Okay, this little thing I thought was really cool and exactly what I want for my birthday. Of course, I’m sure we can’t afford it but, it really would make dungeon and minatures easier to handle.
A 32″ LCD screen with a touch screen and the ability to manage everything touching it.
One of those things that I’ve been planning on doing for a while, talk to a financial planner about our future. I originally met a guy from LaSalle bank, but he said something that really bothered me. In specific, he wouldn’t send out emails because they were “monitored” by his company. My original feeling was, if you don’t want it to be monitored, then what are you trying to hide? I mean, the securities side of things requires the monitoring for specific reasons. So, I kind of just ignored him. A friend of the family mentioned their financial planner, and I decided to try again. This guy, Kurt, was really nice and friendly and was what I expected out of a financial planner.
Fortunately, I had a good idea of what I was doing before we talked. He said I was “aggresive” in my planning, mainly because I felt that at the age of 31, I had at least three decades to wait out the really large slumps in the market. I happened to agree.
Of course, to maintain my cost of living until I was eighty-something, at this point, I would need a million dollars worth of life insurance because I didn’t have enough investments to cover it. There is something to be said about handling this stuff early; I’d recommend you have as much as reasonable as soon you start earning a paycheck, that extra ten years would have cut those numbers down to half of what they are now.
So, I’m working on getting my financies in order and prepared for the future. And I feel pretty good about it.
At GenCon this year, one of the things I was trying to figure out the most was how to bring minatures into the game. I wanted to start using them for the Exalted game, mainly to simplify the range and other variables discussions. So, I was looking at the various options. bil got me a huge two meter square and hex grid map, which worked perfectly. About half of stuff I picked up were tokens and the like.
I considered Dwarven Forge but they expensive but very pretty. I also considered building my own from foam, which takes the most work. I also considered Hirst Arts for an option, mainly because they let me make it and they make some of the most beautiful sets I have ever seen in my life. Of course, you build them up brick by brick it would take hours, nay weeks to finish and still require me to print them.
In the end, after I decided to go with Hirst, I found Fat Dragon Games. They are build your own stuff, but they use paper models instead of resin or anything else. So, I can print as many as I want and tape/glue and mount them on foam-core board. That lets me keep the flexibility and price of Hirst with the simplicity of Dwarven Forge.
I’m currently assembling a huge palace for this Saturday’s game and I’m really happy with their product. The only drawback is their selection is somewhat poor, but it is still worth it.
I was browing one the blog for Schlock Mercenary, one of my daily must-read comics, and I saw a little quote that made me smile.
(If you’re a FreeBSD zealot, by all means complain about my nigh-libelous description of your bestest little devil-friend TO SOMEONE ELSE. I’m just repeating what the server guys have told me. No, I don’t want your offer of technical help. No, I’m not printing an apology or a retraction. Yes, you’ll get over it. I promise.)
Now, I’m a borderline zealot. I love Linux with a passion, just becuase it enables me to do so much more and I happen to think/function in a way that it makes sense to me. Now, I don’t think BSD is better or worse than Linux, just as I don’t think Solaris, Mac OS X, or most of the others. My only complaint about OS X and Windows is they try to do too much for me, but I don’t want a dumbed-down interface, I want the complexity to do what I want to do. On the other hand, there are people out there that are far and away more obsessed with BSD, Windows, Linux than me. Its one of those interesting things, but I’m a middle-of-the-fence type person anyways.
On, I love the comic strip, it has such wonderful characters and a plot line. And, the best part, the author actually explains much of the science, or lack of science, in the strip, always a nice little detail.
I use Flash a lot in my job and personal life. However, as a Linux user, Flash hasn’t been the easiest program in the world to get running. Older versions wouldn’t play sound or they would break up so badly that sometimes the sound was seconds off. In the first version, fadeouts would take minutes instead of seconds, but things have been getting much better over the years.
I just found the blog to track the Linux Flash development and it looks like some good things are coming up. I also found a blog talking about one of the guys on it, and the efforts he is working on to get one of my favorite plugins working.
Of course, this won’t help my YouTube.com addiction. :)
Regardless, great job and just wanted to give some kudos to those efforts.
Last night, I was messing more with the automatic rules for placement in the region editor. I got it so it determines if a tile is considered flat or not (there are some minor bugs). In the following picture, the blues are places you can put a tile, red are too steep for a tile.
I also started the scenario editor. The first part of the scenario editor is placing of buildings, this is also used in the game. At the moment, I’m going to just create a “plate” at large as the building being placed and let the player see where it can or cannot be placed. That should give me a good basic start on this entire process.
Ideally, when you move the mouse around (while holding the spacebar at the moment), it will move the plate around and turn it blue when you find a valid spot. You can rotate with the right mouse button. However, there is a little bug with the Irrlicht.NET CP code (that will be fixed as soon as it gets into SVN, I think) that prevents me from finding where the mouse is over; that should be fixed “soon.’ and I’ll be able to move forward with this.
At GenCon, Fluffy dragged me into the writer’s gallery because there was an author with the same first name as myself. Naturally, I just wanted to see what other Dylan’s write like, so I was just as interested as she was. Imagine my surprise when he writes in a similiar genre and theme as I do.
The Shadow Chaser is a 277 page book written by Dylan Birtolo about a man named Darien Yost who finds out that there is more to him that he could ever imagine. The story starts slow, but moves into a fast-paced style that kept me interested until the end; I went to bed late to read as much as I could just because I was so interested in it.
The topic of the book was very enjoyable. I like magic in the “modern” world without turning it into the dark depression of World of Darkness. The sensations of the magic were nice, with a nice attention to the detail that the various characters didn’t exactly feel when they were using it, it was more perceptions of others, almost a seeming instead of true transformations. Some of the character traits were reflected in their powers, which also one of those tiny little detail things I look for.
The fight scenes were creative, actually using the traits of the combatants and also reflecting the various changing environments. The difference between the multiple worlds really showed up in the various scenary and also the “feel” of the story, enhanced by the use of italics for the “other” world. That part I enjoyed a lot.
Some minor things stood out as I read it, ignoring the one typo on page 90 since those always get in there.
I frequently got lost on the point of view. In the middle of a section, the view would change from one character to another and there wasn’t a good way of indicating that the view had changed; sometimes I would go back to try figuring who was feeling what when.
As a fast-paced story, it flowed very well, but it also felt rushed. The montage-like scene in the middle, where two of the characters go from little skill to fairly high in skill (in magic for one and rifles in the other) didn’t really feel right. If she showed a talents for guns earlier, it would have made more sense than just a sudden surge in skill. It also make it feel like everything was rushed.
The only other thing that stood out was the problem of perfection. The main character has awesome powers and everyone else knows it, but Dylan doesn’t explain why. Instead, its just there to drive the story where it could have given the story more depth to explain why everyone knows, including the non-magical person. Contrasting that is that the characters make the wrong conclusion in the story and actually carry it through until the revelation, which made a nice little minor twist.
Despite the main character having these impressive powers, he also has setbacks, which makes the story great. In the story, he has a natural talent, more than most people, but there was still a feeling of danger and he wasn’t exactly able to depending on his l33t powers to save him, instead the character protrayed showed a great deal of intelligence.
Overall, I enjoyed the story. The characters have an interesting potential for personalities and also it leaves it open for the “what if” that I always love at the end of stories. Not everything was neatly tied up which I consider one of the best parts of the stories, mainly because it made me think of what happened next.
Fluffy, while not as verbose as me, really enjoyed the story and kept pushing me to read it, because she knew I would enjoy it. And I did. I’m looking forward to the next one, mainly to see how the world develops and the mythology of this tale grows.
This weekend, I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to place buildings in the game. The approach I decided to go with basically creates a “tile” that will match the terrain of the map. The rules of for the tile (such as if it is too steep or if it gives bonuses) will be set in the region editor while the scenario editor will be used to set the default building layouts.
This took me quite a bit to figure out and I’m still not done. The rules for how steep aren’t in there (I’m going to stay steep if all four corners aren’t the same height) and I really want to get the building placement stuff done.
But… some screenshots:
The following screenshots are the retile process. Basically, I just take all the tiles and put them at the highest hight, then drag them down until they hit ground. It isn’t really fancy or anything, but at least approximates the ground layer. The most important parts are when there is one or more tiles at the same level, which there are regions that have that. Those are where the building placements are going to be in the scenario builder. The white tiles won’t be visible to the user in any other stage, this is just for setting region controls.
Normally, I memorize most books I read for a rather long period of time. In most cases, I have to read at least a hundred books before I can go back to it, simply because I just remember it so well. Of course, I knew that would slow down at some point. At this point, it is trivial. For the second time in five years, I bought the same book twice. *sigh* I know it sounds silly, but it used to be something I was very proud of myself. Well, still got a great book. :)
A cute little article about Help Vampires and how to ask questions properly: