Blade Edge

Computer software | Video production | My life in general

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Source Control, wheeee!

October 27th, 2004 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I downloaded and installed the client and server of Ionforge’s Evolution, since I’m going to be taking them up on their offer. It was a painless install and the setup was easy too. I was a little put off when the client kept crashing when I scrolled my mouse wheel while over a certain frame in a certain window, but it seems to be an isolated incident. I set up my project tree with all my files in a few minutes, they have a nice interface. I’ve created a Development branch for right now – once I get Katana working again (doing some overhaul here and there) I’ll create a Release branch so I’ll always have a buildable code base, while modifying the Development branch. I’ll prob also create an OGL branch I can use to work on OGL implimentation. So cool. I’m going to set it up for the rest of the team tomorrow.

So other than that, I did some coding – still overhauling my render code to make it faster. I worked all day and then had to drive with a friend out to PA so he could drop off his bike to the guy he sold it to. Then I had to drive him back. No problem tho, since he rode up with me to pick up my bike when I got it, and he also paid for dinner and gas. So alls fair.

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GTA: San Andreas!

October 26th, 2004 · Gaming

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

I wish I had a PS2 . Today I was over at a friend’s house after working out at the gym playing GTA: San Andreas. The game looks sooo awesome (of course). Riding around on a bike is way cool, popping the wheelies and stoppies, taking mad tight turns. I also love how you can swim in this game – finally!! I pulled up a screen of the entire map and this game is easily like 2-3 times the size of Vice City. Plus the locales are just cooler and more varied. In the areas I was able to access, there was everything from slums to business districts, trailer parks and rolling countryside in the mountains to docks and wharfs with entertainment peirs. Crazy. You can also eat in this game (in fact I think you have to), and change your character’s wardrobe. There are also a ton of skills that your character can accrue, like stamina, biking, strength, etc. Very cool. I’m going to be near death from anxiety by the time this comes out for PC – and it won’t help that most all of my friends have PS2’s and will be nagging me about it. Ah well.

So that was it for today. Work, workout, play San Andres, come home and check email/web boards/journals, post entry and go to bed.

Wheeee

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Keyboard and Media Pad and Mouse – Oh my!!

October 25th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So my Logitech diNovo wireless Bluetooth keyboard/media pad/mouse finally showed up today. I swear the UPS guy just dropped it on the porch and left because I have three dogs, two of which yap their heads off if someone so much as sneezes out on the porch, and I never heard them barking. So I never even knew it had been delivered until like 2pm! Then I had to leave for work halfway through install. Noooo!!!

When I finally got home and finished setting everything up, I was a happy happy person. Well, almost. Let’s break it down shall we?

First of all – this keyboard is thin. And by thin I mean freakin thin. Like, 1/2 inch thin. Very cool, and very comfortable. I read somewhere it’s ergonomic cause it keeps your wrists aligned properly with your arms. Whatever. It feels good. The keys are so flat that my fingers can just kinda breeze along em. I’m definetly going to be typing faster than I was before once I get the hang of the key spacing (my laptop had a smaller keyboard). The keyboard has several of those programmable buttons for launching apps, I have em set up to load Firefox, Outlook, and Google. Then of course there’s the “Enhanced Function Keys” which let me open, close, save, reply, send, forward, etc. There’s an F-Lock key tho, so I can toggle between the enhanced and normal function keys without having to hold down another key. Good. The mouse is way better than my Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 as well. The forward/back buttons are higher up so I’m not clicking them by accident, and there are two buttons, one above and one below the scroll wheel that I can press to scroll like page up/page down. Saves wear and tear on the wheel and my scroll finger. There’s also a button that brings up a task switcher window. I still use Alt+Tab if my hand’s near the keyboard tho. Finally we have the media pad, a seperate number pad device with an LCD display screen.

This is where the dissapointment sets in.

I’m quite surprised that Logitech never made any attempts at releasing some sort of SDK for this media pad thing. Being able to display messages and track info on the LCD alone is worth a lot. The media pad supports Outlook email, MSN, Yahoo, Media Player, and Logitechs own Media Center. But that’s about it. What about WinAmp? Eudora? Trillian?? They all have plugins! Why were none ever created to be able to work with this thing? The reasoning is beyond me, but it’s pretty much rendered the media pad to an oversized calculator (tho the calc function is cool). Even when it was checking my Outlook emails, it would only display one email header. How stupid is that? There should have at least been a way to scroll through multiple incoming emails. I ended up disabling the function.

Luckily the media controls (play, stop, puse, track change, volume) work okay with WinAmp 5. But I’m still peeved I can’t get track, playtime and other info for such a popular and much-used media player.

So there you have it. I love the keyboard and mouse, but the media pad’s lack of functionality disgusts me. Was it worth $180? yea, I still think so, since the keyboard and mouse are just so great. Heck I’m proud enough of the fact that I’m able to drop such cash for a freakin keyboard/mouse combo . Still, that damn media pad has left me with regrets. Hopefully someday Logitech will pull its head out of its ass or just plain stop sucking up to MS.

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I Have *How Many* Emails?!?

October 24th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

*Whew* that was rough. I hadn’t archived my emails in months, and I just paid for it dearly. It took me like 5 hours to sort and archive my emails. I had over 2,000 sent emails to go through, and even more received emails. Luckily I already sort my incoming mail, so that wasn’t too much of a hassle. What I really need to do is start adding rules for my outgoing mail as well. Not only that, but I’ve tasked myself in Outlook so that I remember to archive my emails once a week. My archived mail totals 383011 KB. That’s like 4 years worth of email right there. I wish it would give me the actual count of emails. I prob have like 8k – 10k

So yea, I didn’t do much of anything else obviously. But I’m still glad it’s done. It was something I had to do sooner or later, and the longer I waited the worse it would have become.

Today was a good day of shows. The last show was frikin cold as all hell tho. It must have been like 40 degrees. At points where I’m lying on the ground for a few seconds or minutes, my head was literally enveloped in this fog mist from the heat evaporating off my head! I could shoot clouds of my breath like 2 feet into the air. Forunately as soon as the show starts I’m too busy acting to even notice the cold. It’s before and a few minutes after the show when my body has cooled down that are the worst. We have heaters backstage tho, so that helps a lot. I remember back in July, making fun of Batman, Robin and Catwoman cause they had such heavy costumes (compared to my under armour shirt and BDU pants) and were hot as hell. Well, the jokes on me now 😛

Ah well… I’m going to finish out the day with the last two Stargate Atlantis episodes. My new keyboard comes in tomorrow (Finally!! Stupid Tiger Direct!) so I’ll have to code a lot to break it in proper . Yes, good rationale, that.

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Blah

October 23rd, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well I didn’t get to go paintballing today, cause we had a bunch of people drop out on us at the last moment. Blargh! But that’s okay, since we might be going skydiving next week. Yes – skydiving. From 14,000 feet no less. Another cast member did it on Fri and had a blast. Now he’s making the rest of us go. Sure, why the hell not?

So anyways I managed to stay injury-free today. Well, there are the usual cuts, scrapes, abrasions and bruises, but nothing with freely-flowing blood or big bumps like that smack to my head yesterday. I still have a purplish mark on my forhead, but it doesn’t hurt. There were over 40,000 people in the park today. We almost had to do an extra show at 11:15, but luckily people were standing in lines more than they were walking about, so we got off at our usual time. Still, it took me 25 minutes to travel the half mile distance from the employee exit to Rt 195 which I take home. 40,000 people == a lot of traffic after all.

I got some more work done on Katana. I’m stripping out my current rendering system and retooling it. It’s rather over-complex, to the point where I sometimes have to think for a few minutes about how it works . I stumbled across a problem tho trying to use a member function to Z-order sort through my list. I’ll try tackling it with boost::bind tomorrow. Hopefully this will up my frame rate some more – I need it.

So after getting frustrated I popped some corn and caught myself up (finally) with the last two episodes of Stargate SG-1 before the summer finale. Goooood stuff. I still have the last two episodes of Stargate Atlantis to watch too. Maybe tomorrow.

So yea… pretty blah day. Nothing too exciting. Hum drum. Ah well. To bed!!

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Blast From the Past – Part I

October 22nd, 2004 · Personal

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Teh Gooey!!

October 21st, 2004 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I tweaked my log data load code a bit more today. Nothing serious, I just noticed a few things that needed some cleaning up. My big project today was laying the groundwork for Katana’s GUI system. I’ve never done a GUI before, but the general concepts are easy enough. I already have my objects:

  • Static Text
  • Input Text
  • Selectable Text
  • Button
  • Image
  • Sprite

And by using them, I shall create:

  • Scroll Bar
  • List Box
  • Dropdown List
  • Radio Buttons
  • Check Box
  • Input Textbox

Of course, these are all based off a CWidget class (of course) with all the common widget properties.

In addition, the UI manager will be able to display dialog boxes that can:

  • Display any sized message, and sizes to fit the message
  • Display OK and/or Cancel buttons
  • Skinnable
  • Modal, which means it can take focus away from the rest of the UI until it’s closed
  • Static, which means there are no buttons (automatically modal)
  • Timeout, which lets you display a static message box for a certain amount of seconds

The way the UI will work is a widget will be composed of objects. The object callbacks will route to the widget, and the widget will have its own callback that programs can use.

So let’s take a Scroll Bar, for example. It’ll be made up of Button and Image objects. When a user clicks on a scroll button, the callback is routed to the Scroll Bar. The Scroll Bar then updates itself, and calls the user function, passing along its new value. A simple interface. The Button and Image objects render themselves, all the Scroll Bar object has to do is update their positions on screen to make them act like a scroll bar.

So like I said, I have the groundwork laid out and compiled. I got my base widget header, my scrollbar header, and my UI manager header, plus associated files (enums, structs, etc). Sat I’ll actually start implementing stuff, and hopefully I’ll be able to test the GUI with a scrollbar scrolling some text by the end of the day. Prob won’t be until Sun tho, since I have a busy weekend. But that’s my goal.

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Codin’ Frenzy!

October 20th, 2004 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well I managed to accomplish quite a lot in just four hours of coding tonight. I’m still working on Tanto, the log reporter for my Katana engine. I started posting about it back on the 1st of this month. Tonight my goal was to code the log data loading system, which I did – yey. I only coded in loading for text output messages, but that’s a good start. Some highlights:

I was stymied for a bit trying to decide how to define what output type got assigned what color. At first I thought of just randomly choosing RGB values, but that could produce colors that wouldn’t read well on the screen. Finally I came up with using an image as a palette. I simply create a bitmap with each pixel a different color, aligned in a row. I then load in the bitmap, lock the surface, and use a GetPixel() function to get and store the color of each pixel. Ta da! Now I have colors to assign to text output types, and I can change those colors without having to recode anything.

Another problem I had was a result of a new feature I wanted to implement in my logging system. Currently the logger dumps everything to a file in real time. This can drag performance, having to keep a file open and writing to it possibly dozens of times per frame. Instead I want to implement a memory buffer and a dump limit. So when something’s sent to the log system to be outputted to a file, instead it’s stashed in memory. If the used memory exceeds a set limit, it dumps its contents to a file and clears the buffer for new data. So if you have a small buffer and play long enough, you could end up with more than one log file. The multiple log files will have numbered extensions, like RAR files: debug.log1, debug.log2, debug.log3, etc. When the app shuts down, it will dump the remains of the buffer into debug.log, along with the log header. Now, how do I open and input data from multiple files? I don’t use recursive functions much, but this was a situation too good to pass up. The user opens the main log file (with the .log extension) and at the top there’s a batch number. The function then appends that batch number onto the log file path and calls itself. So say we have 3 batch files:

Code listing.

Suhweeeeeet. Thanks to the wonderfulness that is recursion, I can now dump log data into multiple log files, and then load that data in proper order. Take notes kids.

So that’s really all the cool stuff I did tonight. Now that I’ve figured out the new format for my log text, I can change the way I log stuff in the engine. I’ve got this warm happy fuzzy feeling you get when know you’ve coded something proper. I’m going to wait until tomorrow to test it, because my fuzzy feeling’ll prob go away quick when the damn logistical errors crop up, like they always do.

So… off for some cherry pie, cookies and brownies – celebration time for a job well done!

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Flip Fest

October 19th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So since it’s Tuesday, it’s my night out at the gym hangin with my coaching buddies and other friends. I got called out by one of them since I had stated last week that I could do a gainer off the inground trampoline and clear an 8-incher long-ways (about… 10 feet I guess). A gainer is a back or front flip that travels. A back gainer is a back flip that travels forward, and a front gainer is a front flip that travels backwards. Obviously you don’t want a back flip traveling forwards, or a front flip traveling backwards, so you can see why they’re so much fun to do, cause they just look wrong. Well, I got within a foot of clearing the 8-incher mat (an 8 inch high mat). But then the other coaches started tossing flips onto the mats, and things quickly escalated to the point where me and another coach were doing piked fliffuses (2 flips with a 1/2 twist in a piked position (which rotates slower than tucked so it’s harder)) off the tranp onto the mats. Then someone tossed a half-in half-out duck under forward roll, which got us into the subject of barani-ins (1 flip with a 1/2 twist to your back).

Uh oh.

Shit went bad at this point, since the subject of the Drewcifus (soft “c”) came up. As you can tell, it’s a trick named after me, since I’m prob one of a few crazy mofo’s in this world to pull it. It’s a barani-in 3/4 out to stomach. So that’s a front flip with a half twist and then a back flip where I come up short and land on my belly. All in the air. Now, it doesn’t sound that bad, until you consider the consequences. Only one of the following three things will happen upon landing:

1) Land short and plane the skin off your face as it scrapes against the trampoline. You could possibly break your neck too. (my first attempt at this trick did indeed leave a red scrape mark across the entire left side of my face. I was lucky)

2) Land perfectly on your belly.

3) Land late and worm down from your legs to your stomach, at the least causing whiplash, at the worst breaking your back.

So there. I did one tonight to show the uninitated (2 people there hadn’t yet witnessed it) how nasty it truly was. Everyone who’d already seen it was holding on to each other and praying I didn’t die, as they always do . I think that was the 6th or 7th one I’ve done in three years. I may not have many left.

I once did a 1 3/4 back flip to stomach. It’s pretty much the same thing, though slightly worse. See, with a Drewcifus, you can see the trampoline through the barani-in, which helps keep you from getting lost. Doing a double back, it’s easy to lose your sense of rotation. I did it though, and landed on my stomach fine. I don’t think I’ll be doing it again anytime soon however. It’s not a good thing to tempt fate you know.

So after the crazy flip fest, I grabbed some Denny’s and then we had a PS2 nite at someone’s house. I played a demo of Star Wars: Battlefront – what an awesome game. I gots to get me a copy

Finally, my Binary Clock from ThinkGeek arrived today! WHooo! Here’s teh pictars:


I got the blue on cause it goes nicely with my Logitech speaker remote which has a blue LED status light. Plus… I just think blue and silver is cool.

Stupid TigerDirect finally shipped my diNovo today, even tho I ordered both the clock and the keyboard the same day (Sat) minutes apart. Chalk up kudos points for ThinkGeek. They get stuff done proper.

Ah well, enough blabbering from me. Bed time!

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Insomnia Sucks

October 18th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I wanted to get up at 8 to take my bike in to get serviced today. All well and good. I go to bed at like 2am so I get a decent amount of sleep, and what happens? I can’t sleep! I had a good night’s rest the night before, but no more than usual. Still, I couldn’t get my brain to shut up and let me fall asleep. I kept thinking and pondering about the most philosophical things imaginable for like 3 hours before I finally said screw it, turned on the light and finished a book I was reading. By then it was 6am. So I turned the light back off and spent another hour trying to fall asleep. I finally did, only to have my stereo system jolt me awake less than an hour later. Screw this, I said as I turned it off and went back to sleep.

sigh. What a waste of time. If I had known I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, I wouldn’t have bothered laying in bed for so long. Bah. I’m going to try to get my bike in tomorrow.

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