

I feel like that applies to my work on my div3. I a day working on some feature and eventually get it working. The thing is that it really only takes me about an hour to write the code. The rest of the time is spent thinking or whatever.

The div3 is actually coming along quite well. I find my work goes in bursts, I get going on one thing and progress really fast until I come up against a design wall. Right now that wall is my rendering design. In the interest of getting things on screen I make it so that all my characters are rendered on what ever hex is currently occupied. But now they can move.

So I need some way of animating that movement. That involves timing and probably another state in my state machine. Its not really a big deal it is just that it is a large departure from how the rendering is done now.

Spells are another issues. Spells should be pretty when they are cast, fire should burn up and lightning should strike from the sky. Right now spells are rendered in a binary state. They have a solid form and are either visible or not. I am going to need to create some sort of data structure that stores animations. I have no idea where to go with that.

end div3 rant.

There was just an ad for Mission Impossible on whatever channel I am watching.

The movie, which is playing tonight, is being presented by, wait for it, "The Incredibles DVD".


W T F.

There is something to be said for laundry day. And now I will say it.

I feel like there are two kinds of laundry days, the ones where you squeeze laundry into your normal schedule and the ones where you say screw it, and do nothing but laundry all day long. Or at least for a large chunk of the day.

Yesterday we did laundry. Laundry and nothing else really. I mean we ran a couple errands while stuff was washing and drying but for the most part we just did laundry. Since I have classes and Jessica did not have to teach we were free to enjoy each others company without anything else to do. It was quite nice.

Not really much else to say. I just had a very nice day, mostly because I spent it with Jessica.

One of the state classes in my div3 needs to use the glutCreateMenu function. That function takes a function pointer as a parameter. The catch is that it wants that function to be unique, so I can either pass a global function of I could pass a member function. The member function has to be declared static, which makes the function pointer point to a single function. That function can only take a single int as a parameter. Normally I would just pass a pointer to self to with the function and access the class like that.

So now I have a function in my class that can do all the processing but since it is static it cant access anything in the actual instance of the class.

So I created a new member variable that is static pointer to the same class type. Then when I create the class I store a pointer to self in that pointer so that the class can access itself from inside the static function.

Its ugly, but elegant.

If you followed that, you should feel proud.

Its times like this that I feel confidant about my coding abilities. Its not that the solution is genius or that it has never been done before, its that I did not need to think or ask around about how to fix it. When you think about it that is some pretty abstract stuff and it is clear as day to me. Makes me feel good.

So there is finally a screen shot of my div3.

http://waxor.com/div3/img/Screenshot.png

What you are looking at is a hex based grid loaded from a bitmap file.
The grid is 32x32 and the height data is loaded froma 65x65 file. that allows for each vertex/node/point on the hex to have an individual height. Hence the smooth face.

The next thing to do is make the colors load like this also. Right now each hex has a single color. Soon all will be much prettier!

YAY!

-Waxler

I love it when the media screws up. I have a secret love for news anchors saying someting worg, such as "J Low is more likely to give them a blowjob rather... errr, curbjob" on the six o'clock news. I especially like seeing people mess with live broadcasts. I have a couple clips of random college kids streaking reporters, I even have on of some chick flashing CNN.


That all really, just though you all would get a kick out of that.