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More Galaxy Conquest Progress

December 16th, 2005 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

I got some more work done on GC. In my last entry I had worked out the basics for placing tiles on the map from the palette. Today I reworked a lot of that since there were some aspects I hadn’t considered in the original design. However in the end it came out alright. I can now select all tiles from both the Systems and Planets palette and place them on the map


Here’s a bunch of special systems clustered around each other


And here are some planets and empty systems. The more times you click on a planet the more rings are added to that planet

I have three main bugs that still need to be solved before I can move on:

  • I can’t seem to place any tiles in the first column of the map. I just realized it when taking the above screenshots and have no clue why, although I have a feeling it has something to do with the code I wrote to prevent a tile placement attempt when the mouse was clicked off the map
  • You’re only supposed to have 5 rings on a planet and then you can’t add any more. if you click past 5 right now instead of just ignoring the placement it moves on to the next planet, starting with just the planet, and then adding rings to that color planet. Whoopsie. I’ve tracked it down to the information stored within each tile – seems the ring count keeps coming up as 0
  • Clicking on a planet when using a brush of a different planet color should change that planet to the new planet color and maintain the current ring count. Currently none of that happens. What does? Absolutely squat 😛

After I clear up these three issues tomorrow my next steps will be to

  1. Make it so that you can right-click on planets to remove rings, and finally the planet when all rings are gone
  2. Change the way backgrounds are selected. Currently you change the background by clicking on its image in the palette, but that means when you select the palette the background always changes to the first image, since the selection box automatically moves up to the first brush when a new palette is loaded. The change will be you will have to click on the brush and then on the map to change the background
  3. Make sure map tile data is being stored properly (tho I’ll prob handle this issue fixing the second and/or third bug listed above)
  4. Implement territory shading for the Imperialism game mode

I think that’s a nice ToDo list for the day. Well, I’ll be tackling all of that in a few hours so best get some rest while I can…

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back to work

December 15th, 2005 · Personal, Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So okay, I finally worked on some more GC tonight. I figured out the basics of adding tiles to a map, although I did get hung up after a while trying to work out all the logistics. Not only do I have to add tiles, but I need to be able to tell during the game what kind of tiles they are, which player they belong to if any, etc. I also have to design the map class so that the editor and the game can use the same functions, even though they both utilize maps a bit differently. I’ve also decided to change another game aspect. In our original design, a single map file held all three map sizes/layouts. This isn’t possible in T2D (and I don’t feel like making it possible) so now when you select a new map size in the editor, it will load a new map rather than a new size of the currently loaded map. I’ll also be removing the map size selection arrows from the mini conquest setup screen. So yea, got the basics laid out, but then my head started hurting thinking about the rest, mainly since I have a blasted cold. Here are the obligatory screens:


Now you see em (left-click with the black hole selected on the palette)


Now you don’t! (right-click removes them)

And yes, those are animated tiles. The palette is a static image, but the map is animated. Also, these tiles you see in these shots versus previous screens are empty tiles, which means they will not be shown when the game is being played.

In other news, I had to order the Vaio recovery DVD kit from Sony today for $26. Seems I need to be walked through the “recovery process” before they can even think about repairing my computer. If you’re wondering why I don’t have the recovery disks, educate yourself.

In yet more other news, my car is being fixed finally. I called my insurance company last Thurs and they said no one had ever told them where the car was so they could send out an assesor. My dad claims he told them the week before, but they say they have no record. So I give them the number to the shop it’s at and they say they’ll handle it. I call my friend at the shop Fri and he says he never got a phone call. So he tells me to ask them to just tow it to the nearest autobody and have them assess it there. Huh. Never thought of that. So I do and they’re like “well we have an assessment scheduled for the 13th” and I’m like what?? how the hell did they schedule an assessment without telling me or my friend at the shop?? Whatever. So I had them tow it to an autobody, who I then had to call every day until yesterday, when the price finally came out to 5g’s and the parts were ordered. They’ll be coming in all through next week so hopefully between xmas and new years my car will be back.

Blah what a hassle. Ok my cold is bugging me so I’m going to go watch my news and pass out. Peace.

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Timbuktu City Journal – Part 1

December 10th, 2005 · Gaming

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Timbuktu Peak

Current Population: 719
Current Date: 7/2/34
Treasury: $421,985
Monthly Income: $3,172
Monthly Expenditures: $2,996

History

Timubuktu Peak is one of the highest towns in the Timbuktu region, located in the far south western corner. It was originally founded as a utilities city, its sole purpose to provide power, water and garbage to neighboring cities. However, these neighboring cities did not yet exist, so the original colonists began to build Timbuktu Peak into a bustling city, which reached its peak in 2016 with a population of 1,281 sims. After that, population began to decline as residents moved out to neighboring cities Zion and Cliffside, and farmland slowly overtook a majority of the city, leaving the current population of 719 sims. Timbuktu Peak realized its goal of providing services to neighboring cities. It currently exports 5,000 MW/mo in power, 42,266 cu m/mo in water and imports 324 tons of garbage. All these services are located in a valley at the city’s south western border, leaving the air clean for the city residents. Timbuktu Peak has a rock stable economy, and the city is now a sleepy town that, besides the addition of utilities, won’t be seeing much change in the future.

Image Gallery


The small town of Timbuktu Peak glitters in the night, far removed from the pollution-heavy coal power plant


Closer views of the town and power plant. The current job demand is satisfied by the power plant, stymieing commercial development for the time being


A water tower is built with a wind power supply. This would be torn down soon after and relocated near the power plant as farmland began to pollute the water supply


As the residential population increases, commercial business begin to pop up and farmers move into the north east corner


More farmland develops and new commercial plots are zoned to help increase demand for more residents


Here is a shot of the new water tower, away from farmland pollution and unaffected by air pollution


Increased traffic demands upgrading some streets to roads. One-way roads are utilized to enhance traffic flow around the town square


A closer look at the town square at dawn


The Mayor’s residence, located just outside the center of town to the north, is constructed


Farmland develops to the north west as agricultural demand skyrockets


Yes, these are Llamas. YAY LLAMAS!!!


A medical clinic is constructed to provide services for ailing sims


Farm growth continues to drive Timbuktu Peak’s economy as more agricultural industries move into the south east


An elementary school is provided to educate sims and create a smarter workforce able to draw high-tech industry and medium/high-wealth commercial industry


Farmers completely take over the south eastern portion of the city


These are cows. Not as cool as Llamas but… wish you could click on em to tip them over…


The first medium-wealth commercial businesses begin to pop up along the main street leading out of town


A branch library is built to help keep educated sims sharp, now that most of the populace is living into old age


A final spurt of farm growth caps the industry for the time being


A high school is the next logical step towards continuing sim’s educations


A small fire station is built to help calm frightened residents, although to this date not a single fire outbreak has been reported in the entire city


Night and day shots of Timbuktu Peak at the height of it’s growth, circa 2016


As the populace grows older still, a city museum is erected. This provides continuing education to older sims and young sims alike. There are no school buses outside, so I guess no field trips were scheduled for this day


The farmland is heavily subsidized to increase revenue from the agricultural industry without having to further raise taxes


The neighboring city of Zion is founded to the north and residents begin to move out of Timbuktu Peak, paving the way for more farmland


The move is complete, with half the town – including the museum and library – replaced by agriculture


A closer look at the mansion of Mayor King Emperor Drew, now surrounded by farmland


The Rock is built out in the services valley for additional income – masses of protesters gather outside to fight against its construction, which has a permanent affect on mayor rating


A new view of Timbuktu Peak. A landfill begins to import trash from neighboring cities Zion and Cliffside. In the far south west corner, a water plant replaces a few water towers for increased production


Increased traffic to the neighboring Cliffside to the east demands some streets be upgraded to roads for greater capacity


A small police station is built to maintain order – not that there have ever been that many serious crimes in Timbuktu Peak. But residents always feel safer with police patrolling the streets


Increased landfill size helps manage the import of trash from Zion and Cliffside, who in turn import trash from cities North Riverside, South Riverside, Sea Ridge and Villanova


7 water towers = 1 water plant. A third water plant nears construction as water export demands steadily increase since Zion and Cliffside in turn export water to North Riverside, South Riverside, Sea Ridge and Villanova


The library and museum are rebuilt


A look at the air pollution overlay and how the valley helps shield farmland from nasty air

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The History of Timbuktu – Intro

December 8th, 2005 · Gaming

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

ve decided to begin a series on my SimCity 4 exploits, looking at the development of each of my cities so far in the Timbuktu (formerly Maxisland) region. A while ago I had expressed my renewed interest in the game, and not to long after that I started having troubles 😛 Mainly it was some design issues with the game that were (fortunately) solved with the expansion pack Rush Hour. Once I got that the game became much easier and more enjoyable to play. My goal is to still populate the entire region, and I’ve decided to work from all 4 corners to the center of the region. So far I have populated 2 corners, the southwest:

and the northeast:

The southwest corner is the oldest corner so that’s where I am going to begin with the town Timbuktu Peak. I’ve made sure to take a lot of snapshots during the development and evolution of the cities, most still ongoing.

So stay tuned for Part 1 – Timbuktu Peak!

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Interesting how things turn out

December 5th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Wow. Most unplanned night ever. I got home from work wanting to rip into some GC but boy did I get side tracked all to hell 😛

First I reinstated my main laptop back to its spot on my desk since the hard dive seemed to want to cooperate again. After that I spent some time on the phone with the girl while eating dinner. Next I played around a bit with Remote Desktop – now I run Trillian, some of my Konfabultor widgets, my Money account, and soon my email on my old laptop via an open window of Remote Desktop. This pretty much frees up my main machine from having to access the hard drive for vital data I don’t want to lose. I’ll still run apps like Codeweaver and stuff on here, but all the files will be modified on the network drive that is my old laptop.

This means I get to run this comp into the ground. Along those lines I started a thread in the Lounge asking about my options for the hard drive. I think I may try to get Sony to ship me out a new drive, that would be awesome. I doubt they’d upgrade my machine for a harddrive failure, especially since it’s less than a year old.

So after playing around with setting up my remote files and such, I moved 6gigs of tv shows over to my main machine to free up much needed space on the old laptop. I didn’t wanna delete the shows and I don’t have a DVD burner and I don’t mind if I wind up losing them if this disk crashes so it was a good solution. Took a while tho as you may imagine, even over a LAN. So I watch Headlin News Prime from 12-1. After that the transfer was still ongoing so I checked out TVGuide.com and saw that new Sci-Fi miniseries The Triangle was repeating its first episode airing. So I tuned in. It was pretty good, I have to admit. I’ve followed some Bermuda Triangle research and it was cool to see them use the methane gas bubble theory to blow up a ship. The whole wormhole time-warp idea is pretty cool too. Based on the previews of the next episode (of three total) it seems tho like there’s some kind of government conspiracy involved (oh gee big whooping surprise) and the original benefactor of the project has a more personal stake in the matter than we first realize. So I guess I’ll be watching tomorrow… Or taping it rather since I won’t be around to see it live.

Sooooo The Triangle ended at 3 and I flipped channels a bit just out of curiosity for what else was on. Came across Turner Classic Movies and there was a cute gal singing in and old movie. Had what looked like pirates cheering on so I figured I’d watch for a bit. Pirates aren’t as cool as ninjas but they’re still cool. Turned out to be an old Bob Hope comedy from 1944 called The Princess and the Pirate. I caught the last hour and it had me almost falling out of my chair laughing at the end. Also had a nice swashbuckling pirate raid – always nostalgic seeing people die by short sword jabs and blades along backs and through arms.

Righty then. So it’s now 4am and oh geez whaddya know, I still haven’t done this weeks newsletter! Now why the hell would I stay up to work on a newsletter that I don’t get paid to do? Well the simple answer is that the whole GDNet team works through situations just as daunting without pay for love of this site, and I sure as hell ain’t going to be the only one who doesn’t. (yes, they’re all pointing and laughing at me right now. Bastards :P)

So I knock that off by 5am and realize I still have to back up my Outlook data. *sigh* So I initiate a personal folder backup through Outlook around 5:15 and… *checks*…yep it’s still going. Holy crap if I had known it would be this slow I would have just copied the damn .pst file over myself! Of course, it being ~700MB doesn’t help much either. I’m a pack rat, shut up 😛

And so here I am at 6:30 in the morning. Wow, fancy that huh? What happened to all my work on GC? Well that’s the beauty of working for yourself. I’ll work on it Wed. Yey.

On a last note, this hard drive is really confusing me. Is it dying or what?? I’ve ran it for like 10 hours now with no reall problems, although it’s finally starting to hum a bit now. I guess having the comp on for long periods of time really is a factor? That’s mainly the reason I’m still up – I want to shut it off after the backup is done rather than leave it on while I sleep. *sigh*

BTW I intercepted a phone call to my mom around 4:45 that said my old highschool had a 90-min delay today. Guess we didn’t end up with as much snow as we thought we would, either that or the roads just stayed clear. Ah well, woulda been nice to not have had work tomorrow and slept in… later… than usual… *cough*

K my girl’s going to wake me up in about 6 hours or so and yell at me for being up so late so I’d better get going

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A happy ending after all

December 4th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, as I had hoped, letting my comp sit for a few hours has remedied the problem enough for me to log back in and back up all my data. Hallelujah. I’ll start looking tomorrow at my options for getting a new hardrive in this sucker. Until then I’ll just have to power off when I’m not using it. I dunno, maybe after it gets too hot from being on too long the drive starts going bonkers? I started it up and the drive was quiet as a whisper, not the scratchy whiny bitch it was earlier.

Well anyways enjoy the screens posted earlier, because they are once again the real deal Tomorrow I plan on actually adding stuff to the map, and yes I will edit my files remotely 😛 I’m also sticking to webmail too until I get this problem fixed, thank god I can still access all my accounts… K see ya bye

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The Fat Lady may have sung

December 4th, 2005 · Personal, Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Figures. I get to the end of the day and what happens? My computer decides to finally keel over and die. This is before I have a chance to back up for the day mind you. Why the hell did I not edit all my files remotely? I feel like such a freaking idiot for continuing to work on files on a hard disk I knew was on the verge of failing when I could have edited them from one of my network drives. Stupid stupid stupid. So now unless I can get my computer to recognize the hard drive, I just lost all my work for the day. Yes, it could be worse and I could have lost more than that but I had made a lot of progress on GC and was just getting ready to post some new screenshots when the comp crashed for good . I made the message boxes more generic and added a new mode for OKONLY-type msg boxes in addition to the YESNO-type ones I had last time I posted screens. The editor had come a long way – all the palettes were loaded and selectable, and I even had game maps up! AUUUGH!!

Any setback, no matter how small, can be devastating, and I’m feeling that right now. I took down my old laptop from the shelf it had retired to as a network drive, dusted it off and installed Firefox and Trillian. So I’m good to go until I get the big laptop fixed… somehow. I called Sony support earlier today and they told me I would have to ship it out to their retail store in San Diego. Well fuck that. I have to pay for shipping are you nuts? I’ll have to investigate further and see just what exactly is covered under this warranty I still have covering me. I may just end up installing a new hard drive myself. Screw it.

Anyways I’m rather pissed off right now as you might imagine. This is my first hard drive failure ever in my life and even tho I know it usually happens at least once to everyone that doesn’t really make me feel any better. The rest of my night is pretty much shot, guess I’ll catch up on my magazines and watch a movie or something. Tomorrow I’m going to download Codeweaver and try working on GC on this machine – it’s got built-in graphics but I’m not doing a whole lot in the game yet and T2D is pretty good with old hardware. So we’ll see.

I’m going to try booting up my comp again before bed too – maybe after a time-out she’ll be ready to cooperate at least enough for me to get my data off it.

……
………..

Hot damn I just remembered that I uploaded all the pics before the comp crashed – they’re on my GDNet+ account so here they are – the GC that should have been… *sniff*

This is the OKONLY message box. You’d call it like thus

loadMessageBoxDlg("You can't quit! Nyah nyah!", null, $MSGBOX_OKOKNLY);

The null is usually where you’d place the name of the function to handle a yes or no button, but since there’s only one button on this form of message box, you don’t need it

Here’s a large map loaded

Here’s a small map loaded after clicking on the Small button under the Map Sizes. Note also to the right that I selected a new brush – the selector box whizzes down to highlight it

Here I’ve scrolled down the available system brushes and selected a new one

Ooooh new backgrounds

Switched the background again as well as the palette

Okay well – I feel a little better now that I was able to post those…. bittersweet…

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Dead comp walking

December 3rd, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, looking at the radar map on weather.com it’s supposedly snowing rather heavily in my area. But I don’t care enough to get up off my ass to go check out the window. Snow what, I say.

So yea, my computer is on its way out. Well, the hard drive is at least. But that’s pretty much the computer right there. I mean, like a processor or something, without one a computer is pretty much useless. Luckily I’m still under warranty, and I’m mailing out my extended warranty on Monday. My first scare came last week when my comp froze up trying to log back into Windows. I rebooted and it tried to run a diskcheck. Last time it did that it took like 4 hours and screwed up my comp so I had to reformat. So I quick exited and managed to log back on, but as I was trying to start backing up my data onto my two old computers, a blue screen of death came up. So I rebooted and let diskcheck do its thing. Only took a few minutes this time and everything seemed fine after it booted back up – but a BSoD popped up yet again, and when I restarted XP would begin to load and then a message would display saying “Operating system not found”. My heart froze in my chest, but luckily I remembered they had a troubleshooting question about this issue in my VAIO handbook. So I checked and they said to go into the BIOS and reset to the default system settings. I did and XP booted up just fine. *phew* backed up all my data and felt much safer…. till today. Now the drive seems to like to thrash itself everynow and then. It happened twice so far and it locks up the computer and the hard drive light just stays on until I manage to reboot or just plain switch the thing off.

So here I am backing up yet again, and I think I’m going to have to back up every single night from now on just to be safe. Add this on top of the fact that my family’s router was also making its way to the grave. It was constantly resetting itself and losing its settings – I couldn’t stay online for more than 15 minutes before I would get kicked off AIM. My internet was slow and spotty as well. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and made my parents buy a new one. Now we have a wireless G router vs. a B, so now I get to take full advantage of my G adapter as well.

I suppose I’ll get in the habit of backing up till the thing dies. If I do it every day it shouldn’t take more than 30 mins. Or I can schedule it to be taken in to have a new hard drive put in but I hate downtime. I don’t have a suitable machine to use in the interim. Well, I suppose I could hook my external monitor up to my old laptop just for everyday stuff like email and webstuff till I get my main machine back. I’ll have to contact my local VAIO repair center, wherever/whatever that is. *sigh*

I was gonna work more on GC tonight too (got started a bit in fact) – I checked through the T2D Reference doc to look at the tile map capabilities and now have a crystal clear idea of how to go about making the game maps in the editor. But now I’m all bummed out, so I think I’m gonna go watch Madagascar for the second time (just got it on DVD last week) and cheer up a bit – hopefully.

Oh yea, as a final note – today I finally dropped the Luna interface for a classic windows look. I finally got fed up with menus taking a second or two to display and Firefox especially would take a few seconds just to restore. I needed to cut down on my memory usage, and plus it hardly looks all that different to me really. Wish I had made myself do it a long time ago.

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More menu goodness

December 2nd, 2005 · Personal, Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

K so I finished up my GI paper tonight, the project is now officially started. Like I said hopefully I can announce something in mid-December. So until then I’ll stop talking about it.

Saw Aeon Flux tonight. It was an okay movie. Charlize Theron is hot as hell in all her outfits – I love the short hair. The action sequences were cool but typical American-style, all up close and almost impossible to really tell what the hell is going on *sigh*. The Chinese bitch slap us all the time. The story was kind of shallow, and you know there are going to be twists, but the concept is pretty neat once you realize the whole plot. Worth the money? Yea. Worth seeing again? Not till it comes out on DVD in the bargain bin.

My grandmother turned 80 years old today. Happy Birthday Obaa-san!!! Can’t resist posting this pic cause it’s so funny

Yup that’s her…

And finally, I putzed around with Galaxy Conquest a bit more tonight, adding a quit dialog to the main menu and game editor since the editor will also require dialogs like “save changes to this map?” “clear map?” and such. So I figured it’d be something worth throwing together tonight since it wouldn’t take a lot of time to do. And it didn’t. I also learned from the GG forums how to create captions for my buttons – just had to set the modal property of the text controls to false so that they wouldn’t try and capture mouse events. Yey. Here, have some pictars.

night

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Chuggin Along

December 1st, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Holy freakin crap it’s December already. No way. Where did the year go??

Anyways tonight I spent all my time working on the new GI thing I still can’t talk about. I have a 3-page document written up on it so far. Yea it’s gonna be big . Most of the time I just sat around thinking, there was a lot of stuff to consider. I still probably have a page more to write before I’m finished, but I want to sleep on what I have so far. You know how you get to a point where your brain gets so jumbled with ideas and thoughts? Kinda like filling up the RAM on your comp – everything sorta slows down and becomes cumbersome. So I need to sleep and defrag my brain, tackle the problem again tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, Aeon Flux comes out. Charlize Theron + skintight bodysuit + short black hair = total hotness. I suppose I won’t be able to get back to Galaxy Conquest until the weekend since I be finalizing my GI paper tomorrow and then going out to the movies and the dojo. Ah well.

I also did some xmas shopping tonight, bought three things for my girlfriend, and thought up a few things to get friends and family. No doubt I’ll still be hitting the mall xmas eve – it’s pretty much tradition for me now .

K I suppose that’s it for today. Days are too damned short. I don’t… I don’t wanna…. sleeeeeeeee

*zonk*

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