Doug’s Blog

I’m finally done switching over my website. I don’t know why I say ‘finally’ though, it barely took a day. All my content is back up on the main dvondrake.com, and everything is actually using the same URLs since MistCMS is awesome. Okay, that had nothing to do with it, it was just a handy coincidence. That doesn’t mean MistCMS isn’t awesome though–by all means, it is. I tried making something similar to the design on dvondrake.com right now with horizontal menu links in other CMS scripts, and it just never worked. A lot of them were like Wordpress where you have a PHP file for the header, one for the sidebar, one for the footer, etc… Wordpress is great, but just for blogs; not for sites. However, MistCMS was created for sites, so it is therefor better at sites. Did that make sense?

I added a few new things today like visitor logs, a hidden drafts folder, RSS feeds, and dynamic metatags. Of course I also had a lot of bugs to fix, mainly with MistCode. MistCode is like BBCode, but it allows you to do different things like showing the post date or inputting metatag keywords. Don’t worry, you’ll find out more when all the bugs are ironed out and MistCMS is released. However, it looks pretty stable now. I had some problems earlier when you put quotes inside text boxes, but I fixed that pretty easily. Right now I’m just making sure that everything displays properly now, since I’ve added escape characters for quotes and whatnot. The XHTML validator doesn’t like <p> tags for some reason, and the RSS validator gives me a couple warnings, but other than that everything’s running A-OK. Looks great and works perfectly in both IE and Firefox.

Nothing to say about real life stuff, as all I’ve been doing lately is coding again. I’m sure my life is exciting enough for me to list everything I ate today, though. Well, it all started out with a donut…

So you might have noticed how funky everything’s been the past couple days on dvondrake.com, and there’s a reason for that: I’m redesigning my site again. Wordpress will no longer be used for the whole site, just the blog in it’s new subdirectory blog.dvondrake.com. For the root of the site, I’ll be using a custom-made CMS called MistCMS. I’ve been working on that the past couple of days, and it really owns. Really, you’ve never seen a CMS like this before. It’s painfully easy to integrate it with your site design; MistCMS works around your design, not the other way around. You just use PHP tags to include things like menus, content, titles, etc… Which can all be formatted in the options menu of the admin panel. As for the inner workings, it supports friendly-URLs out of the box (in fact it doesn’t support unfriendly-URLs, mean bastards), has a “folder” system (categories), and comes bundled with TinyMCE. (A WYSIWYG editor) I’ve finished coding MistCMS, so I’ll now begin designing my new site. After I’ve used MistCMS for a while and all the bugs have been worked out, it’ll be ready for a release. You won’t be disappointed.

Anyway, if you find any broken links, let me know. If any of my links are broken in off-site wiki’s and stuff, please change them for me. However, they won’t be broken for long–I’ll try to use the same folder structures for my new site. (films/blah, scripts/blah, etc…) Just wait a little longer, it’ll all come together soon. Nothing much to say about other/real life stuff, since all I’ve been doing is coding. I still want an iMac, though, and the possibility of vacationing later this month is quite high.

I went to have dinner today with my uncle, aunt and her family at Texas Roadhouse. It’s actually really good. I’ve never been there before, but I was pretty impressed. I had a medium well 11oz sirloin, and it was just right. Well done can be good sometimes, but most of the time it’s charred so much it isn’t juicy and tender anymore. 11oz was the perfect size for me–filled me up, but didn’t make me explode like some other steaks do. Then again other steaks are probably bigger… The salad was nice too; I went to Applebee’s for the first time a couple weeks ago and was highly disappointed, their Caesar salad was just a bag of lettuce with Hidden Valley dressing poured on top. No croutons, no cheese, dressing not mixed up. The food wasn’t that great either, but the salad really got me. That’s irrelevant though, the point is: Texas Roadhouse is very good and I would eat there again.

After eating my uncle gave us a printer/fax/copier in exchange for toilet paper. He didn’t want to stop by a store to get some, so we brought some with us. Although I initially wanted to walk into the restaurant with the toilet paper, I decided it might be a better idea to do the trade after we eat in the parking lot. It’s a very nice combo though–most seem so plasticy and flimsy you know they’ll break very easily, but this one doesn’t. Very fast printing, copying, yadda yadda. Good quality too. To test the fax I found a number of HP’s that receives faxes and then sends them back to you. Never knew something like that existed. Lets just hope it’s automated and there’s not someone sitting there all day pressing the fax button.

It was a pain in the ass to get it working across the LAN though. It’s plugged into my dad’s computer, which is Vista, and the rest of the computers in the network are XP. That was incredibly frustrating. First I had to turn the firewalls down a notch so we could share crap through the network–but just that didn’t work. I had to add the IP range 192.168.0.100-192.168.0.255 to the firewalls’ “trusted zones” so it would accept connections from them without freaking out and asking me if I want to allow every single packet of spooling data. That didn’t work either. I then had to click the “share this printer” button on my dad’s computer–which, you guessed it, didn’t work. After some reading online, I figured out you have to manually specify the network path to the printer under the ports section of the printer’s properties window. Why would you have to do this? I’m already sharing the printer! So there I go, I typed the network path in manually. But no, of course that didn’t work either. I had to go through the gazillions of menus in Vista to find the hidden network connection settings and enable everything from “share printers” to “broadcast shit through network”. And that finally worked… But then it started asking me for a password to the printer. What the hell? I didn’t even specify a password! Now I have to go through the deepest, inner-most hidden menus of Vista to disable passwords on networked printers. Why would this be on default? Ah well who cares, it works now. And of course, I spoke to soon. It went to the print queue, but it appeared to spool for eternity. After dicking around pretty much every single setting in the printer properties screen, I finally figured out that adding the network path to the ports window disabled it from using USB to contact the printer. Okay, so I just check the USB port’s enable box and I’m on my way. *click* Wait, now the network port is disabled. Apparently you can’t have two ports enabled. After more dicking around, I found the advanced port settings window that allows me to “pool printers”. What the hell does this mean? I click it and it allows me to select both the network port and USB port, and now it finally works. But what the hell is “pool printers”? Why is this disabled by default? Why is this even an option?

Now, I for one have learned a valuable lesson here: Get a Mac. I’ve been researching more about them, and it looks like I’ll be going for the 24″ 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, but upgrading the RAM to 4GB. It’s $2400 versus $3100 for the MacBook Pro I was looking at earlier (17″ 2.5GHz with significantly less hard drive space), so it’s well worth it in my opinion. More bang for your buck. Plus the new Montevina MBP’s are going to be coming out sometime near September, so it’s not good to buy one now because it’ll become outdated really soon and it’s not good to buy one right when it comes out because you’ll have to put up with repairing it every Sunday because you were foolish enough to get the first generation of something, which always has an obscene amount of bugs and hardware defects. So, one iMac for me please. I love how simple everything is in OS X. To use a printer, you just plug it in. To use a printer on the network, just click “search for printers” and it’s magically there. No installing drivers, no dicking around settings that don’t seem to be labeled properly and have no possible use–just plug it in and it works. The interface is most definitely a lot more simplistic and you have a lot less control over different settings, but that’s the good thing I think. You don’t have a cluttered up settings window with random crap, you just have the settings you need and will ever need, and that’s it. Even with everyday things like opening a program, it’s right there on your dock–you don’t have to click the Start button or minimize to your desktop. Sure that’s just a simple mouse click away, but that’s still one unnecessary mouse click that OS X has done away with. Now take that simple mouse click, and apply the same principle to every single thing in Windows and OS X. Everything you do in OS X takes double the effort in Windows, whether it be double the mouse clicks, double the lag, or double the frustration. I’m not saying this applies to everything, but for the most part, it does.

Right now my parents and I are at a point where we can either go on vacation or get me an iMac. Sure I’d like an iMac, but my computer now still works. Albeit it’s a bit laggy and I’m done with all the frustration Windows has to offer, it still works and that’s all that counts. Hopefully we can go to Disneyland later this month, then when we come back we can look into an iMac. I’d like to get one before the summer ends because I won’t have the time to switch from two completely different operating systems when school is back, since all I’ll want to do when I get home is something productive like playing a good game of StarCraft or coding something useful. During a vacation, I find myself with a lot more time than I can deal with, which leaves me with a lot more time to play around in OS X and figure out how to work it properly. Changing the subject a little: The one problem I have with Macs is with their userbase. It seems as if the majority of Mac users are so pompous that they don’t care what the question is, the answer is always “get a Mac”. On forums I see people asking Windows-specific questions like “how do I add an admin user for UAC”, and of course the pompous Mac fanatics come in and say “get a Mac”. Well what if he doesn’t want to get a Mac? You don’t see Linux users spamming “get Linux” about on forums, and you most definitely don’t see that with Windows users. Perhaps a little Mac bashing, but at least the question is still answered.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about what OS to use. Quite frankly, I’m tired of Windows. It’s too laggy, too buggy, and too slow–plus, what the hell is with the registry? It’s useless. For my next computer, I have two options really: Vista, or take the plunge and go UNIX. I for one really hate Vista, as does everyone, but for me it’s to the point that I refuse to use it. I can’t find any XP CDs in my house, and the only torrents are crap ones with a load of preinstalled viruses. As you know, I was trying Ubuntu Linux a couple weeks ago and I really liked it. I’ve been dualbooting and using it for a while now, and I’ve come to a conclusion: It’s great, far better than Windows, but there are a few things that drive me away from it. For one, you have to use the command prompt for a lot of otherwise every-day tasks. Installing things VIA .deb files are great, but apt-get can be a bit of a pain after a while, and it’s really slow. Plus you have all these dependencies to download for a 2mb application–that’s a real annoyance. Another thing is how a lot of programs are only distributed as source code for Linux, so you have to figure out how to compile it yourself. Overall I loved Linux, but it’s just not good for everyday use for me. Too many loopholes to go through, which inevitably slows down productivity.

The other day when I was watching WALL•E I still had the whole “what OS to use” thought in my mind. I still can’t get over how great a movie that was, but I digress. I’m sitting there watching WALL•E soak up the sun with his solar panels, and when he gets his battery fully charged he makes the OSX startup sound. Heheh, that’s neat. Wait, OSX! For the longest time I’ve hated Macs–or at least, PowerPC-based Macs. I completely overlooked the fact that Macs now run on Intel chips, and are therefor somewhat better. As for the actual OS, the only versions I’ve used ate OS8 and below, so surely they’ve upgraded since then. And they have, to OSX10 “Leopard”. I tried it in VMWare, and I must say that I’m impressed. Long story short: I think I want to get one. A MacBook Pro to be precise. The only problem is how they’re so expensive, and since I want to upgrade the RAM and hard drive to be faster (as a desktop replacement), that’ll cost me another extra penny. I’ve been doing a lot of research, and have even compiled a list of my most frequently used applications on Windows and their alternatives on OSX–or if they run natively or VIA Crossover. Since Macs are Intel-based now, you can easily emulate Windows applications through different emulation programs like Crossover or DarWINE (Mac WINE port), but then you can always use BootCamp to dualboot to Windows. You just need a Windows disc, which my dad has of Vista when his hard drive crashed not too long ago.

Everything on my list is either native or has a very nice alternative; besides Steam and GMod, though they can apparently be emulated quite fine with Crossover. I’ve never liked Macs before, but maybe that was just because I wasn’t unhappy with Windows. Of course years ago they weren’t Intel based and didn’t have a lot of software, so they’re better now, but still. It’s strange to think that I’m actually considering a Mac after years of disliking them with a passion. Problem is they’re so damn expensive. If only they could glitch and develop a personality like WALL•E, that’d be a good selling point to get my dad to help me pay for one.

As for other stuff, nothing much to say. That’s all that’s been on my mind lately.

I saw WALL-E today, and it was great. And by great, I really, really mean GREAT–and I don’t say this about too many movies. Sure, Iron Man was great, but it didn’t really play with your mind or touch you emotionally and philosphically, giving you a fresh new view on things. Basically, it’s about a robot (WALL-E) who compacts trash on Earth for a living. If I told you anything else, it’d be a spoiler. The concept of the movie is small, yet with the emotion Pixar (somehow) put in all their characters, it just makes the movie so much bigger. I applaud Pixar with that in mind. So, you’re making a movie with robots that can’t talk. Okay. Now how do you show what they’re thinking? How do you show emotion? By having rather extensive and highly movable limbs and eyes that can rotate multiple ways, Pixar was able to put in a lot of emotion into their characters. Robots with effective emotion–who would’ve known?

With that said, the robots don’t exactly behave like robots. They have a certain personification to them that gives them all a distinct personality and attitude. For example, WALL-E is very curious. His lady friend EVE is very directive, as she tells us multiple times. A cleaning robot named Mo is very… Well, cute. The list goes on and on for each character, of course. When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought there would be no humans or talking at all, and that it’d be rather kiddie because of that. I mean, if you can’t talk or anything, why not just do a lot of kiddie humor like bash into walls and stuff? Pixar did a good job of avoiding this. There are humans who talk and play a big part in the movie, and the robots do talk in their own way. Imagine how those voice synthesizers on guitars talk, make it 8-bit, and there you go. To give you a bit of an idea, WALL-E has a lot of trouble saying EVE’s name.

Overall, this was a really good movie. The plot was nice and original enough to be very enjoyable. The humor was really good–maybe a bit better than usual, considering these robots show a lot of emotion. (More than other Pixar characters, as the robots’ emotion was a big aspect of this film.) The character design was just amazing, as is the soundtrack. And as always, breaking their previous record, Pixar’s graphics and rendering are better than ever. Would I recommend you see this movie? Of course! 10/10! At times, it seems a tad bit uninspired with not too much humor, but the majority (being 98%) is absolutely amazing. WALL-E is a great contender for a best animated feature film Oscar–as if there was any competition. Elaborating on the soundtrack a bit more, Thomas Newman is a genius. I’m listening to it right now and especially with this new sound card, my ears are in complete bliss. Now back to the movie, it really has a big philosophical side to it that gets you thinking. What if we really had AI like that? What if what happened to Earth in the movie really did happen? What if we all got fat an immobile!? The main idea is AI that is self-aware, that can think for it’s self, and can have emotion. With that in mind, WALL-E may just be my favourite movie this year.

Really, I wouldn’t mind working for them. Game development being a hobby and Pixar being work would work out perfectly. At Pixar you get to ride scooters and stuff through the halls, they have talent contests, and parties in the lobby whenever a movie opens. You also get to use whatever operating system you want on your computer, and there are no internet filters. If that isn’t already amazing, you get to paint your office whatever colour you want. Sure it’s not that big an office–more like a cubicle in terms of size–but it has walls and it’s own door. Niiiiiice. Now, lets compare that to the gaming industry: You can work for EA or Valve. EA’s working conditions would obviously treat you like utter crap, so I’m not even going to go into that. Valve is more of the “prime realestate”-type when it comes to game development jobs I’d think, and even there I’d think it’d be a bit boring. Sitting in an office all day with internet filters and everything, forced to use Windows. Then you don’t get anything new, it’s just munging around old, probably poorly written code written by someone else. I’ve done a lot of coding myself, and I know that I hate working with other peoples’ code. Therefor, having Pixar as a job and game devleopment as a hobbie, as it is now, would be perfect. That’s my goal/plan, at least. I’m trying to get back into Maya, so hopefully with a little amatuer experience I’ll be ready for Pixar University.

Anyway, other stuff: EXRP’s meeting was moved to Monday because some key members couldn’t come, and that’s fine. It would’ve been nice to have it today, but then I would’ve wanted to see WALL-E today anyway (which I didn’t realize on Thursday when I scheduled the meeting originally) so that would’ve conflicted and screwed things up. On monday my family has to take our car to the shop ’cause the wheels are squeaky, one of the side doors doesn’t lock with the remote, and someone keyed the driver’s door in the theater parking lot today. The latter problem probably isn’t on warranty, which sucks. I wish I had more non-movie stuff to say, but I don’t. WALL-E just blew my mind–go see it, and it’ll blow yours too.

I’m still not knowing what I’m doing. EXRP’s general activity has died down a bit–I don’t know if it’s just the time of year, or if I majorly screwed up with EXRP-Script. Either way, we’ve having a meeting on Saturday to discuss a few “radical” ideas to gain more appeal. Who cares if it works or not, it’ll be a lot more fun for everyone. That is, assuming it is agreed upon. I’ll let you in on it after the meeting. I’ve surprisingly got a lot of important things to say and discuss this time around, unlike last, so a note to any staff members reading: Be there or I’ll rip your head off and shove an overheated AMD chip down your neck. Those things are sharp too, yowch!

A lot of game ideas have been coming and going, but mostly going. I really don’t know what to do. I’m at a point where I want to do something, I know exactly how to do it, but I have no concept at all. I want to make something simple, fun, yet somewhat innovative and fresh, but I have no idea what. It’s like I’m just waiting for an idea to just fall out of the sky and hit me in the face. Just watch, now a flying hippo or something will come crashing through my roof and crap on my face tonight. Whatever that idea is, I’ll be using the C4 engine, PhysX, and Lua. I’ve already assembled a team of developers, which include other programmers, sound artists, 2d artists, concept artists, and level designers. Also, writers and stuff. The only thing I don’t have immediately covered is modeling, but I can model a few objects and stuff. Character design is a load of crap though–at least, that’s what my attempts at it look like. I’ll definitely need someone to specialize in that. I’ll be using C4 as the engine, PhysX as the physics engine (as it’s actually really easy to implement into C4. Maybe Newton if I magically find out otherwise), and Lua or Squirrel to make the actual game in. Face it, C++ is like traditional Chinese. A lot of game developers are using simpler languages, though making their framework and interpreter in C++, to develop their games. I don’t blame them, it’s just so much easier. An e-book (seriously who does these anymore) is coming out in a week or two, along with build 149 of the C4 engine, that should be a lot of help. I’m thinking I’ll get it–I mean, it won’t hurt. Always good to have a little extra documentation.

As for other stuff, I have none. I haven’t played anything too much lately, so I can’t talk about how exciting my gaming life is. I’ve been playing around in GMod as usual, and like I mentioned in an earlier blog post (I think) I got Flight Simulator X. It’s really fun, and I’m getting quite good at it. However, it really is a pain in the ass to find and line up with an air strip to land. Even with radar it’s painful, so just imagine without. I’ve been into a lot of music with more soft vocals lately, I don’t know why. I mean like Rusted Root, The Postal Service, Cold Play, Royksopp. Hell, even Gary Jules. It’s just really relaxing and easy to listen to. I don’t know, maybe I need that relaxing quality right now. All this “wtf am I doing” stuff is frustrating me.

I saw Get Smart yesterday, and I must say it greatly exceeded my expectations. It was non-stop funny, although a few of the jokes at the very beginning were a bit lame, but you’ll definitely come out of the theater feeling good and ready to crack a few of your own. If you’ve ever seen the show Maxwell Smart that the movie’s based upon, it’ll be a lot more enjoyable. They butchered the cone of silence, though, which I was very upset with at the time. However, the pro’s outweigh the con’s, and it’s a great movie. There are a lot of movies coming out soon; WALL-E on Friday, then sometime later Hancock, and sometime later after that The Dark Knight. Sounds like a good year for movies. Games too, I can’t wait for The Force Unleashed and Spore. Also, Far Cry 2 looks nice. Tomorrow I have to get up early to go to IHOP for breakfast with a few family members. Also, randomly changing the subject (I wonder why), I got a hair cut a couple days ago. Before I had rather long hair, but now it’s a lot shorter. It’s still kinda long at the front–just above my eyebrows–but the short is a lot shorter and a lot comfier. I like it. And again changing the subject: I haven’t had yams in a while. Maybe I’ll try one again soon–thanks Viva!

I’m not quite sure what I’ve been up to lately. I would say nothing much, as I usually do, but that isn’t quite the case. That and I’ve used that as the beginning sentence to 9 out of 10 of my posts, so I think it’s about time to get creative and use something else. EXRP is going good, we’re getting a lot of new players recently. Still having a few server problems, but they aren’t as noticeable as before now. I haven’t really added anything new to the script, just a lot of bug fixes and minor tweaks. I’ve been meaning to set Ubuntu as my default in GRUB for a while now, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I even installed an IFS for Ext3 partitions in Windows so I can change my GRUB config without having to wait for my computer to shut down and boot to the GRUB screen again, but I never have. No idea why–I’m not doing anything really important now, so I don’t know what’s keeping me.

I’ve been exploring a lot of things, recently. My 6 months of coding have been a really eye-opening experience. Yes, that sounds really lame, cheesy, and unbelievable, but it’s true. It was the first time I’ve finally sat down and coded something from scratch. Sure, I do this quite often with my PHP work, but nothing on such a large scale as EXRP. It’s really opened my eyes to coding–allowed me to think about the future. And of course, that’s just what I’m doing now. Recently, I’ve been trying to think of ideas for games. To do so, I’ve been playing a lot of them. The past week, I’ve downloaded a lot of game demos and bought a lot of games. X3 Reunion was nice, but very complex and hard to get into without being a total geek about the game. Star Wars Republic Commando was an extremely good game, nice graphics, story, gameplay and all, but it was very neglected by the media in my opinion. My only problem is that it’s a bit repetitive, but I still think it’s a great game. In terms of FPS games, Republic Commando had the same thing going as CoD4 had with it’s campaign, with the whole team that you love that gets killed at the end. Good story, with that in mind. Of course I don’t know if they really do die, but whenever a writer gets you attached to a bunch of characters like that, especially ones you fight to your last breath with, you know they’re gunna die eventually. What I liked was that it was a lot darker than other Star Wars games I’ve played. It brought with it a whole new view of Star Wars games–it’s a shame LucasArts didn’t follow through and make more like this. Then again, The Force Unleashed may be darker as well, so you never know. Not until it releases, at least.

A couple other games I’ve tried are flight simulators. Flight Simulator X was nice, but the AA was quite awful–even at the highest setting. I don’t know, maybe it was just the demo. Hopefully, at least, because I liked that game. I built a jet fighter in EXRP a couple days ago that used the fin stool for wings, creating realistic lift. Thrusters were only used for acceleration and steering. I’ve always loved aviation and aircraft–even just the idea and thrill of flying–but to be honest, I’ve never really realized how much I have loved it until I made the RP character Thomas McCloud to make a caricature of aviation lovers. Midway through, I just stopped and thought to myself, “Hey… This is exactly like me!” Now I want to get some pilot training at my air port, get a license, and start flying. My dad was in the Canadian Air Force when he was young, and while I won’t join any military myself, I wouldn’t mind flying a jet fighter or two. However, that’s not the point. Throughout my whole life, I always remember my dad looking up at the sky and pointing out what model every plane he saw was. Watching programs on TV about planes, playing flight simulators, marveling over different planes at a museum. I guess that almost inspired me to have a certain love for aircraft as well. Then there was also Soarin’. It’s a ride at Disneyland/Disney World where you sit on a row of chairs that gets lifted into a big dome and moves around like a motion simulator, and on the dome is footage from a hang glider accompanied by some really relaxing, brilliantly made music. I really liked that ride, and it also had to do with aviation–this could’ve possible had an effect on me too. Also, the music is great.

As I said before, I really don’t know what I’ve been doing lately. In addition to the above, I’ve been trying out different 3d modeling programs (the contest is between Maya and Cinema 4D right now) to use for my games. I don’t know, I like having some help, but I find it easier just to do things myself sometimes. I would find someone to model stuff for my games for me, but it’s just so much easier to argue with yourself than with someone else. I got the Spore Creature Creator (who hasn’t?) and I really like the way that you “model” things in that; it reminds me a lot of ZBrush or Mudbox. ZBrush was alright, but it’s the type of thing you have to go through hours of training before you can do anything with it. I tried a demo for Mudbox, and it was a lot better, but unfortionately way too expensive for me. Plus I don’t know what the practicality of making a space ship in there would be.

I really like the look Will Wright is taking on gaming. I’ve really only noticed it now that Spore is the main talk–now that we know everything about Spore, and it really makes sense. At first I thought Will Wright’s games were simulators. Sim City simulated a society. Then The Sims simulated personality. Now Spore is simulating evolution. It just gets bigger and bigger each time around. Then I realized: These aren’t sim games, these are philosophy games. Evolution is still very much a theory (although I believe in it), so there’s still a lot of “what if” and “but then…” included whenever you think about it. Really, that’s philosophy. Sim City contained the philosophy of how a society grows. The Sims had the philosophy of of how peoples’ minds mature. Now Spore is about evolution? I applaud Will Wright in creating games that really make you think–regardless if they did when they were released, or now that Spore has surfaced to spark your memory. Really, Spore has gotten me thinking about a lot of things more philosophically now. Religion, emotion, psychology (partially), life in general, etc… It just has endless possibilities. Although it’s probably not something I should admit, it’s quite relaxing to take a crap at about 4PM in my house’s big bathroom. The way that the light reflects through the small window and how the birds in the trees directly outside it sing songs for me, it creates a very nice ambiance. Perfect for relaxing and thinking, really. And pooping. The mood is completely ruined once someone comes out with their weed whacker, however.

With that said, my post comes to an end. I haven’t posted in 10 days, and while I could definitely say I was busy enough to not have any time to make a blog, I wasn’t busy with anything really important. Later today I’ll be getting a summer haircut (read: summ’er better than others), and maybe I’ll watch Get Smart. Again, nothing important, but that’s what a vacation is all about; just relaxing and doing random, unimportant stuff you never had time to do before. Call me crazy, but I’m just enjoying my summer. Are we there yet?

As I probably mentioned before, my parents picked me up LEGO Indiana Jones the other day for graduating. So it isn’t a car, but it’s still a very good game. It keeps everything that made LEGO Star Wars such a huge success, improves on it, and gets rid of all the annoying repetition in puzzles. Graphics have most certainly improved, although I can never get AA working properly, but the gameplay is top notch. I haven’t gotten far, but from what I’ve played through it certainly goes past expectations. One big feature in LEGO Star Wars that I think made it such a hit was that you could play as many different characters. In Indiana Jones there aren’t that many reoccuring characters other than Indy himself, but they did a good job of putting in some of the ‘lesser’ characters too–and although I usually find myself playing as Indy, there are some perks to playing as the other characters. For example, ladies can jump higher, short people can go into certain areas, people with shovels can dig up treasure, people wirh wrenches can fix things, etc…

LEGO ‘Jonesy is a lot more physics-based too, which I like. you can pick objects up and throw them at people, or use them in puzzles, and of course you can swing from vines/ropes and your whip. Nice. One improvement that I saw within the first couple minutes of playing is that LEGO Indiana Jones seems to play more like a sidescroller than before. Sure, LEGO Star Wars was a sidescroller when it felt like it, but it was more of an isometric view most of the time. I found a lot of trouble with the controls in it due to the camera, but I’ve yet to experience any problems with the camera in LEGO Indiana Jones. As far as the puzzles go, they’ve improved a lot too–no longer do I find myself just looking for levers; now I find myself trying to figure out what the hell to do. That’s good, though. As far as AI difficulty goes, it seems to have a new adaptive difficulty setting that you can turn on and off in the options menu, and it works pretty well from what I’ve seen so far. If you start sucking horribly, the AI does too. If you go all pro on them, they fight back. I’m still waiting for something with I, Robot AI, though.

In other news, I got a new chair. It’s really comfy. I’ve tried a lot of new chairs before, as the one I was using before was a broken plastic IKEA chair, but I’ve never found anything that was just right. Then there I am at Sam’s Club with my folks when they start debating wether or not to buy a certain brand of something–I don’t remember what–so I sit down on a chair near me and relax. Now WHAAAAAAAAAAAT? This chair is actually comfy! So I got it. Very nice chair, will sit in again, A++++. I’ve also gotten a Facebook just for the hell of it, and you can see my profile at the link on the bottom right of my blog. Feel free to add me if you have one. I’ve found a lot of my friend back in Toronto there, which is nice. I don’t know if I’ll keep it, though. I don’t want to go along with the seemingly popular social networking site whoring, but Facebook seems to have a bit more class than the others if you don’t spam it up too much. EXRP’s been great, and I really am done coding now–at least for now. I was having some server problems yesterday and earlier today with awful lag that had be at 100% CPU even when nothing was open VIA Remote Desktop, but my server host fixed that for me. However, the Icecast server seems to lag things up a bit, so I’ll be hosting that elsewhere. For now, no radio, but it’ll be back up soon. As for my talk about playing SWG: I finally did today. I did for about 20 minutes yesterday, but it was more like an hour today. I always seem to have to take care of some EXRP problem when I first get up for a few hours, and by the time I’m ready to play my SWG friends already have to go offline due to time zones. Hopefully that won’t happen tomorrow, I’m dieing to play and leverl up. Anyway, that’s it. NN

This last 6 months have been quite hectic for me, but it’s finally over now. Yesterday I finished ironing out all the bugs and adding in some fancy new features like the ability to change characters after a countdown without having to relog, and welfare so people would stop complaining about not having money. Overall, these past 6 months have been great; I began as a novice coder, and came out as somewhat of a guru. When I first started EXRP-Script in December, I found it hard to make something from scratch. I had to check the wiki for every single thing I did, and ask for help with a lot of things. Now, I can code without testing or looking things up. It’s really a great feeling, as is seeing my brain child in use. It’s just such a satisfying feeling to see people playing (and enjoying) it, as well as seeing them talking about how it’s supposedly better than other scripts in OOC. It’s just such an amazing feeling, and I thank you all.

As for my life (wow, finally I have time for it again), not much has happened recently. I’m out of school now, which is great. I went to a party yesterday which was fun, and I beat everyone in Brawl except Bob. I’m thinking I can finally play some stuff today–whether it be SWG or Lego Indiana Jones. I’m dieing to play both, really. Then again, I’m also dieing to have a good RP again–and have been for the past 6 months. All in all, that’s pretty much it. I just can’t get my mind off the fact that I’m finally done, and then how satisfying the end result was–especially the feedback. It’s just an amazing feeling, and I can’t get it out of my head.

You seriously don’t know how relieved I am. When I pressed enter in the server console to unpassword it, I was shaking. I truly was. When people started flooding in, I was shaking, sweating, and I couldn’t talk without stammering. Then… Well, nothing. No crashing. No lag. I was amazed, to be frank. I was expecting the whole thing to go down in flames. In the past few days, I had been making some major changes to some core functions–without testing them on multiplayer. That was a huge risk. All the stuff I changed would probably work without testing, but it was just eating away at me. That’s all I could think about.

We’ve had a couple bugs, but those were easily fixed. I’m currently working a fix for HL2 weapons, as they lock up the server when you try to drop them or get arrested with them in your weapons cache. No idea why this happens, I’m quite sure it’s a problem with the way GMod integrates them from the HL2 source code. At this time, no fix–I’ve just made it so you cant pick them up. Maybe I can fix it later, maybe I can’t.

Anyway, I just can’t express my gratitude to you all. It’s been a whole semester–January to June–and everyone stuck by me through this whole ordeal. We filled a 20-slot server when we launched, even. That’s impressive. Thanks guys! Today was great. Mainly, I’m just glad this whole coding to make a deadline and finally release thing is over. Now I can get back to more rational fears, like buckets, the letter L, and irregularly shaped rubber balls.