High Latency
So so far I haven't done any work on Skewed except for one half of a fairly large part, so I'm going to have to get more squared away. This can be directly attributed to the fact I've been sleeping so much, though. I've got to finish that by end of December, and then get a new remake of the main AnacondaSoftware website out.
I haven't really played anymore Shogi since the last time I talked about learning it. My plan was after I won my first match, which I had saved in the PSP game I was using so I could write down the move list to analyze later, I just hadn't gotten to it yet. And apparently it took even longer for my subconcious to get around to it, because I only just barely had a dream with some relation to Shogi a few days ago. Very long delay.
Tags: anacondasoftware skewed video_games website_design
Redevelopment Cycle
If you had used the Castle Tilemap Editor checked in before today, you would have had to deal with a performance issue with large maps, because it was drawing the whole map, including off-screen parts, to the map window every draw call. So today I sat down to write a function to make it draw to an offscreen back buffer, only drawing what was currently on the screen, to improve the performance.
However, as I got started, it turns out I had already done that. I had properly coded it that way from the very beginning of CastleEngine. However, somewhere along the way, in dealing with bugs and crashes, it had worked its way out of the loop. So at this point it is recreated each resize and used to determine whether the scrollbars should be shown or not (a flickering issue i have to deal with, on that note), but otherwise nothing is ever drawn to it. It was all drawing directly to the window itsel.
Not wanting to reintroduce whatever bugs had worked out to end up like that, I quickly just altered the draw code to only draw the portion of the map currently displayed. However I find it rather intesting that it had devolved in such a way, then I noticed it and went to reimplement it again without even knowing it was there.
Tags: programming
Drug Induced
When I was little, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I had taken several different prescriptions for it, up until about 8th grade where I more or less just quit and managed it without. As I mentioned I was taking several different drugs, the last one I was taking before I quit was Dexedrine.
One of the previous ones, though, had an odd side effect. I don't know what it was for sure, I think it might have been Adderall, whatever it was it was one that had to be taken at night, and I was taking it in my early grade school years. When I hadn't gotten it, it would cause me to have nightmares. The same nightmare each time, but as I reflect back on it, it was rather interesting how it worked. The nightmare went like this:
And that was really it, though it wasn't such a simple view. A recreation of one of the early screens of the Commodore 64 game Nonterraqueous. I happened to be addicted to the game at the time, and I still to day haven't gotten even close to beating it.
To go into things a little further, on that particular screen you have to drop a bomb on the force field, and get out of the way so it doesn't blow you up too. It wasn't in 2D in the nightmare, instead it was a more realistic environment, but instead of the force field it was a brick wall closing off the corridor. All the aliens would be on the other side of the wall, trying to break through, all the while chanting three words in repeated order. "ROCKS, STONES, POWER!!" They would never actually break through, as far as I'm aware, but that in and of itself must have been enough to scare awake. Always the same nightmare, and only when I didn't get the prescription. Rather interesting.
(On a side note, the Wikipedia article for the game doesn't go into the Commodore version, and from the only Youtube videos for the game the ZX Spectrum version was quite a bit different. I'll have to record a gameplay video of the Commodore version sometime.) Date posted: 07 December, 2008
Tags: computer dream video_games wiki
Daywalker
I had been fairly well adjusted to my graveyard schedule. I would sleep in the morning, get up about 12-1 PM, be awake for the afternoon, then work at night. However, when I went to Idaho for my family's Thanksgiving get-together, I wanted to be awake during the full days while I was up there, so I took a couple days to readjust my sleep schedule beforehand.
That worked for then, but ever since then I've had trouble getting back to my previous intervals. From sleeping a grand 14 hours one day, to not being able to sleep in the morning, to falling asleep for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon. I've had a hard time getting back to the flow, which has made it hard to get much work done.
Tags: personal travel
410
I rarely ever delete files. I have collections of files that I've migrated from older machines, some for a very long time. The reason being is I never now if I will need something again, if I will have to dig up something archived. And I have had to go dig up some old things on multiple occasions. So it is very frustrating when I cannot find what I am looking for. Everything I've ever written on my own machines, I have old high school reports, talks I've given in church, and basically anything I've ever typed up.
However if I cannot find something I am looking for, then it becomes very frustrating, which is exactly the point I am in right now. At some point in the past, though I cannot recall when, I wrote out a piece of storyline for Spiral Island. But I cannot find it. I have searched all possible places for it to be on my machines, but it is nowhere to be found. I am going to have to start searching my backups now, because I need the information I had written in it.
Interestingly enough, in the process of going through my last searches on my main machine, I have dug up a really old document with my experimental storyline for Skewed, from back before part one of the story was finished. I thought I still remembered everything I never got around to or wrote out of the story, but I just found one part here for an experimental ending which I don't even remember. It's an interesting segment, there are a few things which I worked into the actual storyline I have planned out. I'll have to remember this file and touch back on it sometime in the future.
Tags: spiral_island writing