Well, I’m a bachelor for nine days. Fluffy is out of town to visit her cousin in South Carolina, then to drive to Iowa, then back here home. So, nine days of pining for her and nine days of me not having that anchor I’ve gotten used to in the last ten years.
So, I worked until two in the morning last night on various projects and watched 300 for the first time. Did two comics for Glorious Saber so I’m now two ahead. Only eight more and Fightertype says she’ll read it.
I also tried my hand at playing Resistance: Fall of Man. While I consider myself a good gamer, most platformers games don’t cause me problems, apparently I suck at FPS. I felt like a hyperactive spastic running around, hitting more buildings than monsters and everything else. I tried the demo for Darkness, another FPS, and another twenty minutes of running around hitting walls and getting shot up like no tomorrow. Demo for Heavenly Sword? Slaughtered the opponents, every single one of them with chained combos and nearly got through the stage with a flawless. Heavenly Sword is not a FPS. :)
Though, it looks like someone is making a REALLY big map of Creation. I offered both what I’ve done already and possibly an ISP to host it, which means I might be working on that (it was on my todo list after GenCon anyways) because I’ll have someone working with me. Admittedly, it would be a lot more complicated that what I have now, but I think it would benefit the Exalted gaming community as a whole (and more brownie points with White Wolf.
Wind, Bear, and Moon Proposal
Summer Biking: (236.7 / 400.0 km)
CuteGod Development: (44 / 172 requirements)
Wind, Bear, and Moon Proposal
Summer Biking: (203.5 / 400.0 km)
Apparently, unlike some of you, I don’t use my computer during my vacations or during GenCon. :) So, after six days of enjoying myself, I’m finally back from another wonderful trip. I left on Wednesday morning and came back a few hours ago, here on Monday. This was the first time I’ve ever run a game at GenCon (Exalted of course) and I had some really cool news from the end of it.
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Yeah, still sick. Went home two hours early yesterday, working from home today. Talking is a chore and my voice is giving out after 15-20 minutes. This morning I almost couldn’t breath when I woke up though drinking a pot of tea and creamer seemed to has helped with that. I even missed the rifftrax for Willy Wonka, which saddened me, but it was a good thing because my father came over with a chainsaw to handle the tree that tore out of the ground a few weeks back. We were only back there for an hour, but it is amazing to see how much cutting you can do with a chainsaw. The tree is now neatly sectioned into no length over 1.5 meters. I just have to drag it back into the woods over the next week and finish getting rid of a fence the city is bitching about.
At least I’m almost at the point I want to be with the world creator program. I got it to handle scaling of images so I can start with a single 256 pixel image for a world, say drawn on a napkin or photographed from a particularly interesting stain on the oven *cough*, or scaled down from a higher detailed once such as the vector map I created for Exalted. At this point, the main things I have left are the editing infrastructure which is going to let me make changes and automatically rebuild the rest of the zoom levels and details involved, and the relief generation from two other layers (I already got heightmap and terrain skinning done).
But, not today. Today, I’m going to work as long as I can then pass out again.
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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I did a fair amount this weekend, given the fact that I wasn’t feeling on the top of the world. I sent out a query letter for Muddy Reflections. I’m not comfortable with sending out batches yet, so I’ll probably just send out one at a time, or overlap them by a few weeks. This one was to Writers House. I was glad I could say I was on White Wolf’s quarterly too. I also did a synopsis and a chapter outline. I also finished a story for the Machine of Death anthology and submitted it.
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I got every location in stephenls’ map updated on my online map of Creation. I also got the beginning of changing the icons around so the cities have a different appearance from the celestial gates. If you look at the Sepia Throne map, you can see that the Sepia stuff has a different color. The white icons are the canon (or mostly canon at this point) with the wheat ones being the Sepia Throne stuff.
I’m thinking about “announcing” it to some of the forums to see what people think. Stephenls hasn’t responded to my emails, so I’m going to leave off their map until I get feedback. I’d love to have feedback and see if people just think I’m doing the right thing. Of course, most of it is leading into doing my own fantasy world, but at least something cool is coming out of it.
Yep, I got it up and running last night. Took a lot of hours and I don’t have anywhere near enough markers in yet, still working on the file formats and all that lovely stuff, but the proof of concept is in and I’m feeling a pretty good high from it.
I even took that scary step and sent an email to stephenls and asked if they would be willing to let me put their map online. It’s okay if they say no, but I won’t know until I tried. It will mean I’ll need to create a database of every location in Creation, along with their coordinates, but that’s another project I think the community could use if they don’t already have it.
I know that sounds strange, but the Exalted world of Creation simply isn’t square. In the process of trying to figure out how to get a Google Map to work with Creation, I made some interesting observations. The earth is square, at least when you use a projection to make it square. The World of Warcraft is square, judging from the online map of that world. The world of Oblivion is square. Lots of fantasy worlds are simply… square. Most worlds are created on a piece of paper and square is just a natural shape. For some, they don’t want to deal with the curvature of a planet, so they make it a “flat” world and I noticed most flat worlds are… square. Creation, on the other hand, was crafted to fit as the cover of Exalted, two pages side by side. So, naturally, it is more of a rectangle that isn’t square. I will admit, I don’t like flat worlds, there are so many little details that you have to think of, such as line of sight, horizon issues, and simple navigation. An anime banner in Exalted really should be visible for hundreds of miles, its a flat world and a bright enough light would be visible up to thousands of miles, even if just a haze.
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I’ve been somewhat frustrated with my map of Creation along with the other worlds I’m greatly interesting in making maps for. The map of Creation looks pretty good, but it continues to fail me in that I can’t get the level of detail without making the entire map so large that my computer is simply unable to handle it. According to what I found, Creation is suppose to be 13,200 by 8,266 miles in size. My map of Creation, which uses the same sizes as stephenls’ map, is 3,840 by 2,303 pixels. If I increase the dimensions by 4 I would get roughly 1 pixel per mile of Creation. At the expense of pretty needing a 4 GB machine to handle the sheer amount of raw data. I found a way that gets around this that lets me add on data as I go without needing me to do a 1px/mile detail.
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Last night, I finished entering the cities from stephenls’ map into my own. It is beginning to look like a decent map now. I think the last few steps of doing the stephen map are doing countries/boundaries/regions, roads, and air boat routes. I think the main reason I’m doing this is because I’m planning on making maps for Fedora and my own fantasy worlds and this is a great way to get some experience. Overall, I think the maps are looking pretty good.
I am looking forward to running on Saturday.
