What have you been up to in June of 2005?
1. Jun 9, 2005
Jun 9, 2005: Wanna play my mind game? The last week has been spent working on programming it, creating the images and stuff, as well as beta testing it and adding new features as I think of them. Numerous things have also occurred including 2 rain-crazy severe storms, one of which having a tornado near me.
#1 Wanna PLAY my mind game?: This is no joke. Since the beginning of June, one of my favorite months, I've been working on just this. There are numerous features planned and already implemented for it. Of the original plans, only two things remain: the flare effect, and the puff-making. The puff-making is, currently, the hardest thing to figure out how to script efficiently. Remember that interactive animation? Much of what is from in here is redone. Before, there were three background panels that only slid in one direction. Now, there are 7 background panels and they scroll in all directions, even up and down! Before, you couldn't really do anything except change the speed, acceleration, and the scaling of 3 different background objects. Now, you can control a character and literally use all the special abilities I frequently mention: the flash attack, the stomp, gliding, fall-gliding, speed blast, and more. Before, the image quality wasn't all that high. Now, the image quality looks far more realistic. It's such a big change, and it works so well because I'm thoroughly beta testing it. What's beta testing you may ask? Simple: it's where you play or mess around with a program and try to pick holes in it in any way you can through normal use. However, instead of someone else changing the script to fix the bug, I'm doing that. At the point of posting this, the program is relatively bug free, like the last version. Even now, I'm still finding bugs, but I almost have to play it like 10 minutes before I find one. Yet, I might actually make this as shareware. The price I'm thinking of most is $1.99. There are two versions. The trial version doesn't have most of the features and doesn't have some of the features and other features are limited. The trial version will be posted on my site as a free download. The trial version can be used forever, but it's quite limited. When I finish everything, the list of features will be posted. Right now, I'm not accepting payments or orders as it may still end up being another two weeks at the most before I finish. I'll tell you though, the list of features is very long and, if I can come up with more, I'll add those if they're easy enough to implement. If you're curious, here are 3 screenshots to show you just what it looks like:
With some powerful jumps, you can really soar into the air. And yes, the background appears to be in 3D (minimal though, not real 3D) as well. Notice the lighting? Compared to version 1.0, the change is tremendous!
That famous float run I tend to love. Yep, cruisin' at full speed! On the ground, you can see all 7 background panels. However, only a pixel or two may show up on the very distant mountains.
Here's another view from high up, this way, you can see the furthest mountains more clearly. Everything, with the default scaling, is extremely realistic. What's that faint line you may ask? That's the horizon marker. It tells exactly where the horizon is. You can toggle the intensity of the line or just make it disappear all together. It's useful for if you want to know exactly where you would be on the background objects.
This is a screenshot from the old version. Compare this to the new version. The change is gigantic!
#2 Couldn't pass up the deal: On May 29, 2005, I went to the grocery store and bought 144 Gatorades. Why so many? They were on sale for an extremely low 58¢! I couldn't pass up the deal! Even with that many, my bill didn't reach $100! It's enough to last me for at least 2 months! It has a big blow toward saving up on fireworks, however, because I don't have to get drinks for all of June and all of July, that alone saves $132. After checking out, getting that super heavy cart around was very difficult. All those drinks, because they came in convienient boxes, fit in just one cart. I could've stacked another 48 on top, but storage space is limited so I couldn't, plus, the boxes, being stacked up so high, were a little unstable. I did some testing to make sure it'll work okay. However, when I came to the door to leave the grocery store, there was a small hump there and, with the boxes being stacked up so high, it was rather difficult to get the cart out. Someone had to help lift the cart about a quarter inch or so just to get it to go outside. To cross the street, I had to wait until there was a big gap in the oncoming traffic. That cart was so heavy, running across was not really an option so, for safety, I had to get a bigger gap. Oncoming traffic, in case you're wondering, is the traffic in the parking lot. Although a big blow to the savings, I still managed to save $40 for the month leaving me behind by $60.
#3 Shower log for May 29, 2005: Although normally this would be at the bottom of the list (least important), I'm going chronological due to the huge time gap between updates. Anyway, I took a shower on this day and it lasted about 30 minutes ± 3 minutes.
#4 I saw a real ant nest!: On May 30, 2005, my parents wanted me to pick up some old leaves that were near the house. However, while doing so, I found an ant's nest! In the nest were these quarter-inch long, white, worm-like things, supposedly larvae. I've only seen larvae on TV and maybe in school textbooks, but this is the first time (as far as I know) in which I saw a real ant nest! Fortunately, I had gloves so I squished a bunch of them and threw'em in the trash with the rest of the leaves. There were nearly 300 ants per square foot! I probably squished around 1000 ants!
#5 Interactive animation began development: Having done a google search for "ulillillia" in the images on May 31, 2005, I spotted my old version of the interactive animation. I then gained a strong motive to rework the entire thing almost entirely from scratch and thought about my mind game. I then began drawing the images in the GIMP and began writing the script associated with it. I figured: the old version was very limited and because I'm semidecent in working with the GIMP, I figured I'd be much better off using that than MSPaint.
#6 Canada again: Although the paper couldn't be found, Canada is at last more possible. To prevent losing the paper again, I made so many backup copies. One of which is written and on top of my monitor and two more are stored on my hard drive. The time has been set for June 20, 2005. However, in order to make it, I have to advance my sleep-wake cycle about 10 to 12 hours. With a large time frame and strong motive into making that interactive animation version 2, the chances of making the goal are moderately high (around 70%). However, I'm having strong urges to get a digital camera. There are 3.0 megapixel digital cameras out there for $70. That isn't too bad actually. 4.0 megapixel cameras are around $90 or so. 3 MP is 50% more pixels than what's shown on my screen, a huge resolution! That's about 2048x1536 (I run at 1600x1200) resolution, which is actually more than enough for me.
#7 Severe thunderstorm and tornadoes: The second severe storm of the year 2005 (on Jun 1) came with a surprise: tornadoes! There was one in the county in which I live in, but it still was rather far away. The storms formed on Doppler Radar in only 4 frames (about 24 minutes). It rained extremely hard and for about 10 minutes or something. Level ground had puddles everywhere and there was also quarter-inch hail thrown in. Whenever severe storms come, I always check the local stations. If a storm is severe, I keep a very constant eye on the radar and events. If something was dangerous enough, I'd warn my parents. Some of these storms go on at 3:00 AM, when everyone is sleeping (except the poor meteorologist). This storm, however, happened at around 5:00 PM.
#8 Interactive animation progress on Jun 1: Up to this point, I've finished making two of the mountain panels (the two furthest ones you see in the screenshots above).
#9 Interactive animation progress on Jun 2: I've finished the third group of mountains and finished 10 frames of the character animation: stand, jump, float run, stop, and glide. I was getting excited (too excited actually) and really wanted to try out the new version.
#10 New song craze: Before, it was the FF1WORLD song that I played so many times, now, since Jun 2, I've been going crazy with Bahamas Zone (from Croc 2). Already, I've got over 1250 plays (and before starting, it was at a solid zero). My favorite speed ranges for this song is from 30,000 on the low end to up to around 65,000. That is, from 60 to 130% of the true speed. Why did I call it that? Some have told me that this music comes from the Caribbean area and the first thing that came to mind was the Bahamas, a place a frequent in my mind game. They also told me that the type of music is reggae. However, I can't tell the difference between rock and jazz that well by only listening to it. I'm less than 2% certain on it....
#11 Interactive animation progress on Jun 3: All character animation frames have been done and all mountain ranges have been done leaving only the hills, city, and houses remaining. I also rewrote the "readme.txt" file that comes with the animation (it's present in version 1.0 as well).
#12 Mowed the grass at high speed: Try this. The grass is 7 to 10 inches tall on average. I'm walking along the area at almost normal walking speed. The mower is old and only has a 4 horsepower engine. The mower never stalls. Can't do it? I certainly did. The trick is simple though and I've posted it on my website last year. To me, speed is the name of the game. If I have a way of doing something at high speed, I'll certainly use it, unless, of course, it's too dangerous.
#13 Interactive animation progress on Jun 4 and Jun 5: All background panels have been finished except the sky. Beta testing was about to begin. On Jun 5, the interactive animation was fully operational, but very buggy. I had to rewrite the entire code for the physical movements. Boy, you wouldn't believe how many ifs I've got. I tallied it up and counted nearly 80 just for the physical movement stuff alone, sometimes getting even 6 or 7 levels in. However, when I tried to run from a full stop, a crash occurred (due to division by zero that I didn't notice). I had to end up creating two more ifs to fix this. Before, like on Jun 1 or so, I wrote the entire script, but couldn't test it without "file not found" errors. On the second round, I added the functionality one at a time and tested it from there. I got rid of the bugs with that when I encountered them, then went on to adding the next feature. I kept on going at it. As a lesson to programmers, don't write all the code in one shot, test it after implementing a single feature. Some of my most common mistakes are these: add instead of subtract or multiply instead of divide (or vice versa on both). I sometimes leave residue behind from an incomplete copy/paste transfer (that is, I copy it and paste it (as if moving it), but forget to delete what I originally copied). A third thing is forgetting a semicolon, especially after defining string content. The only things that remain at this point are the puff-making, speed blast, and flare effect. I was so involved with development, I was actually awake for close to 24 hours. My record is 53 hours of being awake.
#14 Interactive animation progress on Jun 6: I only fixed a few bugs and added two statistical features: the time played and distance travelled. The puff-making, flare effect, and speed blast haven't yet been implemented. At this point, the program is somewhat bug free. However, the mountains need ice caps. Though calculations, the mountains are actually about 15,000 feet high at the highest, ice caps certainly form around here. I'm debating on whether or not I should add some clouds into the scene: the sky looks rather bare and empty. Also, I'm sort of debating on whether or not I should add space effects to the sky. You can get up to around 40,000 feet high and at this height, the sky is very dark. I've also implemented the horizon indicator as well.
#15 Severe storm again: The third severe storm swept through the area on Jun 6. However, this storm was mostly a heavy rain event. At this point, my region has gotten twice the average amount of rain (11 inches versus 5 or 6). There weren't any tornadoes and, although there was hail, it wasn't in my area. The other hazard was the 40 to 50 mph winds (sustained speed; possible 60 mph gusts)
#16 Interactive animation progress on Jun 7 to Jun 9: On Jun 7, most of the speed blast has been implemented, however, more storms halted my progress. Currently, I'm still having a hard time figuring out how to code the puff-making. The flare effect shouldn't be too hard to implement. I've also added a slow-motion feature to help with jumping to get the greatest possible height.
#17 6 new dreams added: Mostly being the night's dreams, 6 new dreams have been added. The newest additions are: dream 2-28 (featuring a pinball game with three compartments), dream 5-27 (featuring a store robbery, school work, and tree climbing all in one), dream 6-12 (featuring a monster in an interesting apartment-like area), dream 7-24 (featuring the float run and an unusual shower), dream 10-12 (featuring the mile run in an area filled with greenery), and dream 11-38 (featuring a sky train and a football game).
#18 Small intentions on making another MP3 CD: I've been having some small intentions on making another MP3 CD. On the current one, featuring like 12 songs or so, I don't listen to many of them and I don't listen to all the speeds. However, 9 days of music on just one CD is an aweful lot. However, before I go at doing this, I'd like to get a new hard drive. A lot of my time is spent waiting for my computer to do conversions and writing to the hard drive. My hard drive writes at only 5 MB per second and today's hard drives write at five times that (even a low-end one). Capacity isn't much of a concern though. I can free up 1.5 gigs of space just by zipping up my BMP files from my animation frames.... If I do get a new hard drive, it'll be around 30 or 40 gigs. I have little need for a 120 gig hard drive. Most of what I do doesn't need all that space. Although I do make videos, they compress so well that, if I had 10 gigs in videos, I could save nearly 9.9 gigs of disk space from simply running Winzip on them.
#19 I made a prediction nine years ago: Almost one year from now to the day, supposedly, from a prediction I made nine years earlier, something special would happen. I've probably brought this up on my website many times, but, then, I made a prediction that, on June 13, 2006, something special was going to happen. I couldn't tell what for sure though. Even today, I still can't tell for sure.
#20 My script: Even now, I still haven't heard back from the company I sent my script to. It's been, what, 3 months now since sending it? Although it's a long script (324 pages), it shouldn't take 3 months to read it. When I was editting it, I took but a week to read through it, but, in this case, I was fixing grammer errors and general errors. However, though I won't give up on it, I could literally create the entire story on my own! This is no joke either. In 3D Gamestudio, I could do many things. However, the only real limitation I have are sound effects. Doing character communication and adding music wouldn't be too much of a problem, however, it's sound effects like explosions (as from the fire36 spell), wind (I could somewhat vocalize this to a certain extent), car engines running, etc. that I can't do. I could vocalize them, but I'm very limited on this. I know the scenes very well and how the characters look and programming the effects isn't much of an obstacle like it once was two years ago.
2. Jun 24, 2005
Jun 24, 2005: My trip to Canada finally happened! 50 feet is now 60 miles! Better yet, I get to go again! Also, the interactive animation thing is now officially a game! Yes, that's right, a GAME. The game is fully operational and nearly bug free. I'm only doing the finishing touches at this moment. 5 new dreams have been added, all of which were dreams during the nights between the updates.
#1 Trip to Canada: Before, the trip never happened because the information was lost. Now, through some very careful calculations, I planned exactly how to go about ensuring a high chance of going. Indeed, the trip really did happen. Because the entry is so big and long, I'm not posting it on the blog and index pages, it goes in a special area in the blog, complete with forty photos and a detailed travel log. To read about the events that happened, go here. Yep, it covers almost everything.
#2 It's now a game: From the last update on Jun 9, 2005, I was telling of a project I had going featuring being able to play my mind game. Well, you can, but, from some help on the forums and stuff, I decided to turn this thing into a game. Although it was made in 3D Gamestudio, it's a 2D game and I have intentions, small though, on making it into 3D. Read on within this news entry for further details on day-by-day development progress.
Jun 9: I didn't mess with the animation much, however, I think I fixed a bug I found. I used 6 hours to update my website as it was 12 days since the last update (this update is 14 days old).
Jun 10: On Jun 10, I tried two new features out and fixed a bug with the "time played" feature. Also, I added ice caps to the mountains and tested the blur effect on them. With the blur effect the pixelation almost vanishes. It also smooths out the edges, but wrecks the desert part. The fix is easy though, however. The slow motion feature has been editted as well and unsure exactly how to do "fast motion".
Jun 11: The flare effect is now working, however, the transparency is flawed. I also got the time control feature to render at faster than normal speeds. I also fixed a bug with one of the character frames.
Jun 12: The transparency of the flare effect is fixed, however, the red, blue, and magenta colors are too dark. The solution is to base brightness off of ffff40. The speed blast code needs to be optimized as well as some other parts.
Jun 13: Fixed flare effect brightness and began adding (or thinking of) challenges. My goal was to get 10 challenges. I also thought of adding the bounce feature which is easy to implement. Still no thoughts on puff-making yet. Spending too much time on the forums drastically stalled my progress.
Jun 14: Still spending too much time on the forums. However, one challenge has been implemented and tested. A second challenge has been implemented, but not tested at all. Puff-making still hasn't been done yet. 3 other challenges remain yet from what I thought of. I was thinking of implementing a hint feature. Two bugs have been fixed as well: jumping and animation mode with logo displays.
Jun 15: Three challenges have been implemented so far and fully tested. A fourth has, but barely even tested. The script is now passing 5000 lines. Hint feature added and made the hard difficulty run at double speed to further increase the difficulty. The frame advance feature has also got a bug fix for time factors faster than true speed.
Jun 16: SED got even slower and more unstable yet since I installed Spy Sweeper 4.0. The 4th and 5th challenges have been implemented and tested uite well. I'm now up to 8 challenges thought of. The hint feature has been implemented. The code is now 5200 lines.
Jun 17: Due to SED being unbearably slow, I had to reinstall Gamestudio. I also put Norton SystemWorks back on as well.
Jun 18: The game is now fully operational. 7 challenges have been implemented and it takes about 15 minutes to play through all 7 in easy and medium difficulty. I've fixed the character positioning bug, but this also means having to fix the flare effect as well. I've also began working on the puff-creation script. It's basically done minus the images, panels and testing. The only thing left from the original plans are the clouds and the bounce. Also, the background scenery needs to be optimized so it uses less disk space (and thus, less video memory).
Jun 19: Puffs implemented! However, it's only a simpler version at this point, only four puffs are made in one go and the first puff appears too late. Also, the puffs remain after you've jumped and that shouldn't happen. The cause of SED being so slow has been found. Spy Sweeper. Yep, again. If it weren't for that illegal operation notice (invalid page fault), I may have never known, considering that I was working in SED at the time. Definition update problems again. The cause is that the program has the "view news at startup" checkbox selected by default. When starting up a download, the program switches to the news field automatically which causes the illegal op to occur closing the program. When a download is going on, the program shouldn't do this. However, the illegal op helped me get SED going fast again, and faster than it was doing with version 3.5.
Jun 20: The puffs in my script need to be fixed. The positions are being passed incorrectly as well as the images. Hardly any time to work with the game due to the trip to Canada. Flare effect images need fixing, mainly to adjust the vertical positioning.
Jun 21: Spent way too much time on the forums. No progress was made because of it. All that remains is fixing the glitch with the puffs and implementing the clouds and space effect.
Jun 22: Fixed long lingering bug with puffs and puffs now working as expected. That was the hardest thing to implement! Instead of 4 puffs being shown, it's been increased to ten puffs. Again, spending too much time on the forums is hampering my progress big time.
#3 Other events that happened between updates:
Jun 9: Spent 6 hours updating my website. Nothing else happened.
Jun 10: Nothing happened much at all, besides the forums as usual.
Jun 11: Due to 50 mph winds sustained for quite a long time with even a 60 mph gust, a tree was split and would fall. I spent about 2 hours outside putting the broken part of the poor tree into the brush pile. The backyard was almost a swamp. The ground was squishy from the excessive rain. It made me think about Louisiana.
Jun 12: Nothing happened except being on the forums.
Jun 13: I also looked into digital cameras. The cameras were more expensive than I first thought, but they have a long list of advantages, even though I rarely take photos. However, memory turned out to be cheaper than expected. My surprise is the fact that digital camera memory cards are faster than my hard drive. I saw the slowest speed (on Ebay) at just 7 MB/sec. My hard drive only writes at 5.4 MB/sec. It's what you get for having a hard drive that's nearing 5 1/2 years old. I also ordered Domino's Pizza to try to find cheaper, less greasy pizzas. Domino's tastes about the same, costs slightly less, and about as greasy as Pizza Hut. However, when I order triple cheese (three extra toppings of cheese), Pizza Hut only puts on like 1.5 toppings worth or so. Domino's does the full so Domino's is more advantageous than Pizza Hut. The negatives with Domino's, from where I am, is that they are much further away than the closest Pizza Hut, nearly twice as far. Negatives with both is that they both won't deliver where I live. I'm 2.5 miles further north from their northern limits....
Jun 14: Nothing happened except being on the forums too much as usual.
Jun 15: Saw a high-speed car chase going on on CNN live. This is something I've never seen before, especially the "live" part of it. Technically, it isn't live. There's about a hundredth of a second delay or so for the light to move from California to New York to the satellite to my dish receiver. Not really noticable, but it tells you that it really isn't live. Also, I set a new record for the most wake-ups during the night. In one night, during my sleep, I woke up 5 or 6 times consecutively after going back to sleep. I sometimes get this to occur just once (the cause of two dreams being recalled from the same night), but it's quite rare. 5 or 6 is more than just rare though.
Jun 16: Microwave stopped working. Because it did, I can't have my pizzas any more. Now I'm stuck with Hamburger Helper dinners (without the hamburger as usual as I hate meat). However, there were many other issues as well for this day. The milk, for one, was three weeks past the expiration date. Tunafish sandwiches were out as well because the mayo was 5.5 months past expiration. The other one had too high of a fat content (double that) so it was X-ed off the list really fast. The pizza cooker was also a problem because the tray was dirty (it supposedly was cleaned, but not all the way as there were some spots on it). As my last option, I had Hamburger Helper. Though most required milk, I had some on stock that didn't require milk. All was good until I noticed that all my spoons were a little greasy. I was close to going a whole day without eating at all. "June luck" got me though. There happened to be one spoon in the dishwasher that was recently cleaned. That was cutting it close. Yes, I'm concerned about my fat intake. I try to cut back on it as much as I can. If I didn't, I'd gain weight like crazy. Since I don't do much at all, I need to take caution. Instead of two meals (or three as some say) per day, I have only one meal per day, nothing more, nothing less. It cuts food calories in about half. Sometimes I do eat twice a day, but I try to avoid it. I was once offered a donut. I rejected it, even though it's one of my favorite kinds. Donut = fatty; fatty = bad. Although pizzas are a little high on the fat content, I degrease them by taking napkins to the pizza. This soaks up some of the fat content, and it also soaks up some water as well. Also, I saw another car chase. The car chase (on CNN live again), it lasted from 2:20 to about 3:40 PM (in my time zone). It's the longest I've ever seen a car chase. Usually, it's from 10 to 90 seconds that one car chase is shown and it's not live, but 80 minutes and live!? Yowsers!
Jun 17: Ran another experiment for my game design stuff. It was to find out how many entity pixels can be displayed on the screen at once. It turns out that I was able to get 500 gigapixels per second rendering rate. I reached the limits of my hardware so I couldn't add anything more. It was the polygon count that was taking out the frame rate. Also, I uninstalled a bunch of programs that I almost never used as well. Although it helped clear up some disk space, it didn't have much of an impact. I also installed Norton SystemWorks 2005 again. I took it off before because I was having memory problems. With 512 MB memory, this isn't too much of a problem any more now. I've noticed that it takes 96 MB of memory from a while ago. Also, the fact that I had dial-up back then meant waiting for ages for the program to update. AVG has smaller updates (usually 100 KB or less), and isn't much of a resource hog. AVG, however, doesn't have real-time monitoring as Norton does. Norton, however, is a bigger memory hog (resource hog uncertain, but doesn't seem like it), and has bigger, longer updates. With DSL, the 5 MB updates aren't much of a big deal. I can usually just watch the screen go by without going to something else and go through the entire download. With dial-up, this is about a 25-minute download. However, when first installing Norton, the downloads are up as high as 30 MB, 2.5 hours on dial-up. On 1 Mbps DSL, this is about 4 minutes, much more bearable. My system has been acting up somewhat lately. Usually, it's from 5 to 9 months between the times of having to restore Windows. Browsing through my blog, it's been about 6 months since the last time I restored Windows. I've had to restore Windows numerous times, so I have plenty of experience installing all those drivers and stuff. The problem is, it takes about 8 hours to do all this. I'm thinking of doing it when I get my new hard drive as I'm seriously thinking about getting one, solely for speed. Capacity isn't my concern. I could survive quite well on a 30 GB hard drive. I'm doing quite well on my 16 GB hard drive and if I were to delete user-created temporary files, I'd have about 7 GB of free space left on that. This 5.4 MB per second write speed is one of the main things that bothers me. I've seen that digital camera memory cards are much faster than my hard drive, close to even twice as fast! How do I know the write speed? A little math and a quick experiment.
Jun 18: I've also been listening to Target Zone quite intensely. Target Zone is the only song I have which still sounds good at four times the true speed. The next closest, Oh What a World version 2, is only good up to about 2.5 times the true speed (less certain). Nothing much happened, from what I've written down.
Jun 19: Due to nagging, annoying parents, I had to waste about 3 hours of potential progress in my game development doing nothing more but measuring the house. Replicating the house in Gamestudio is much more accurate and gives more freedom than a $40 home-design program. Gamestudio is so advantageous, I take it far more considerably than anything else when it comes to true 3D. I could work wonders with it. Other than this, nothing else happened worth noting (or that I have written down). From my math, I predicted that I should go to bed at 6:00 PM. Well, I actually went to bed at 7:00 PM instead. I fell asleep around 8:00 PM. When I go to bed, I usually take about an hour to get to sleep. I write stuff down so I can add it to my blog, or there wouldn't be as much detail. My memory is so bad nowadays, my rate of forgetting is increasing more and more and I get frustrated because of it. Then, after I fall asleep, I sleep about 10 hours on average. When I finally wake up, I take about 30 minutes or so to get out of bed, plus more time to write down dream details so I can later add it in on my site. Add this up, that's about 11.5 hours. Since mom told me that we were to leave at 7:00, I had to adjust for this. I also took a shower on this day as well after over a week since taking my last shower. I haven't been keeping the shower log that much lately. I don't find much importance in the shower log, however.
Jun 20: Went to Canada. At the beginning of the day, I was trying to fix the bug with the puffs. I left at around 7:45 AM. When I returned, I went straight to putting those digital camera photos from my mom's camera. However, the program was installed on the XP computer, which isn't mine. Routing the cables to my computer wouldn't be worthwhile either. However, I had a case of floppy disks that I could use. The files turned out to be bigger than expected. I could only fit four of them on a floppy disk. This means that I had some major floppy disk transfers to do. I had a case of 30 disks, with about 6 or 7 of them used or so. I had so many photos that I took, I used up all of the floppy disks. So, I had to transfer them to my computer. This took several hours to accomplish. Since I still had about 24 more photos left, and had no more floppies available, I had to run the format command. It was the longest format command I've ever had to do with floppy disks. I had to format 24 of them! Then, when I transferred the remaining photos, I had another 6 floppies to format on top of that! That was the fun part of this all....
Jun 21: Made a photo album on my site and put my travel log on there as well. Once finished, I made a post about it on the two forums I frequent the most. I spent most of the day on the forums about my trip I had.
Jun 22: Again, spent too much time on the forums. However, the fact that my site hasn't been updated in nearly two weeks makes updating it high priority. So, for Jun 23, I spent most of the beginning parts of the day updating my site.
#4 6 new dreams added: Six new dreams have been added pushing the dream count to 220. 5 of the new dreams were dreams from between the updates. The other one is one recalled from quite a long time ago. The newest additions are: dream 3-21 (featuring swimming in a warm lake in the arctic), dream 4-6 (featuring sinking into quicksand forever deeper), dream 5-28 (featuring a trip through my home town seeing it as it was from beginning of creation to the present), dream 8-15 (featuring a fair-like area and a billionaire), dream 8-16 (featuring a place for those suffering from boredom called the "Froolm"), and dream 10-13 (featuring a class where you learn how to shop).
3. Jun 30, 2005
Jun 30, 2005: The game is finished, but is now being beta tested. My savings goal has been reached and exceeded as well, but changes in plans tell otherwise. A new hard drive coming as well. One new dream has been added as well putting the count at 221. Not much else has happened though.
#1 My first game: It's a game, it's playable, and currently undergoing beta testing and otherwise unavailable for download at this moment. Here are four screenshots of the game close to what it is like now:
This is the title screen, what you see when the game starts up. The title has already been thought of and the title logo is also there as well.
This is just one of the seven available challenges. When you start up a challenge, you have ten seconds to read the rules, guidelines, and requirements, more than enough. To cope with reaction time, the GO! notice appears earlier before it even starts. Keep in mind though, some things still need some fixing and work.
This is a true effect. When you get up very high, the sky, indeed, does get very dark. This is called the space effect. You may also notice the transparent white "clones". This is the flare effect and only occurs at high speed. Your character goes through the spectrum continuously until the flare effect ends (when you fall below the minimum required speed). This is about the height from the top of Mount Everest.
You see it quite often in my animations. If you stop, you make puffs. Unlike the animations, you can make puffs whenever you want, even from 800 mph!
So, what has been in development since the last update? Not much really:
Jun 24: The space effect was implemented, but the graphic was too bright, way too bright. A bug with the frame advance mode and jumping was fixed and the speed feature has been modified slightly: it now includes the base speed, the physical speed you are moving with both the vertical and horizontal put in one.
Jun 25: The space effect brightness issue has been fixed. I've also added some additional status displays such as the horizon's opacity. The first beta version was released soon afterward. After this date, nothing else happened in development.
plans: Having a practice mode is also thought of, as well as a master difficulty even harder than hard. Not much else though. Figuring out how to do the clouds is also a bit on the tricky side. It's the imagery part of it that's tough. A full overcast sky is one way of doing it and simple, however, a broken sky, though it'll look much better, is harder to accomplish, but I could still do it.
#2 Other daily events: These are other nonimportant or nonmajor events that occurred between updates.
Jun 23: Mowed the grass, mainly the ditch. The grass was about 5 to 6 inches tall (and my parents complain about that being too tall - it was easy to work with!). Website was updated taking nearly 6 hours to do. Also, Winamp stopped working as it kept on giving an MMSYSTEM008 error, a rare one according to the Winamp forums. I'm back at using WinDAT to play my music.
Jun 24: The problem with Winamp was solved. Strangely enough, the AC'97 sound couldn't handle the high sample rates I was using, but my WAV edittor, WinDAT, can handle 30 times what I was using. I ran a test and found that I was able to play songs at 4,150,000 Hz without any trouble. Yes, I can get it up that high. 4,200,000 Hz causes an error saying that it can't allocate enough memory. Strangely enough, the Microsoft Sound Mapper is the one driver that's being used, which, strangely, isn't my primary driver. Also, I ordered Domino's again, but this time, it wasn't my idea (except the place). Domino's and Pizza Hut are very close together in quality. They're both just as greasy, Domino's fulfills orders fully when Pizza Hut doesn't (in two different places in my home town). Domino's price is about the same from what I can tell. What do I mean by "fulfilling orders fully" you may ask? Simple. When I order three extra toppings of cheese, Pizza Hut only puts one extra on and I pay for all three. Domino's puts all three extras on (as indicated by the thickness and the amount).
Jun 25: Another severe storm swept through the area, mostly just a high wind event. I did happen to report quarter-inch hail to the station and I heard that report being broadcasted on the TV when the meteorologist was informing those of the severe weather. I like doing this whenever possible.
Jun 27: Note: I'm skipping 26 because I was awake more during the 27th than the 26th after waking up. Two new severe storms swept through the area. Yet, my father wouldn't change the channel so I could monitor the storm, even though there were tornadoes in the south heading in the general direction where I live and two waves that were going to directly hit us, he wouldn't bother watching it at all. After ten minutes of arguing, still refusing over the nonsense he was watching (on Comedy Central on the satellite system), I had one last option, my mom's TV. Thankfully she was sleeping during the time.... Unfortunately, the TV was quite staticy (sp.?; static + y as in spice + y = spicy) due to a loose back end connection. I spent some time trying to fix it and managed to get it to a point where I could better watch the storm. It worked to some extent. I can't believe that, even with tornadoes heading in the general direction from 100 miles away and with two waves of severe weather heading straight for the house, my father didn't even want to change and wasn't concerned about it. His compatibility dropped about 15 units from that (from in the high 700's, this isn't that much of an impact, rather minor actually). Stupidity = 9.8 out of 10! My TV won't work as it's not hooked up. To hook it up means having to wait until the pesky low-luck weekends, especially since I had to wait through an entire week.
Jun 28: Took a shower at 1:15 AM. Seems very odd, but either I did it when parents or sleeping or they'd have to wait another 3 or 4 days before actually being able to do it during the day. I also began working on the complete songs list. The history of me and music is done, and about 12 songs have been processed. The data is now much more organized and more comprehensive.
Jun 29: Another storm day. I spent quite a big portion of the day monitoring three waves of storms that hit us. There was severe weather, but it wasn't in my county. There was even a bow echo slipped in as well. I then watched TV afterward waiting for the lightning to go away. Also, on this day, I've been having a hard time deciding which song to play. It's between Out Where the Lake Is (my all-time top favorite), Desert Zone and Target Zone.
#3 Savings goal reached: Though I was far behind by the end of my from my set goal, now I'm actually ahead by $40. Yeehaa! However, my thoughts have changed some. Instead of spending like $150 on fireworks, I'm thinking more around $100 or $125, I have yet to decide. Still, that's four (or five) times what I normally spend in a given year. I have an extremely high compatibility and interest with them, but I usually end up only getting the el cheapo stuff that isn't much exciting. 6 artillary shells for $6 is about the most expensive I've worked with. Getting a job to shoot off fireworks would be fun. I have plenty of experience with them as I've used them nonstop since about I was about 5 years old or so.
#4 New hard drive: Now, you may be thinking. Why get a new hard drive when I'm doing very well on my existing one? Two reasons: speed and age. Capacity is at the very bottom of my list of concerns. Speed is the primary reason for it. Through extensive testing, my current hard drive can only write at 5.4 megabytes per second and read at around 7 megabytes per second. Hard drives nowadays are far faster than this. In fact, digital camera memory cards are close to twice the speed of my hard drive. I've seen digital camera memory cards that have write speeds of 9 megabytes per second, 80% faster than my current hard drive. It's downright slow. Even the slowest hard drives nowadays can write at least five times faster. The other reason is the age, though less significant. My current hard drive is 5 1/2 years old. Given that age, it could begin starting to fail at any time. I found one on Newegg for a very decent price though, better than expected. I currently have a 16 gig hard drive. After deleting temporary backup files and user-created temporary files, I could have about 7 gigs of free space left (thus 9 gigs are used). I can add another gig from zipping up my bitmap files. With optimization, I could get to about 9 gigs of free space. You almost can't find a 20 gig hard drive nowadays and the lowest available is 40 gigs, so I got that. That would mean, even with what I've got now, that's still about 27 gigs of free space. It's the speed that matters most to me so I got the fastest hard drive I could find that was cheap and that my motherboard could support: IDE. The specs don't look too bad for the new one either.
#5 One new dream: The stuff is clear (or almost clear), it's wet, it's wavy, and every living thing needs it. Yep, it's water. The latest dream is water dream, though rather high on the weird index. I'm now at 221 dreams. The new dream is 3-22 which features playing in water in the living room. Nothing else has occurred though.
#6 Moderately strong urge: I'm having a moderately strong urge of changing the format of my website. Changing the format as in having a small change in the style. While doing this, that could mean doing the footnote index, updating those webpages that are hardly updated at all, and setting up sections and subsections more clearly along with a far more detailed site map (accurate down to the lowest subsections within a page). This'll be version 5.1 of my site. The side effect to this is that, either some pages will look strange from the change of style, or the entire website will be updated in one go. The most likely is that I'll be updating them by sections, one at a time.
Pages: Jan 2005 | February 2005 | Mar 2005 | Apr 2005 | May 2005 | Jun 2005 | Jul 2005 | Aug 2005 | Sep 2005 | Oct 2005 | Nov 2005 | +1 year | +2 years | +5 years | +10 years
To jump to a specific date faster, go to the URL and change the address, http://www.ulillillia.us/myblog/YYYYMMM.html, to what ever date you want. If you want, say, June 2006, change the YYYY to 2006 and the MMM to jun. If you want August 2011, change the YYYY to 2011 and the MMM to aug. Remember, all lower case letters only. The format is the four-digit year and the first three letters of the month following that in lower case.
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