Sylpher

LifeSaver v0.1b

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:23:06 -0700

I made a thing!

I grew tired of saving games constantly so I made this little utility to do it for me.

1 Whole Pixel

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:15:28 -0700

My proto-engine has been going well.

That is the sentence I would say had I made a post yesterday. Today is another story. Not to suggest that things are going bad in code land, on the contrary I have made good progress. But I ran into one of those bugs that you should probably walk away, take a break, relax a while, but I CANNOT! I know it is some small detail I am overlooking in my math, as is often the case, but my brain will not work through it.

For some reason my collision detection has this halo of 1 pixel around it that when the hitbox collides with something they get fused together like dogs in heat. My collision detection is nothing fancy, it isn't even per-pixel detection so all I have to do is check for overlap in rectangles.

The purpose of this post is to do something else so that hopefully the answer will come rushing in all at once in a sweet and blissful realization.

Any minute now...

Dude! Update already!

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:49:50 -0700

Oh, hello.

[insert excuses about not updating for so long]

Right, moving along. I've been coding a lot lately, and forcing myself to not start a project. It was difficult at first to turn off the impulse in my brain that once I learned a new concept to not immediately try to think of a way to implement it into a project somehow. I guess the ideas still flood in, but the important thing is I am refusing to act on the ideas and this has helped me really buckle down and focus on improving my skills without the pressure of a project.

Of course this sounds obvious now, but it is quite difficult to stop habits sometimes. My only real goal at this point is to get a solid understanding of a game engine and various ways to implement them. I'm trying to build myself a decent engine that I can do rapid prototyping in. If I can get to that point I will very likely post any throw away prototypes I make on here. Naturally the ones I would like to do more with I would keep slightly closer to my chest, but I would probably release them sooner or later.

Return of the Blind Cat!

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:33:52 -0700

If you saw the blind cat that is in my photo album then this video might pull at your heart strings.

Outlaws - The Cliffs

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:30:41 -0700

The Cliffs are up here and here. Only using knives and dynamite on this one. The final level is just around the corner.

Stand Right Next To A Mountain

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:27:57 -0700

I discovered a bow in my acoustic recently that despite fiddling the truss rod could not be worked out. To make myself feel better I stepped up in the world and finally got an electric!

I feel much better now.

My Chain:
Epiphone Les Paul Custom
Boss Metal Core ML-2
MOTU 8pre
The Laptop

I'll be your friend

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:29:19 -0700

Whenever I see a picture online of someone taking a picture of themselves using a mirror, all I can think is, "Don't you have friends?"

Sid Meier's Railroads!

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:38:05 -0700

I recently picked up Sid Meier's Railroads! as I enjoy the occasional strategy or simulation game. After playing the game for around half an hour it would drop dead with a generic error message and kick me back to the desktop.

I did as any person would do and try to figure out what the heck was wrong. A couple Google's and forum lurkings later I discovered that the game has a memory issue that it runs into constantly with Vista due to its high resource demands. I tried all suggestions to remedy this such as turning off Aero and sacrificing cute animals to the old ones.

They were not pleased.

I ran into similar issues in Vista with Deus Ex and Thief 3 and ultimately had to face that Ion Storm is gone and any hopes of an update is close enough to squat that I might as well not do any holding of my breath/bathroom breaks. Railroads is different, though. This is a game that came out in late 2006, just months before Vista was rolled out by a company very much alive and healthy.

Let us also not forget that it is built on Gamebryo, the same engine Civilization 4 is built on -- made by the same company for you not following -- which I have not had a single issue with in Vista. I might as well throw in that Civ4 was released a year prior to Railroads just for the heck of it.

All this considered I figured things can't be as hopeless as Ion Storm's games, so I sent off an email to 2k Games as that is what the Firaxis site says to do (OR ELSE! maybe... ) asking about the issue. After waiting the past week I finally received my heartfelt response:

Hello,

It appears you are running the game in Windows Vista, which unfortunately is incompatible with Railroads.

Well. Screw that noise. I setup a small partition on my drive and installed XP so now I am able to play Railroads and Ion Storm's games again, and probably others I haven't tried yet in Vista. Happy as I am that I am able to play I still feel the scorn from Firaxis/2k Games. Don't think I will forget this Mr. Meiers! You win this round.

Next round Buddhism is out!

Random Building Size

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:30:48 -0700

I have my code base for making a roguelike mostly worked out. Nothing terribly impressive just the basics to create a screen buffer, and draw to it. I also have a class I called Structure to represent all buildings in the world as one generic class. I would like to eventually make it so it procedurally generates a structure, but for the time being I will have to settle with working on a random size generator.

Side Note: Structure might not be the best idea for a class name, so I am thinking about changing it to Building in future endeavors.

The method to draw a structure is little more than two loops which makes anything beyond a rectangle complicated. I have the class setup to set the height, width, etc.. properties in the constructor, but this makes working with it a little bit of a pain so I gave myself a Resize method, as well.

Passing Resize a couple values generated with rand() and its friends and I have a different sized room every time I launch the application. Not exactly the most advanced piece of software to ever be written, but I have a couple ideas of where I might go with it to make some slightly more complicated shapes.

In the future I will upload a build if I ever put something together worth messing with, but I figured screen shots were enough for this example.

Outlaws - The Mine

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:30:49 -0700

The Mine is up here. Despite the numerous issues I ran into on this one I really like the way it turned out. Two more videos to go!