Veiva

I was messing around with Unreal. Well, more like getting models made in Blender to import into Unreal. Took about three hours to find the right settings... It's a crappy animation and he's missing his left arm but it works lol.

I had to turn in a draft of my first essay to an online tutoring service paid for by my college. You want to know the feedback? "The essay was perfect." I had to argue which of two articles on the same subject better expressed themselves. To be honest I think I didn't cite enough examples from one of the articles. We'll see what my instructor says. (To be fair, I helped a family member through his/her English courses so I have a big advantage.) ... Also, a family friend took me driving for the first time today. IT WAS INCREDIBLE. I practiced in a parking lot for roughly 1-2 hours and then we went on empty country roads for a bit (~30 minutes). The biggest problems are 1) over steering 2) acceleration. It seems like I press the gas pedal even a little and the car jumps forward, why. :( ... Oh, and if nothing comes up (e.g., scooter repairs or something), my brother and I should have over 3 months of expenses saved up (hint: rent/utilities/food/misc cost us $1500/month) by the end of February. The extra income from the job is amazing, it completely goes into savings.

I really like how this turned out. Btw I sold $600 worth of accessories when selling a computer this weekend. The target is $200 per computer. Lol. First try. I'm a boss.

I'd generally agree but I live near Fort Bragg and people in the military often sell their otherwise functional vehicles when they're deployed overseas due to costs of transport, etc. Like I said, I'd be adamant at meeting at a local mechanic and having an inspection done. I'd also bring a friend whose good with cars and I'd require service records or I'd refuse to buy it. It would take 12 months to save up for a car from a dealership assuming there's no unexpected expenses. This doesn't include insurance. I'm not waiting another year. I'm tired of having to deal with inclement weather, riding gear, lack of storage, and the general risk that comes with riding 10-15 MPH under the speed limit on a scooter. As it stands, I'm up for review for my disability benefits this year. If they no longer think I'm disabled, then I'm back to square one. "Disabled" means can't hold a job, not that I think there's people in walls or that the world is controlled by interdimensional dream monsters.

I got my learner's permit today! Hoping to get a license by my birthday (25th). Assuming nothing major comes up, I could buy a used Toyota Camry (or similar) by March or April. Anyone have advice for buying a used car from Craigslist? My though process is meet at a mechanic, have a pre-purchase inspection done, if it goes okay, meet at my bank and pay for the car. School has been great. Although the programming classes thus far have covered everything I already know, they're still great fun. Been talking with my classmates when I can. There's a game developer's club I'm going to join later. The first meeting is on the 21st. Work has been great, too. I've been really comfortable talking to customers. Have a pretty good success rate of convincing them to buy "attachments" like ink and warranties so far. Haven't sold a computer yet, though... Only printers. To think, just two months ago, I was so depressed I didn't want to get out of bed.. edit: Also I found out I'm #10 in RuneScape for number of Tormented Demons killed. I haven't killed a Tormented Demon in over a year and a half LOL. Can I put that on my resume, or would that make me overqualified?

My rec is get a working website. this is a joke i know how things break randomly i get it please don't be discouraged You're using Google's DNS? Google for some reason won't look up my domain since last night. (I use Google). DNSSEC is failing or something. Lol. edit: Should be working now. It was a problem on my domain registrar's end.

I wrote my first dev log entry for my game... Here it is. Anyone care to give some feedback?

Aah it's an army.

So I got text rendering working... The format for the silly quote is: <size height="48"><shadow>Hello</shadow>, <speed value="0.05"><scroll mode="Character">world</scroll></speed><shake mode="Character">!!!</shake> <speed value="0.5"><scroll mode="Word">Do or do no try</scroll></speed>, <color primary="gold">there <color secondary="dark-brown"><shadow><shake mode="Word">is</shake></shadow></color> no is.</color></size> Animations can be applied per-word or per-character. When I draw a character, I pass along the word index and character index. The draw method then applies than animations based on the animation class (word or character). For shaking, I offset by the result of a Perlin noise calculation, scaling arguments to the noise by the time value. I haven't implemented underline/strike-through yet but that's not important for now. I also added the first widget, a button. With school and work, it's been hard to find time to work on my game... edit: Knocked out a basic text input box: That is a major step. Now I can create the "Dusty Grammaton," a feature to allow me to test all sorts of features at runtime. I could type a description, for example, to spawn an NPC or item, instead of having to hardcode it...

I came across a great quote by Terry Pratchett while doing some research for my game's design: "Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel?" It sucks he died...

[bleep] you nerd Well first off how dare you

Were you wearing a proper motorcycle jacket, jeans/pants, boots, and gloves?

I've been working on adding a GUI. There's a button. It's styled externally: Everything visual is defined in the above stylesheet. Animations with names matching events are played when that event fires. Other animations can be played whenever. I wanted to decouple widget rendering from widget logic without going overboard, and I think I handled it nicely. Some widgets, like text rendering ones, will require some custom drawing logic, but that's a given. As an aside, I absolutely hate GUI stuff.

I was just making a joke about North Carolina, not trying to out-do you.

Yeah but I think North Carolina has like two and a third salt trucks and maybe four snow plows plus some dude with a snow shovel so we're not really prepared for even a little snow.

Yeah but they'd probably cancel schools if it got to 110 degrees because the roads would melt.

I had my first day of school yesterday. It was amazing. I haven't been so happy in a long time. But today school was cancelled because of snow. I hate snow.

I finally got the object system sorted. There's ThingMaterial, which contains resources like a texture (e.g., glass) and properties (e.g., strength, durability, weight). Then there's ThingDefinition, which contains further resources like the model (e.g., texture atlas/skin/inventory icon) and skeleton, and a list of materials with specific weights. The first material is considered the "base material", and has a sane default. For example, a potion bottle currently is a 100 parts glass and 1 part cork, with glass being the base material. A "stone potion bottle" would override the glass and become 100 parts stone, 1 part cork. A ThingDefinition can be instantiated into a ThingInstance. Every NPC (I refer to friendly NPCs as peeps and monsters as creeps but there's no fundamental difference), item, and even the player are ThingInstances. They have properties like a description, inventory, temperature, etc; e.g., things that change in response to gameplay events. And so I instantiated a player and some undead glass peep: That was a lot of work! Funny aside: Technically, I want materials to become liquid/gaseous if they become hot enough. I already created a system for this. This means if a dragon keeps breathing fire on you, your armor can melt... evil...

I don't think I've ever updated my BIOS. If it's not broken, don't fix it is how I handle things like that. Don't want to brick my motherboard... ... I implemented a (very rough) 'thing renderer'. It handles applying materials (loaded from a central 'material database') and colors thus far to 'models' (basically icons/characters/etc; i.e., the visual representation of a thing/game object). So I took it for a spin with a potion bottle: Left is just a literal "potion bottle", center is a "green potion bottle", and right is a "neon green cork potion bottle." It works, even when adding/removing description at runtime... The contents can change with the inventory of the potion bottle, too. So a red potion would make the pink blob red, a blue potion blue, a some lava orange-and-black, etc. But I didn't implement that yet...

I'm going to select a few hundred nouns/adjectives (nouns can be used in the description, I think; for example, 'pirate king' would make a pirate with a crown or something) and assignm them to groups. For example, words like 'big' and 'small' would be in the "size group". Different words in the group would offer different benefits; 'big' may may something 50% bigger, while titanic would make it 200% bigger. So a Titanic potion bottle would store 200% more potion, and a titanic shopkeeper would have a hard time fitting through the door... (And a slow shopkeeper would be easier to steal from!). You get these words as scrolls from quests, monsters, and exploration. So if you want to summon a 'legendary undead terrifying titanic dragon', you'll need to find those adjectives and nouns first... And it will also drop items that are legendary, undead, terrifying, and/or titanic. This means that a 'puny small dragon' would drop puny, small items, making it less worthwhile to game the description to make the game easier (your drops would suck). I'm going to be releasing it via Steam, but that's two years away optimistically. I just began working on this last month pretty much.

I've been working on a game. it's like Scribblenauts, a game where you can type something like "happy blue zombie" or "dirty janitor" or and spawn objects like... happy blue zombies and dirty janitors. Except it's a roguelike, and you control the random feature generator via description. So if you type "haunted ancient plains," you should get something with ruins and ghosts, but it should resemble a plain and thus be open and flat. Or "grassy lush desert" and be a doofus I guess. So I've been working on one the critical parts, object rendering. I want items and other objects appearances to change based on their description. For example, a "stone potion bottle" should be made out of stone. An "undead shopkeeper" should have purple skin. A "mossy stone dragon" should have stone for scales. That kind of thing. I made an vector description object I named "pixie" (since it's not exactly a sprite, but kind of is). It allows me to assign palette entries to shapes, but not just that--texture slots and such too. For example, take this character, the Iron Tower: Now imagine if he's made out of glass, or cork: You can also apply transformations on palette colors. This means you could have a dragon where its belly is the complimentary color of its skin. So a blue dragon would have an orange belly by shifting the hue 180 degrees. You can modify palette entries relatively like that: It's really nice, I think. The best part is I serialize the material data back into the original SVG document, so when I make changes I don't lose anything. I only have to update new paths/shapes. I make the actual graphics in InkScape, and use my tool (pictured above) to prepare it for my game.

Anyone know if I made the right call? My BIOS warned me twice thus far about a "power surge." (It shut off and next reboot claimed it shut off because of a power surge, to protect the components). My computer is behind a UPS, so I'm certain it's not a wiring/electrical problem with the outlet or electric service. So I replaced the PSU. Does that sound right? I have no way of testing the old PSU. It seemed to happen whenever I did something (1. load a new website in Firefox with a video 2. open my game I'm developing), so I'm thinking it's the PSU. I hope it's not the GPU...

I have a "fantasy" spreadsheet where I can put in a price and total sales value, and it tells me how much I theoretically would earn after taxes. It also includes a projection of how much I would have after X years, assuming I get a normal job and save some each month. (This one doesn't include the capital gains tax rate so it's a bit off. I'd think I'd just deduct it from the interest but I don't know for certain). It helps motivate me and ease my depression. Even pitiful sale numbers look good after 40 years of investing (assuming 1) I graduate college in 4-5 years 2) I get a decent job soon thereafter)... I'd just be thrilled if I could be financially independent after 20 years or so of entering the workforce. It's feasible if I were to have a moderate amount of sales and get a decent job in a low cost of living area, like here in North Carolina. The dream is to make a game (or something) before I graduate college, make enough to put a down payment on a house, get a good job near Raleigh, NC, and move to Cary (it's a nice town 10 miles near Raleigh). ... In other news, I got a job at Staples. Waiting to hear when I go in for orientation. I hit it off really well with the manager during the interview, so I hope that's a good indicator of what's to come.

I had two teeth removed today. First surgery ever. It was so weird. I was out of it after the anesthesia so I just took a nap when I got home. ... Room/hallway generation, with connections. Also, preliminary text-rendering:

The beginnings of random generation... It's pretty neat... I only created Rectangle and Circle shapes thus far. 'Hallways' aren't added yet, but you can kind of see the connections from the circles in the middle to the neighboring rectangles.