A while back my dad complained about the amount of profanity I use in my posts. I don’t really give a shit, but since I had nothing better to do, I made a censor plugin. Visitors have the choice to either turn it on or leave it off. The censoring part wasn’t that hard (especially since that was the example on the WordPress site), it was the turning on and off that took a while.
I have an idea for a wee database-driven app called Hitlist. Essentially it would be a list of people you dislike (more likely hate) with a points system. Every time someone on the list pisses you off, you click a little “+” button and a point is added to their score. If someones not on the list all you have to do is input their name. Then, everyone on the list is sorted according to the number of points they have, most hated at the top and a minor nuisance at the bottom. Of course it would have some fancy animation in there as well.
I can’t think of a title.
I’m still sick, but feel a little better. Thanksgiving break is coming [ok so I almost coughed up a lung right there] so that will be nice hopefully, but then you know how teachers think: “Oh! They have a break! That means they’ll have plenty of time to relax and write a 42 page essay!” That’s what they ALL think. They say they know that other teachers are giving us stuff, but it’s too late, they’re sure that this is the perfect assignment and that we can handle all the rest. BULLSHIT! Unless I missed the memo, breaks are meant to give us a chance to relax, to unwind, to escape the stress of fucking assignments. I thought of a title. I thought of something I want to program. It’s gonna be a simulation of single celled organisms and I reall want to make it look like a realistic electron scanning image. In other news, I finally completely completed “the Simpsons Hit and Run” with a little help from some maps, I had 2 gags that I couldn’t find and that’s all I needed to be 100%, though the maps didn’t really help because I wasn’t sure what gags I had already gotten. Turns out that I had missed the break in the fence around the telescope in the observatory on level 3 and 7. It’s a pretty awesome game, but I really want a free-range Simpsons game where you can go anywhere, with an accurate city layout (Hit and Run maps are so warped it’s painful) and where not all of the missions are based around cars, maybe that’s what the new Simpsons Game is, but I don’t know.
I haven’t really had much to write about lately, well there is one thing, but I going to wait on that. The last few days (read nights) I’ve been working on a multi-player game-like thing. It’s not really a game as of yet. It’s hard to describe, but pretty much you control this hover block that you can move around in a 3D world and sortof interact with other people. I built in a really quick chat system that works through the console. The console, at the moment, is really the only way of doing stuff other than moving or changing the camera angle and view. I’ve built in a bunch of functions that do stuff like change the player’s name, color, or alpha. So, you can personalize your “Helio” (as I’m calling it, yeah I know the name rips off the phone, but it really fits, cause the model looks like a little helicopter) to a degree. Also, I put in a few secret things that I though would be fun to use when showing it off to people. Eventually, the plan is to make a capture the flag game. I wonder if it works over the interwebs, I’m unsure because I haven’t had a chance to try it, the only testing has been on my local network. One problem is that because of .swf security issues, the networking only works in an executable form, though there may be a workaround, which would be nice.
This is almost the same as the version from yesterday, but it’s got some new stuff which makes it look a little cooler…at least I think it does.
My asteroids game was going really slow. I thought it was because of all of the particles and projectiles not being trashed by memory garbage collection. Turns out I was sorta right. What was really happening is that I had an event that was firing every frame for every object, even dead ones, and that was piling up in the background. So, I put in a line that killed the call when the object dies. Lo and behold, it worked…then I added a bunch more crap and slowed it down again. Here it is: Asteroids. I added tracking so there are targets over each asteroid. Unfortunately it doesn’t work correctly when the screen size changes from 800×600 to something else the HUD doesn’t draw correctly so the tracking and the site get fucked up. Another addition is that when you destroy one of the smallest asteroids, a big one is created in the distance. In this way it starts of easy and the gets ever so slightly harder as you go. Also, there’s now a score count at the top.
I’ve been working on my asteroids game. It’s pretty cool. Unfortunately, after a while it starts to slow down, because there are tons of objects that get destroyed and stop doing anything, but they don’t go away completely. I still haven’t figure out a way to completely delete an object. So, fuck. Asteroids
My dad went to Texas the other day for…something. Anyway, he brought me back two things. The first thing is a blue, glass turtle; nothing super amazing. However, the second caught me completely by surprise. Last night when he got home, he gave me the turtle and said there was something else for me one the table downstairs. I was watching TV and didn’t really feel like getting up and going downstairs. Today I got up, took a shower, and sat down in front of my computer (never had breakfast or lunch), so it wasn’t until I went down to do the chores my mom assigned me that I noticed a large box at my place. The tag sticking out had some stuff written on it, but what caught my attention was “21/2 Brim.” So, I thought, “why did he buy me a hat?” I opened the box and to my surprise I found this inside:
Also, I’ve been working on my Asteroids game and it’s coming along rather nicely. Here’s what it looks like at the moment. It’s still a work in progress. Here are the controls:
Movement:
forward – w
backward – s
strafe right – d
strafe left – a
brake – space
Steering:
up – down arrow (inverted axis)
down – up arrow
left – left arrow
right – right arrow
Other:
fire – shift
first person view (more over-the-shoulder) – 1
top down view – 2
zoom (in top down view) – scroll wheel
Well I think that’s everything. I hope to write some more of my story at some point. I have a bunch of ideas, though I’m lazy so…
The other day while working on my Flash game, I decided to try again at programming dynamic 3D shit in Flash. I’d tried on multiple times before but ultimately failed (the rotation is the hard part, so I assumed that it required math beyond my comprehension. This time I just wanted simple parallel 3D, not in perspective. So I went about it like I was rotating a 2D image. I think what happened was I got two of the rotations working and while playing with those, I realized that I had in fact solved my problem. It’s hard to explain how it works, but pretty much, all I had to do was use Sine and Cosine to rotate the points in 3 dimensions, treating the other dimensions as if the were flat. This probably makes no sense, so I’ll show you the end result. Spin this cylinder around with your arrow keys.
Today I felt like programming gravity. So I did. This program effectively simulates gravity (only effectively not perfectly). You can move the larger white “planets” around by dragging them and you can turn their gravity on and off by clicking them (white means on). By holding Shift and clicking you can create more “Satellites”. The satellites are attracted to each other and to the planets. That’s about it.