2007-12-17

Some days, I think I do too much

Filed under: Family,Games,Graphics,Programming,Writing — Tags: , , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 19:30

Visited my dad this weekend. Kind of strange, thing have really changed between us in the years and it was neat to see some of our old relationship coming back. Well, the relationship we kind of had, but I didn’t really see or understand until I sat down to write My Father’s Bike. They also recently extended I-355, so I got lost since it was so easy to get to his house instead of wandering through the backroads. That should take a bit to get used to. But… it was really nice.

The Subaru got back from the dealer on Friday night. The Saturn went into the shop for minor stuff. This morning, the Subaru wouldn’t start. :( And the toilet doesn’t appear to be working either. Not really a good sign when I’m scraping the bottom of the bank account. Hoping to get paid this week, if we do, everything is fine. If we don’t, then I’m going to be miserable and Fluffy won’t be able to get a hotel in Iowa. She loves hotels and I hate not giving them to her.

Oh, I updated the theme for mfgames.com to reflect the winter season. If I did it right, it will automatically change the theme based on the time of year. So, December through Feburary it will be winter, then it will cut over to plain after that, but you can use page styles to change between the two if you want. I also updated the Exalted pages since I was talking about them over at White Wolf’s forum.

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2007-06-27

Faux Heart Attacks

Filed under: Programming — Tags: , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 14:34

» My Father’s Bike: 0.714 (28,567 / 40,000 words)
» Wind, Bear, and Moon Query: 0.000 (0 / 26 weeks)
» Summer Biking: 0.228 (91.2 / 400 km)

One useful method of getting an genuine imitation heart attack:

  1. Ride your bike after not doing it for a couple weeks because you are (still) sick.
  2. Do so on a really humid and hot day.
  3. Worry about a wobble in the rear tire.
  4. Struggle a lot trying to beat your wife’s time and then just equal her.
  5. Lean bike against office door.
  6. Get really, really involved with work.
  7. Jump loudly when bike tire explodes without anyone touching it.

So, my tire decided that it was done and committed suicide yesterday. Startled the hell out of me and was good for a few minutes of everyone asking what in the world that noise was. The rest of the day was rather sedate. I’m trying to get LDAP and PAM (ldap-pam) running in our office.

Oh, because my Google-Fu didn’t find it, if you get “I have no name!” and you are not using ncsd, make sure your /etc/pam_ldap.conf and /etc/libnss_ldap.conf are chmod a+r. Just note to others who spend two days trying to figure it out.

Last night, I worked on Sprite3 on BooGame. This is going to be a graphics library for doing sprites in various rendering systems and eventually leading into getting a GUI (menus, windows, etc) working on a pure graphical interface. Kind of like the windows and popups you see in games. I had hopes that CeGui# would do it, but I can’t get that project to do what I need it to. I didn’t get very far–I spent two weeks thinking about it, but when I got into actually coding it… nada. I did manage to get one demo working, of three kids moving around the screen every five seconds.

I did have one minor disappointment. In 2004, I wrote something jendave called the Moonfire Demos for SDL.NET. It was my effort to do basically the same thing with Sprite3, but years ago. Sprite3 is also what I did with my Gtk# Sprites, but that isn’t really important. Last year or so, jendave said he was working toward moving SDL.NET into more of a pygame approach, which is to provide simple game-related functionality instead of my rather specific sprite library. I thought he was going to keep them in there, but in the last couple rounds of changes, apparently most of my stuff was taken out.

On one hand, I can understand that. I haven’t done much with SDL.NET for a few years and I wasn’t maintaining it. But, it hurts a bit to find out that something I worked on basically got removed because it was too broken. I can understand that it happen and I hope that I won’t drop Sprite3 the same way, though I do plan on getting it working on SDL.NET again, mainly because I keep finding myself wanting this library for the various game projects and maybe if I do it properly, I’ll stop doing it. Or at least stop reinventing the wheel every nine months.

It’s may fault for not paying attention to SDL.NET and the ton of other projects that I start to get involved with, I know that. And this is the consequences of doing paying attention since I have simply so many other projects to work on.

2007-05-02

World Making

Filed under: Programming,Writing — Tags: , , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 01:37

Ah, one of the more enjoyable things and yet, is still just a small aspect of creating a fantasy world. I love world building, mainly because I love creating stories of countries, finding the rules of a world, and even seeing how everything interacts together. My efforts on the world building program (WME) have been related to that, mainly to make it easier to create a fantasy world and to show the relationships between the aspects of the world.

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2007-04-17

A Frustrating Weekend

Filed under: Family,Games,Programming — Tags: , , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 13:17

This weekend, Fluffy had a belt testing and went out town for the entire weekend. She made her belt and is now a Senior Red in Hapkido. That means only three more belts until Black Belt (Junior Deputy, Senior Deputy, and Black). If everything continues as planned, she should hit her black belt right about the time we are planning on moving to Iowa.

As for me, my weekend alternated between frustrating and good.

First the good: gaming was a stitch. I was depressed for the first two hours or so, but I got into the groove and had some fun. People laughed and enjoyed themselves, which was the point. Bunch of magic items got dropped into the player’s hands, including some Heartstone Bracers and female-shape plate which uteck is planning on having shaped to fit him. Interesting characters, interesting locations, and a really cool plot we all came up with that I just have to go with. I actually “killed off” about half the party, but no one really died. There was a nasty botch on one roll so instead of killing them for real, I just gave them a little Wyld mutation that I feel adds to the character. And scienceprincess‘s character got a third eye which I thought was just a cool visual for basically the party’s mage.

The rest of the weekend, not so fun: I had an idea of how to produce a better-quality map with a bit of programming. So, what I thought would be a two day effort to get a prototype (just to see if it works) ended up being two days to get just the windows up and running and a big black screen where I should have a beautifully rendered map of Creation or some other fantasy world. In fact, it is quite depressing in the completely lack of “stuff” I wanted to see. I know that it will eventually work, or I hope it will. I’m going to give it a few days to get out of my head and see if the idea is even viable. Basically, I’m trying to write a Google map based system that lets me generate height maps of a fantasy world, then use that to create the height and depth regions of my vector map. In addition, a good quality terrain map would let me create a bas relief map of a fantasy world. Bas relief happens to be my second favorite type of map.

I also finally got feedback on my Scroll of the Lands:
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2006-07-19

Dynamically Generated Calendars

Filed under: Games,Programming — Tags: , , , — D. Moonfire @ 15:23

Last night, I was working on the compiled version of a calendar. I got the basics working, including muddling through the swamp that is System.CodeDom. This version was more complicated than the MfGames.Template library, mainly because it does more than the template library.

I feel that the approach is a good one. When you define a cycle in a calendar, such as DayOfMonth, the generated code actually creates a property of that name which gives the calculated results. Thay way, if you create a cycle “LongCycle” or “Calibration”, it will create that. This means you have a calendar object specific to your calendar and also with the properties that make sense for that calendar.

Speaking of Calibration, I still need to work on a roaming cycle events (holidays).

But, the project is sound and I think I have a couple good points before I consider it “done” enough to use in Turf Wars:

  • Date Formatting
  • Date Parsing
  • Hours of Day
  • Non-Looped Calculations
  • Rendering
  • Chooser (Gtk# and SWF)
  • Offset (since the rest of the world isn’t zero-based)

I also found a potential calendar for Itrifore that I’ll propose to fightertype. That way, I can have pretty formatted dates and times on my game while I’m debugging instead of looking at a decimal number.

2006-06-14

MfGames.Mapping

Filed under: Programming — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 19:05

Working Cairo to get the maps to render, at least a little scale bar. Took a fair amount of work, having some conceptual problems with it, but its beginning to look like a drawing program now. Trying to keep this set up so it handles everything in meters is going to make most of the initial code harder until I can get a good handle on it.

2006-06-12

Mapping Work

Filed under: Programming — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 15:21

Didn’t do much this weekend. Mostly, with my mate out of town, I just kind of rolled from room to room, not doing much. I got a little bit of programming in for MfGames.Mapping and editor, mainly to get some stuff with layers. I think I have it to the point I can start working on the coordinate system and Map Properties dialog box, then I’ll be ready for actual drawing stuff.

2006-06-09

Mapping Layers and Dropped Projects

Filed under: Programming,Technology — Tags: , , , — D. Moonfire @ 13:04

I spent yesterday working on layers for my mapping program. I decided to arrange it so every layer has the display and color rules, and you add the layers individually. I’m sure something won’t work out, but it seems to match a CSS approach (each layer is a class, well sets of classes). If I was feeling fancy, I’d do something with stylesheets, ala Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org. But, for the time being, I’m just going to stick with styles.

I’m also going to be dropping the flash card program. There are enough of them out there and I found three that did what I needed them to. Why reinvent the wheel? Not to mention, I really want to spend my energy on other projects that obviously need more of an itch resolved.

And, I can maybe work on the hiragana and katakana stuff again. I found an set of applets that helps with those training.

2006-05-19

Sepia – Worked on Templates

Filed under: Games,Programming — Tags: , , , — D. Moonfire @ 13:22

Figured out templates for MediaWiki in the last couple of days. Even started doing “character sheets” for the new arc on the Sepia website.

Feeling pretty good about it. I hope to get the rest of the stuff into the system sooner or later, but the more details I can add, the better. Also getting ready for the next adventure. The Gtk# Wiki client I was working on got pushed back though, it just doesn’t feel right for some reason.

2006-05-02

A little flash card program

Filed under: Programming,Technology — Tags: , , , — D. Moonfire @ 13:45

I’m trying to learn Japanese. No specific reason but someone was willing to send emails to me in Japanese and it gave me the excuse to actually try to start learning it. Of course, the problem is that I’ve failing to learn almost every language I’ve tried, if it wasn’t on the computer. So, I decided to take an idea from Pauker and Slime Forest Adventure and create a modified flash card program. I could have used either one of those, or the multitude of other flash card programs, but I had some specific goals, plus this leads into some other projects I have in mind.

ss-01.png ss-03.png

The core library handles cards, with queries and answers. That part is perfectly normal. It also uses a formula to determine when a card should show up. Basically, it keeps asking you the answer, increasing the amount of time each time. The more you answer correctly, the longer it takes for the question to show up. If you answered all the questions, it just remains blank.

ss-02.png

If you leave it there, when one of the cards expires, it shows up again (that is the pending line). Also, it can handle units which are selectively enabled or disabled based on something outside the library.

Most of the library is to support some children games that I have in mind. Mainly, you can create a unit of vocab words and it uses that to display the question. I also want to write a Lojban (and technically a Japanese) RPG that basically uses expired cards as the monsters. You type in the word to “attack” and if you miss, you take more damage, if you fail to do it in time, you get a light hit.

The way the library is set up, random monster encounters can easily be handled by this. If none of the cards have expired, then there simply won’t be any random encounters. That way, as you master an area, you stop encountering the tokens. On the other hand, it is also set up so you will occasionally be quizzed on mastered cards. If you fail, they start the process again.

Another thing I want to do is make this an applet for Gnome. That way, it will always sit up on the desktop and flash when you have cards to answer. With all of this, it seemed like a fairly useful little library.

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