What have you been up to in January of 2005?



1. Jan 4, 2005



Jan 04, 2005: Two bugs found in Super Mario Sunshine. Four new dreams added, including the oldest one yet dating back to 1993, although there's almost 8 floating around in my mind. The dreams pages have been moved as well to better organize them as the list is likely to get long.
#1 Two bugs in Super Mario Sunshine: If you don't know, I don't just play games for the story and stuff, I make up my own challenges. One of those challenges was to collect the most coins possible in one go. I managed to do this and surprisingly I found a bug. I can get over 999 coins (I can tell by the 1-ups I tend to get past it) simply from grabbing some of the coins in the sewers (the dark areas under Delfino Plaza), going into the pipe by the beach which takes you to a slide, exitting the area and repeating this about 20 times. The other bug I found deals with the sewers as well. If you head toward the bottom of the screen and repeatedly press B to do the ground belly hops and maintain a high speed for some time, Mario will slowly shift toward the bottom of the screen. This doesn't occur when you're going from side to side and I don't know whether it'll occur if you're zoomed out further. If you've got one of the buildings visible and head toward the top of the screen, the second part of this bug occurs. The objects move when they're not supposed to and boy it's confusing at first.
#2 4 dreams added; dreams moved to another subdirectory: A while ago, I told you that I was going to move the dreams documents and if you had a bookmark on one of those pages (except the root page which links to everything about the dreams). This move has been done. The old files are still there but not updated. They will be removed within 2 days or the next update whichever is last. Also, 4 new dreams have been added. 3 more travel dreams (dreams 5-32 through 5-34) and one video game dream (2-19). Dream 2-19 is the oldest dream so far to date dating back to 1993. This was before I was at YMCA camp and before I started middle school (grades 7 and 8). It's so long ago, it's hard to comprehend; yet, one scene from it is remarkably clear!
#3 My script: I figured so. The service for the query submission wasn't going because of the holidays. Now that they're over with, their orders have resumed. Now the order will be processed on my birthday (what a nice indirect birthday present :)), according to an E-mail I received back from them. This means that my E-mail inbox is going to get flooded with messages, probably ten times as many as the last one I had. I have lots of time to process them anyway so it's almost no big deal. Thankfully Hotmail provides me with 250 MB of message space. Though I won't get close to that, not even 3% or so, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem that way either, let alone to 100 junk mail messages I get per week.
#4 Game development: Major progress made. I've started working on the outside terrains within the city and boy, making a terrain is fast and a bit of fun. Though the numbers might scare you, for the size I'd like to make this, I need over 57000 terrains. I made four terrains in about an hour (mainly because I'm copying from a source). I can do around 8 in a single hour at the most which means 7000 hours (300 days) to make all those terrains. By the time my game is finished, it'll be likely around 2007 or 2008. By then, we'd have graphics cards doing 2 billion polygons per second meaning you can almost see the entire world straight below you and still have a decent frame rate. Given this, I'm now thinking of upgrading my graphics card to something doing 200 to 300 million triangles per frame, ten times as much as my current graphics card does. By 2008, my graphics card would be so obsolete, this game focuses toward top-notch systems around 2003 (which, by 2008, would seem as slow as computers made in 1999 compared to today's).
#5 new A-rank song: Remember from the last update, Dec 30, 2004, that I extracted two new songs? Well, it so seems that Noki Bay's rating stands at 873 (rank B) and the plaza one stands at 951 (rank A). This only reflects the current compatibility and not the real one. The real compatibility never changes no matter how old it gets, the current changes constantly.

2. Jan 14, 2005



Jan 14, 2005: Though it's been a long time since an update, I've been very involved with Final Fantasy Origins. My birthday also occured, two more games have been added, the ones in the "future plans" item, and so far, I haven't received any replies from my query letter yet although it sent four days ago.
I'm now age 21: At 3:14 AM Central Time on Jan 10, 2005, I turned 21. The day was much like any other day and I got two presents as far as I can tell. One present was more memory for my computer, 256 MB that is, what I've been wanting, and the other is a science kit, something I wasn't expecting much. My mom is saying that I also got a digital camera, but doesn't know where it's at.
#2 2 more games added: Remember the future plans stating that I had two new games? Well, I've just added them. One is of a racing game dealing with various products, labels, and anything dealing with text. The other is a math game that works with license plates on cars.
#3 Dream feature being revised: Taking far longer than expected, although it's being revised, the dreams documents won't be updated until this revision is complete. I'm currently done with about 30 of the now 144 dreams, which is about 21% finished. I'm revising the feature that tells you the best of the best. Since I'm seemingly forgetting to update it or just not getting the motivation to update the feature as new dreams are added, I've revised the feature to work around this. However, it also comes with another plus: when dreams are moved, the data doesn't have to be modified from the move, it moves with the dream cutting down on the amount of work. Better yet, I've also rated more factors of the dreams now including how good the story was and how fun the dream was as well as a few older categories. In addition to this massive future update, one more dream has been added, dream 6-23 (the dream count is one gross, or 144). This new dream won't be available until the revision is completed.
#4 My script: That query letter finally sent, so now it's the matter of time before I get a response from the agencies and things. So far, since this update, I haven't got any new messages, though my junk mail has returned. I was once getting 100 junk messages per week, now it's back up to 170.... So far, I still haven't got a reply from any of the companies/agencies yet. I wonder if that company did send them out?
#5 Game development: Almost the entire day of Jan 9, 2005 was spent working on the game's design document, mainly explaining how the menu system works. For much of the rest of the game development, it's been describing the game's features in depth in the design document now going on to 70 pages. As for any other progress, not much has been made.
#6 New song added: It is very rare that I add new songs to my collection. This song is from Final Fantasy Origin's FF1 where you are just outside the towns and with forest. The song sounds peaceful and, as far as I've tested it, the range of good speeds is a bit above average, from 32,000 to about 65,000 Hz (from 64 to 130% true speed). This is what I would call a 2:1 span. The song with the greatest span is Target Zone ranging from, I think, 35,000 to clear up to 160,000 Hz and beyond some more (70 to 320%+ true speed), a 9:2 span, more than twice the range as the new song.
#7 Bye bye monitor: So it's out with the old piece of scrap, the monitor I've been wanting to return to tigerdirect. However, for backup reasons, I still have my old monitor readily available. I was just getting used of the large screen space. The screen space on my old monitor is tiny! Once I hooked this thing up, the screen space seems just so much smaller than it did before! What fits the screen you may ask? You couldn't even fit a piece of standard writing paper over what I can see. It measures 10 3/8 by 7 1/2 inches. I'm back with the 1152x864 resolution. Boy, it seems like the dream of using 1600x1200 (let alone 2048x1536) is taking a lot more time than expected. This has been going on for close to two months by now.
#8 Final Fantasy Origins craze: I've been playing Final Fantasy Origins and the original version a bunch lately and it seems that 99% of the time I spend playing it is just battling enemies. The game is hard in only one way: figuring out what to do next. I had to consult an online guide in order to proceed in the game in many places. I kept getting stuck, didn't know what to do next, etc.. Bosses are like ten times easier than figuring out what to do. All I need to do is use my favorite battle command: attack. I almost never use spells in those kinds of games, except cure spells.
#9 The secret to 3D animation found at last: While experimenting with numbers, I found that the old technique of 3D wouldn't work. The scaling from the bottom up doesn't work as I first thought it did. Just take a look at my old standard scrollers and you'll see how much better they are in 3D. With my new discovery, the technique is a bit different but still not too complicated. I was going to start making another avatar for a forum relating to a poem I tend to keep reciting over and over again. I applied the old method for 3D with the progressive scaling steps as you went up and found that the numbers weren't making sense. I experimented around with the numbers and found that there is a pattern. First, you start off with a height, say 4000 units. You place a point 40 steps below the horizon (the object must move up 40 pixels to be at the horizon), the object is a 4000÷40 or a 100 scale. Now, if the object was just 10 pixels below the horizon, the object would be a 4000÷10 or 400 scale. If was just 2 pixels below the horizon, it'd be a 4000÷2 or 2000 scale, very far away. It doesn't just have to be whole numbers either. If it was 1.6 pixels below the horizon (noted by being 1 pixel below), it'd be 4000÷1.6 or a 2500 scale. From a question I asked on the howwhatwhy forums, something with a scale of 200 is twice as far away with something of a scale of 100 which is five times as far as something with a scale of 20. Given this information, I believe it is possible to do animations with actual 3D. Unlike games, where millions of polygons are used, it takes long enough to process just 8 points that over a billion polygons would be processed in a 3D game. 3D animation with forward and backward movement (I have up and down and side to side) is quite a ways outside my reach and would just take way too long to process let alone several columns of numbers. Remember that animation with the 3D lakes? Well, that's using the old method. Now I'll try redoing that using the new method so you can compare the difference. Right now, it's next to impossible to see the 3D effects and it doesn't look all that 3D. Due to this discovery, I'll be editting the video creation page to include details about the new method, but first, to create an animation using it.
#10 A poem repeatedly recited: Since around Jan 4, 2005, I've been reciting a poem aloud that I created. The poem has been added to the stories category if you'd like to see it.
#11 Freezing cold!: Just like last year, right now, I'm getting wind chills of -50°F and air temperatures near record lows, -30°F. This is down right cold! Last year, it was a bit more extreme with -70°F wind chills.
#12 A prediction likely to come true: 9 years ago on this same month, I made a prediction that, on June 13, 2006, something special was going to happen. This is now January of 2005, which is very close to that date. To my surprise, I believe I actually predicted the future ten years ago. I'm starting to see just what this special thing is. I believe that this is when my script is produced as a movie. If the movie business just doesn't seem to work at all, the story is already formatted as a book so it's just as easy to publish the book version of it. I'm very surprised how I predicted the future back in 1996. There's a pretty high chance that this story is going to get published in some way or another by then.

3. Jan 24, 2005



Jan 24, 2005: A long-wanted interactive animation is finally done. Also, the dream revision is nearly finished as I've got about 30 more dreams to process. #1 A long-wanted interactive animation: Although I've been wanting this for about a year or so (at least 8 months anyway), the interactive animation that lets you understand background scaling is finally available, but with far more to it than you might expect. Unlike the javascript idea I once had (no one was helping me figure out why line 74 was problematic), this is an actual program that I created using 3D Gamestudio. What is 3D Gamestudio? It's a program (available here) where you can make 3D applications. It's what I'm using to develop my game. Remember from a while ago that I wanted an animation that moves automatically based on the speed and scaling of various objects? Well, this animation is now available, at last, but with far more features that I originally thought of! The controls are simple and the animation runs at a frame rate far higher than what my animated GIFs and AVI videos have, twice as fast as even the fastest! In other words, it runs at 66 fps. It also has a resolution much higher than any of my current animations, 640x480. The image quality is also higher and more detailed thus allowing more realistic viewing. Better yet, even with that high resolution and massive frame rate and detail, the file size is puny! Remember that "The Long Fall" video I mention often, the one that is 112 KB in size (download size)? This animation is no more than 100 KB even with all that detail. More surprising yet, the full size, though a few megs, is still far smaller than an AVI. There are just so many advantages about this. Yet, now that I got this going, I've been thinking of another kind of interactive animation, one which allows you to actually participate in using those special abilities mentioned often. Press J to jump. Press it again to jump up even higher. Press G to begin a glide, F to start a fall-glide, left and right to run (and float run when you get fast enough), boy, the list goes on! It's almost like a simple game, but no enemies and no challenges. I'm within reach of doing this! To give you an idea on what this program looks like, see the screenshot below:



This is, by far, the most realistic animation I've ever done. I don't have a whole chunk load of math to process either (if you don't know what I go through just to make a single frame, you're missing out! A sample for just 9 frames is shown in section 6 of category 8.). To give you an example of how much work is saved doing it this way, here's something. If you set the acceleration to 5, that of the glide ability, and accelerate to the full speed of 800 mph at 60 fps, you're looking at doing 9600 frames. For these 3 objects, that's 3 columns of numbers (not 6 as the vertical isn't needed). I also need one more column for the frame number, another for flags (to indicate that that frame is done), another for the speed, and another for the position. This all adds up to 7 columns of numbers. With this much, if it takes, say, 20 seconds to do one frame (if I kept at it and my mind didn't wonder off while working on the animation), I'd take 3200 minutes, or 53 hours and 20 minutes to finish the animation. Yet, all that is done by the computer in less than even 3 minutes! What are the features? Well, download it and read the readme.txt file for a list of all the features. I've explained many of them in the paragraph above the screenshot. If I think about it, I may have it available on download sites (as freeware) for download for other users.
#2 A new future of animation: The future is now! Why? I can actually make little movies, with real 3D scenery, of the weird things I do in my mind game. That one story, the one featuring the races underwater (it's my top favorite story of them all), is likely to be done first. I have yet to work out ways of doing this, but, if all goes well, at my current rate, I could have a simple story by March or April of 2005, which isn't all that far away! No need to have to waste 100 MB of disk space to store a large video that compresses 1600:1, just a simple graphics card is all that's needed. The frame rate is high, the detail is very strong, real 3D is used, actual characters are around, boy, the list goes on! If I really go at it, I could do the entire story of "The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters" the way I indend and imagine it to be. However, that's still like two years of work or so, especially given the length of that story (over 5 hours). There's no need for production companies (except to get better quality artwork and, a hard spot for me, sound effects and music). There's just too many advantages to even stand! As another version of a preview of my script, I might just do the first 4 scenes, which gets you into the story enough. Sound, however, is the biggest problem I have about doing this.
#3 Dreams revision: 35 to go! I've currently only got the water dreams, weird dreams, and a few more remaining of the video game dreams. Yet, I've added a few more dreams to the list as it is. #4 Satellite TV - just maybe: Although it's been on the "things to come" list, according to my mother, this Saturday is when I'll be getting the Satellite TV thing for my room (it's been nearly 50 days by now, a whole 1/7 of a year). This isn't that Dish Network thing encountered earlier, this is different. It's our current satellite provider, DirecTV.
#5 My script: Hmm. Suspicions arise. Why? The service that submitted a single query to 3200-some companies isn't doing as I'm expecting. I looked at the writer's compliments section and I keep seeing that they get between 15 and 30 requests for their script for the service and within like 24 hours. For me, it's been 240 hours I haven't got a single reply whether a request or otherwise, which makes it more suspicious. Comparing from the last service, which had 300-some companies, I got 35 replies (all types). This is 3200, ten times that, so I should get around 300 replies, but I've, within 10 days, got zero, a nice round race track to race along. I sent the company offering the service an E-mail to see what's going on. Maybe they just forgot or didn't hit a certain button to mass-send the query and think they did. Oh well, time goes on. I E-mailed them and they told me what was going on. Now for another query letter rewrite. Their service seems very friendly, which is something I like.
#6 A DSL future?: On a chance encounter, my dad was saying something about me getting them DSL. I told my dad that DSL is actually cheaper than our dial-up by $2 a month, and the same price for double the speed. The dial-up service costs $17 and the extra phone line costs $13 totalling $30 a month. 512Kbps DSL costs $28 a month, but unsure if there's any extra fees for those extra phone lines. I'm very used of dial-up right now, however, there might be a chance of getting DSL, but the time is completely unpredictable.
#7 Game development: Until I get my replacement monitor, I won't be working on my game. However, I have indirectly made progress from doing that interactive animation. What progress is that you may ask? Scripting. I hardly knew scripting before that. I can now add text objects (as for character speech), panels, fade-ins and fade-outs (I like the way I figured out on how to do this part.), working with functions, fixing syntax errors and things like that. I already knew testing and so far, this animation thing seems bug free. Maybe I should start on a simple mind game event where you can do the many things in my mind game such as float running, using the flash attack, gliding, etc.. It'll be first view perspective and the details would be rather simple. Next would be a small story, a simple one, to further increase my skills. Doing a story, still, is going to help in game development. At the beginning of the game I'm making, and in many other places, there's a series of events that go on such as the intro story that gives you an introduction to the game. I'll need the skills from making a simple story to make this more complex story.
#8 New monitor finally coming: Are you ready for round 3 at this monitor business? Yep, it's coming all right, and it's brand new instead of an el-cheapo one. It's twice as expensive as my old one, but since it's brand new, the life expectancy and quality should be much higher. Hopefully that case is true.
#9 The fox and the blue - back at Sonic: I'm back at playing Sonic again, the classics. Again, it's the fox and the blue water. Splash goes the fox jumping around pointlessly on spikes (or under them jumping into them).

4. Jan 26, 2005



Jan 26, 2005: Dreams revision complete at last! In addition to that, six more dreams have been added making the dream count 149. My new monitor finally came. Also, the interactive animation only works with DirectX 9 at this point.
#1 Dreams revision completed: At long last the dreams revision is complete. It's so big, it's a level 8 update! In addition to that, six more dreams have been added: dream 1-33 (would've been 1-34, but a dream was moved from this category), dream 6-23 through 6-25, dream 5-35 and dream 5-37. There's a skip because I moved a dream from the mud dreams category because the dream didn't fit. If you remember the best of all dreams to this point, the mud/water carnival one (was dream 1-16, but now it's dream 5-36), this dream hardly had any mud and since a lot of exploration was involved, it got moved to the travel dreams category. What is the new feature added? Well, it's not necessarily added, it's revised. Remember the feature in which I mentioned the best dreams, the worst dreams, the weirdest, etc.? Well this feature has been revised and expanded. Another addition is that I added an introduction to most of the dreams. The update took unusually long as it was hard enough paying attention to what I was doing as my mind kept wondering off which soon became too big of a distraction so I had to quit many times. Also, my addiction to the online forums really wasn't helping much.
#2 New monitor has arrived: At long last I've got my new monitor and this time... it's MUCH better than the other one I had and there's no sign of any defects as far as I can tell. Boy, after all that struggling just to get a bigger monitor, the dream of running at 1600x1200 is at long last finally available. If all continues to go well, I'll probably list my old monitor on Ebay. It's still in good working order and has hardly any defects (even though it's 5 years old). I might list it for, say, $15 or so with around $20 shipping as it's pretty heavy (shipping estimated and will likely be changed. The weight is about 35 pounds so I can compute off of that.
#3 A resource hog anyone? Does anyone have a resource hog, ya know, the hog that eats a lot of resources? Well, this resource hog is not known. Mysteriously, upon starting up my system, I run a program, rsrcmtr.exe, and I'm seeing that I've got 52% of the resources remaining which seems unusually low. When I had my old computer, I remember it being clear up into the 80's. There are three possible programs causing it: Spy Sweeper (which finally updated), Zonealarm, or AVG. Usually it isn't much of a worry, but when the resources fall below 20%, all sorts of problems arise, especially with MSPaint.
#4 Interactive animation notice: From someone on a forum, they couldn't view the interactive animation because they didn't have DirectX 9. Thus, to say the least, you need to have DirectX 9 installed. However, it's quite easy to make it available for DirectX 8.1. When I make this change and add something else onto it (how to quit the program), this version would be uploaded and made available. Most systems have DX 9, but to expand that and since I'm not using any DX 9 features, I'll use DX 8.1 instead to help. I thought I'd point this out.
#5 Blog link page updates: If you've set your bookmarks to the current version of the blog, you're going to want to change them because I'm changing the format of the design. Instead of having page numbers such as page 1, page 2, etc., I'll be having it by the month and year. That is, the first page will be Nov 2004, the second page as Dec 2004, the fifteenth page as Jan 2006, etc.. As I did with the dreams document, the change won't occur for some time now. Though the format of the old version will still stick around, it won't be updated any more. The new version will, however, be updated. It makes it much better to find what happened on a specific date such as June 13, 2006. This is the last update in this format.
#6 Game development: So far, since the last update, I made tiny progress with the design document. Now that I got my bigger monitor again, I could resume working on my game.
#7 My script: While I'm waiting, I decided to further edit my script. So far, I've found a few bugs that I've fixed.
#8 Graphics card upgrade: Still thinking about upgrading my graphics card (video card) with a newer one and so far my search has lead me to quite a few worth looking at. I'm looking in the $90 to $150 price range. I've got like 10 or so cards I can look into. However, I'll make my decision by February. There's tons of cards to look at. Between ATI and nVidia, I don't care too much about. My current Radeon 7000 is pretty slow at rendering my map. If I get the city in my view, the fps drops to a poor 8 and below. By the time my game is finished, probably by 2008, today's top-of-the-line cards would be about what my Radeon 7000 is to today's top-of-the-line cards. A small leap is all I need for now, at least ten times faster than what my Radeon 7000 series card does currently. The ones I'm looking into are in this range.

5. Jan 27, 2005



Jan 27, 2005: A new version of my history is available and it's much shorter, more categorized, and much more organized than the main version. Also, two new dreams have been added making the count 151. Also, the blog pages have been revised.
#1 New version of my history: Remember the old version of my history that I haven't updated in like 6 months or so? Well, this page is likely to get replaced with the new version. The new version is shorter, more focused toward the point, and it's much more organized. The old version is likely to stay for quite some time, however, so no worries about your bookmarks.
#2 Two new dreams added: Two new dreams have been added, a video game dream (dream 2-20) featuring a bug find and a weird dream (dream 7-10) featuring a play.
#3 Blog document revision: As stated in the previous update, the blog was going to get a revision done with it. Instead of having page 10 or page 23, the year and month is given. That is, if you see "page 19", you have no idea what dates that page covers. If you saw "June 2006", you'd know for sure that the events covered on that page occurred around June of 2006 (yeah, this is in the future, but it's just an example). This makes it much easier to find out what happened during a certain time. Sometimes updates are rare, other times, they're quite frequent. Although the files are going to be renamed, I'm giving you some time to change your bookmarks if you have them bookmarked on the blog (this page, the index, doesn't count). If you have them elsewhere, there isn't much worry for you at this moment.

6. Jan 30, 2005



Jan 30, 2005: I now have satellite TV in my room and what an interesting encounter I ended up getting. More expansive dream info is likely to be added as well.
#1 Satellite TV in my room at last: At long last I've got satellite TV in my room. However, during installation of the receiver, toward the end, there was a rather strange occurrance. The access card that came with the receiver happened to be a duplicate having the same code number on it as someone else. According to what I've heard, a duplicate card is rather rare, about 1 in 100,000 as what I've heard (that's almost like getting a straight flush or four of a kind in Poker). It's about the only interesting thing worth noting. The receiver is rather fast, nearly five times faster than the other two we have and to me, speed is the name of the game.
#2 My dreams: Just recently I've expanded the feature that tells you the most extreme dreams by rating them. There's one other thing I sort of would like to add: how scary the dream was. This doesn't neccessarily indicate three weeks of no new additions, adding this wouldn't take long at all. Just reading the titles of each dream is enough to get an image of it to appear in my mind. As you'd expect, the nightmares category is likely to get those high ratings of 7 and above. Most dreams of mine are around 0 for how scary they are, some might be a 1 or a 2 but that's about it. Anything past 2 is rare. Also, a new dream has been added as well making the count 152. Dream 6-26 is the new one added which happens to be a 4 on the scary index.
#3 My script: So far, I've got through about half of my script's story. I'm still going through it to find bugs while I wait for a redo on my query letter service thingy. So far, I'm at round 2 of the query letter.
#4 Game development: Hmm. Some thoughts are saying that, instead of a game, why not make movies? I have this capability much more than I do making a game. So, instead of making a game, I may make a movie out of it instead. Gamestudio isn't really just for making games, it's for making 3D applications which includes games. I currently need to decide what story to make it based on. As far as progress goes, I've just worked on the outside terrains some.



Pages: Nov 2004 | Dec 2004 | Jan 2005 | February 2005 | Mar 2005 | Apr 2005 | May 2005 | Jun 2005 | Jul 2005 | +1 year | +2 years | +5 years | +10 years


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