The AznGeek

Posted by Morpork at October 10th, 2008

Between the computer failing to start up, washing machine breaking down and general clogging up of the schedule, progress has really gotten hampered.  Curiously, this began so soon after an announcement for a semi-goal oriented project begun spontaneously. It’s like the digital equivalent of people carrying glass panes and crossing the street.

Anyhow, I’d like to share a few bits of things I learned exploring SDL. A game loop is divided into three processes. The first is Input and takes care of user input. Basically setting flags and this equals true that equals false. Next, Logic takes these flags and use them to determine what to do. For example, if user hit fire weapon key, the create ball of plasma block of code runs and sets the projectile to have direction set to the facing of the player and with velocity of a plasma_projectile_initial_vel or something like that. Oh and Logic also takes care of what position of everything is. Finally, Display will show the user the red dot that is a plasma ball and refresh the screen. As the name game loop implies, this gets repeated over and over, with user input changing what logic does.

So what’s so good about adhering to these three steps? I think it just makes things easier to keep track of. If you had refresh screen somewhere up in logic, things can be messy on screen and things just won’t be in one place when debugging the code.

One last lesson is do not use two SDL_PollEvent() functions in one game loop. Each call flushes the event queue and renders the second one useless. This function is used in while() loops so just remember to put an if() conditional behind the while() if you have to use two of them. Or more. Because the while() needs to run the stuff in the brackets before checking the status to be true or false. Not that I’d make a mistake like that.

¬_¬

Posted by psych at October 8th, 2008

Finished my central incisor carving today. Stoked. Polished Wax is Silky Smooth MMmmmmm. All the tooth pics are bad. Im not gonna lie. Crappy focus.. Dont feel like typing much. Pictures get processed by your brain at a faster rate anyway. I dont want to be held responsible for causing you to think o0. The tooth are all missing the awesome minor features cos its blurred. Outlines still there tho.

Next project- that annoyingly hard to carve cusped tooth..
Signing off (yet again)

pSyCh

Posted by psych at October 7th, 2008

Went home briefly for one of those I’m-In-Freaking-Kedah-And-Need-To-Go-Back-Home-As-Often-As-I-Can binges. Ended up not doing much and it became a pseudo holiday (aka study break with actual studying).

Sis bought a new gadget. Wish it was mine. I can’t even afford the subscription fees. Why would I need to be online on MSN 24/7 anyway? Emails? I only use those for forum/site registrations. I barely use MSN on my lappy as it is. Enough about why I dont need it..

So.. its good. Nothing really new/special about it I guess compared with the majority of similar phones in the market. I like the sweet mouseball/tracker thing in the middle. Smooth as hell. keyboard imo needs a tutorial thing cos my fingers keep hitting one key to the left <- when i try to touchtype.. So

My Dear Santa Claus Please Give Me A Bag Of Gold Ive Been Real Good This Year       -turns into:-

Nt Swar Sabra xkayss okease fuve ne a vaf id fiks uce veeb rwaj fiid rgus twar

or something like that. I get some keys right but its just so odd. the "home key" to put your fingers on are neither F nor J asfarasicanremember. Keyboards are not meant for phones PERIOD. No matter what other people think. I dont care if youve mastered yours. it still doesnt belong on a phone until they make it big enough (that idea using a projection of a keyboard with invisible sensors so you can project a full sized keyboard on a flat surface is a good way to go). Guess that was my rant. Cant complain more. Its a sweet phone overall.

Nice front. Sexy hand.

Nice back.. Omg sexy hand..

Main menu thing. Reflection from light. Shows how smooth and curvy it is =) kinda.. Notice the clear rubber condom it has on. Forgot to take it off. Much slimmer without it.

Thats it folks.

Signing off (literally)

pSyCh

Posted by azngeek at October 5th, 2008

Life has been a mish mash of everything for me lately. The distinction between being awake and asleep now has sometimes been dulled just by the lack of it. A lot more hectic lately though things have begun to settle down considerably as the semester approaches another end.

So I’ve decided what better way to escape my problems than a long non-nonsensical rant, something I’ve not done for eons. And I’m sure the many(one) reader out there would highly appreciate a pseudo update. Not really quite an update. But a filler. Kinda like those annoying fillers in animes. I digress.

Well as I was saying. Non nonsensical rant. Growing up, I used to think beards were the coolest things in the universe. Like bad ass pirates that have been out at sea for far too long who have neither had the chance to shave or get laid. (Because of the latter they became quite a lot less bad ass) Or the manliest of guerrilla fighters hanging out in the jungle going all holier-than-thou-I-have-a-purpose and attacking the villagers for supplies in the name of freedom. Man. I remember when the careers advisor at my school was having a talk to us at school about career paths. The first thing I blurted out to the poor poor lady (god rest her soul after her talk with me) was I wanted to be a samurai. You know. Connect back to my roots and all. Have honor. A big shiny sword. And a cool mask and armor head to toe to boot. Man. That’s what I’m talking about. But she was trying to convince me how I was a confused individual and asked me to consider something abit more down to earth. Practical she said. Never did she once consider how her lack of consideration for my feelings has scarred me for life. That’s beside the point though.

So as I was saying. I thought about it. And got back to her the next day. I told her I wanted to be a guerrilla warrior and fight for freedom in some obscure location in the amazon. I was trying to convince her how it was practical and how bad ass it would be. With the beard and all. (I wasn’t considering the fact of not being laid for a while as all women love guerrilla warriors that have a bushy as beard, I’d have been rewarded handsomely at the end of my long hard fight. Battle scars and all. Man. I’d be a chick magnet). And she convinced me how that was not practical either, and pointed towards two careers considering the grades that I had and the subjects I was doing. Medicine or Engineering. Bah. She crushed my little soul with her pudgy hands. The bitch.

From then on, I’ve hated beards and all forms of facial hair. Gone are the days of coolness if you looked like wolf-boy (I wanted to be wolf-boy too : <). And now. Now, the act of shaving just pisses me off. I hate getting scruffy in the morning. I got so pissed off. I felt like ripping my face off ( I kid) . What I’m trying to say. The need to shave to look presentable is not bad ass. It’s a pain, and it hurts me so. : <

I’m an angry confused individual.

When I wake up from my confused state I will not have a recollection of this.

Azngeek

Posted by Morpork at October 5th, 2008

And so begins my first stab at having a side project that has nothing to do with normal curriculum. I am writing this under the category Projects with the ’s’ and hopefully I can keep this going for some time.

…Okay, I lied. I will probably start off writing code for a university assignment but I do have some plans to make a game after I deal with that. I have some “design docs” sitting around and I can picture the very very simple game in my mind. Mainly because I played it before when I was young.

As an amateur, I am free to make stuff up as I go. One of the things that I will end up doing is probably creating some “artwork” for the interface. Bless the souls who have already twisted the meaning of that word. Next, it’ll be reusable code. One use discard code is frowned upon but until I gain experience (and level up) there is no hope for me recognising what I can reuse and cannot reuse. I don’t even know all the tools in the toolbox yet.

Right now, I have created one button which behaves much like a standard button found everywhere. It doesn’t do anything yet and I am not sure if it is totally reusable. Note that the source code is written in C++ and uses the SDL graphics library.

Again, as an amateur, I’ll figure out how to distribute working .exe files before I consider uploading them to this site. Since the button is still a work in progress, I’ll also upload that after I tweak it some more.

Endnote: I received a morale boost when I noticed Star Control… erm, the Ur-Quan Masters uses SDL. There’s magic right there.

Posted by azngeek at October 3rd, 2008

I lent my camera to my sister. Never got it back. So with no other alternative I’m forced to put up photos from my phone *upside down smiley*.

I swear it was a lot neater when I first pimped it out, now it’s just a shadow of its former self : <

There you go, the pictures i promised a while back.

Ah. What else. Hmmm.

I’m seriously busy busy busy. : / 8 projects. 3 down, another 2 almost done, 1 just started, 2 to go. : / I have a reason why I’ve been idle : P

Posted by Morpork at September 27th, 2008

As what professionals call ‘executive summary’, this game is bad.

To wit:

• De-synced audio and video.
• Tedious controls.
• Awful targeting.
• Disjointed story.
• Short.
• DIAS.

Throughout the game, you never feel as powerful as the trailers led you to believe. You spend half the time knocked down by enemy fire as you swing your impotent light saber at enemies that can kill you with less spectacular weapons(ie. their fists) No, that doesn’t mean they do more damage with their fists. Their attacks stun you and anyone with any experience with action games or even just DOTA know how stun affects gameplay. It affects you this way: You get free hits from the enemy and you die while you frustratingly jam at the non-responsive controls to ‘wake up’ from the stun.

Speaking of controls, what’s with the hair trigger? There is a slight delay from pressing your button to activating a move and then there’s a longer delay after the animation dies away before you resume control. There are times when you Force Grip the wrong target and you want to stop gripping it. You will be rooted on that location and get stunned and whacked by Storm Troopers. Jedis don’t get killed by storm troopers. …Unless you have a lousy targeting system which always points to the wrong object/person, throw items at the wrong direction (ie not at the enemy standing there) and then penalise you even if you have good reaction speed by numerous delays before, during and after commands are input. Which is why accidentally activating commands with the hair trigger is not welcome.
And for a jedi who is supposedly strong in the force, his Lightsaber Throw attack bounces off other jedi most of the time while theirs always hit you(and stun). They mysteriously block your Lightning and Push attacks while theirs have bigger spread and always hit. You can never block their force powers. Add to that you cannot dodge by watching our opponent’s moves because of the button delay. If you dodge when he throws an object, you will be hit. You have to dodge before he starts to throw.

Maybe you have to be so familiar with every little animation and have lightning quick reflexes to press the button as soon as you see that pixel move. This is also known as Do-It-Again-Stupid gameplay and punishes the player and forces them to keep retrying until they ‘do it right’.

Also, you can lift and throw TIE fighters but you cannot lift a droid. Not funny, especially when those droids come in packs and fire insta-stun area effect homing missiles which are difficult to dodge (see above). Then your attacks just don’t hurt them very much while they can stun you with every little move they make. You’d have to pull at least 3~4 combos of ~20 lightsaber slashes before it might go down. All the while as you swing your blade feverishly at this body, it doesn’t get stunned and can still swing a punch at you (and sigh… stun you). Of course let’s not forget the 3 missiles his buddies just shot at your limp body, doing full damage and knocking you down as soon as you got back up.

Which brings me to: Why are you on the ground all the time? Why is your waking animation so long? Why is the command to override knockdown only work sometimes and, infuriatingly enough, also lock you in midair for a couple of seconds so a missile can hit you?

I give this game an A for its gameplay. A as in Asinine.

The game is in all the glories of current-gen games. It is beautiful (graphicaly speaking), short and plagued with a whole crop of annoyances. Primary among them is the desynced sound and animation. Very underwhelming when you kill a giant beast but hear its dying growls 5 seconds before your lightsaber touches it. This, of course, followed by silence as the animation plays. I thought we solved the sound and video syncing problem 80 years ago.

I think game designers would have noticed something was amiss when they described a scene in the game: Droids which cannot be stopped fire insta-stun area effect homing missiles of infinite range which are difficult to dodge and continue to do damage while you slowly lift yourself from the ground over and over again.

I’d like to apologise for the verbosity and forcing a review down your throat. I just had to vent this somewhere. If you don’t agree with the review, feel free to post a retort provided it is not unintelligible.

Posted by Morpork at September 27th, 2008

This is weird but bear with me. Strange conversations play in my head. Usually I am not in them but I do ‘possess’ the characters in my head in order to handle what a character will say. For this instance, the scenario is… postnuclear apocalypse wasteland. A man is accosted by a wasteland raider. (Indented areas are editorial notes from me.)

Man: Wait, why do you do this? The world is in ruins and humanity is on the brink of extinction. Is this really time to fight amongst ourselves?

Raider: The world is in shambles. There is shortage of food, water and even clean air! My chances of survival are better without other people taking a piece of it. Besides, being pacifistic and tolerant were in the days when those things were abundant. Now there is not enough to go around.

Man: What about the survival of our race?

Raider: Hmph. I do intend to breed one day.

Man: Didn’t you just say you don’t want more people to share with you?

Raider: Don’t get me wrong. Keeping the human race alive is just not as high a priority as  my survival. When the time is right, I will do my part.

Man: Your children will also consume precious resources. As opposed to an able bodied man, they will be helpless for several years and you’ll be forced to find even more to feed all of you. Keeping a grown person on the other hand would have none of these problems.

Raider: …

Man: Besides, if you have children too soon, they will grow and have children of their own. You’d repopulate too quickly and suffocate at the resource bottleneck. Better to leave children to a later time, and gather able bodied people to survive first.

Raider: No. This world is dangerous. You do not know if you will die the next day from radiation poisoning. You cannot see it and no equipment has survived. What if you became sterile before you plan to have children? Can you guarantee surviving for the next 20 years?

Man: That is why every person counts! A child will not survive any better than an adult. In fact, less rads will be enough of a dose to kill them a hundred times over compared to an adult!

First off, you might wonder about the raider’s argument that the nuclear wastes aren’t exactly the best place for peace and love. You might think that conflict was what caused the world to be ruined in the first place. But when you think about it, people are at peace most of the time in today’s society. When you spend 90% of your time in peace and the world was ruined, you’d think that being peaceful didn’t matter too much… perhaps.

I am curious what other people think about the conversation. How would you add to the dialogue? What argument would you make? How believable is the conversation? Do the arguments make sense? As a writer, do you think there is sufficient reason now for the raider to spare the man? Is this scenario plausible or stretching believability?

As an endnote, I think of the raider as the kind of guy who isn’t a brainless thug. He is a guy who has thought through his actions before doing them. Kinda like Han Solo, maybe. A kind of anti-hero before you win him over.

Posted by Morpork at September 24th, 2008

Now I have by no means read the internet. But some people make a pledge on the internet, usually in a blog to do something and they’ll do it. It’s a good self improvement exercise if you pull it off, and if it is of significant enough magnitude, even attract a niche of readers. But promising to a blog seems to not work for me, as can be seen here. Maybe I need a bigger project of ’significant enough magnitude’. I’d need to think on that one… Something to do in my spare time besides pouring it into the timesink known as gaming. I believe people are defined by their afternoons and I might want to do something in my afternoon, so to speak. Although all my classes are in the afternoon, leaving me only with the evening. Not sure if self-improving in the evening will be as effective as in the afternoon. It has something to do with the Sun. I better stop now because I am lowering the intelligence of this post with the passage of time.

Posted by psych at September 24th, 2008

Arlo arlo. Felt like posting something. Dont have much time nowadays to ponder the meaning of life as we know it and why things are the way things are. Seriously I feel properly grown up-ish now. I don’t pine over crushes (hope im not counting my chickens), wonder whats my purpose in life, or even just make up crappy stories for my own amusement… The curse of having too many class hours in a day for me to be comfortably idle with. Anyways, no time for typing. Random lab pics coming up. For anyone who wondered what the 2nd year of dentistry has been like for me.

Random pic from inside the dental building.

Random stalkerish pic.

From the open bridge rest place that i have no name for.

I think this was outside a bowling alley.. or a restaurant.. rainbow ftwz

Basic plaster tooth cavity prep.

lantern procession? to the open square place near the sports complex. apologies for the bad night shot.

Giant Lantern tradition. 4 Lanterns and ours wouldnt go up =/ someone mustve written their wish too hard and tore the damn thing =[

Mmmm reminds me of being a kid. the fumes were exhilarating!

dental materials tech lab. very clean =)

First tooth carving.. central incisor. muahaha.  not completed yet at the time of this photo. dont wanna show you the fat piece of wax that i worked with.

Whew. That was like one month of my life right there minus hours of lectures. em…. think thats it. i wanna say ill post something up soon but i have a feeling i wont. I miss having weird rants =(

until next time

pSyCh

ps- im being very lazy with punctuation as well… as least i resized all the pics for the sake of the blog =)

Posted by Morpork at September 21st, 2008

Out in the cold windy streets,
There is a sound, ol’ very common.
Tis’ the sound of a car being stolen.
From the armchair where I sit,
No one makes a fit,
Not even turn one’s head.
Barely stir on his bed.
Like a reaction to fire alarm’s siren,
Tis’ the cries of a car being stolen.

Posted by azngeek at September 11th, 2008

I’m sure all of you have seen the series pimp my car sometime or another, unwittingly or not. In my case you’d guess which category I’d fall under. The dangers of channel surfing. Well. Yes. I’ve honestly just pimped out my room. Big purchases of 08′.

A 24″ LCD Screen. Logitech THX z-2300 speakers. A Logitech G9 mouse. A weight bench, and additional 40 kgs of weight plates to add to my measly collection. Talk about clutter.

Will post pictures soon once the battery is no longer dead ahahhah.

Azngeek

Posted by Morpork at September 5th, 2008

I am lagging a bit but I heard that Don LaFontaine passed away. No, he didn’t give out favours and expect you to return it some day or made offers you couldn’t refuse. He was the voice over you hear at the beginning of every movie trailer in existence. Okay, so not every one of them but I sure can’t remember any other voice other than his.

In case you still don’t get it, just think “In a world where criminals rule the world and no man dared challenge them, one woman…” That voice you used to read that sentence was his voice.

Recently, I watched Taken and I might post a review… Mind you, I’m not very insightful and unlike most introverted people, I don’t weave magic with words which allows them an outlet of expression on the internet. So let this be forewarning so you don’t waste your time criticising my criticism and how me trying to be a critic lowers the standing of people who create criticism, created this site, WordPress, founded New Zealand, and God.

Sorry God, I am afraid I just lowered your standing a bit.

Posted by azngeek at August 31st, 2008

Across the room,
I stop and stare,
I wonder is it me
you are smiling at.
The lights go dim,
and then I think,
should I go
over there?
The music slows,
my feet go cold,
a shiver down my spine.
The night moves on,
it comes to an end,
I’m all alone again.
I wish I could hit rewind.

Azngeek

Inspired by a friend

Posted by azngeek at August 27th, 2008

“Did you hear?”
Old Ma Higgins
is at it again,
the cookie crumbs
the fresh
baked buns.
Her dainty dress,
she’s not
makeup-less.
Fresh bought roses,
she’s on her tip-toes!
“Ah. Someone is in
love again.”