Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Metroid: Other M

Now that the game is finally out I wanted to offer my review of the game.

To start with, on the positive side:
  • The graphics were some of the best on the Wii with only a few glitches that I have found.
  • Game-play was fun and fast paced which is a nice change from the slower prime series
  • Cut scenes were excellent and merged with the game nicely.
  • Controls, while sometimes a little clunky, worked pretty well most of the time.
And on the negative side:
  • The game was too short for me. only took me 3 days to beat it while playing a few hours a day. (total about 4hrs)
  • Storyline, while good, made Samas seem like a wimp
  • A few (around 4-5) times after some cut scenes you were forced to look around for one tiny item on the screen with no indication of what it might be. The bad part of this is that you have to hover your cursor over the item your looking for for a few seconds before the game gives you a hint that your looking at the right item.
overall I give it a 4/5

edit: forgot one negative and one positive about the game heh

Pathfinder




Today I got my path finding functions finished. It can find a path through any 2D obstacle course, and rather quickly too. usualy takes about 1ms.








<---- Shows it takes 4 seconds to process 2000 times resulting in about 1-2ms per run.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Today's NOT Cool Award ....

... goes to Microsoft.

Those greedy bastards don't seem to think they have enough money. For those of you who haven't heard; Microsoft has said they will increase the price of X-Box live from the previous $7 a month to $10 a month. Now, while most of you will say "What's the big deal? It's only $3." With their current 25 million subscriptions they boast, every $0.04 earns them $1,000,000. so at $7.99 they get $199,750,000 per month. However, the reason for the increase is what has me upset, not the price.

They say they are providing more services now than they did when they increased it to $7. So far, the only services they provide for "free" when you have a membership, are either free on every other system or free to anyone with a web browser. They have "Last FM", "Twitter", "Face book", demos of games, videos on demand (that you usually have to pay for), and now they are adding ESPN (which I won't even look at).

This sounds like a big list except that on the PS3 for free (without a monthly fee) you get a web browser that allows you to visit everything from twitter to you-tube, free game demos, themes, etc. The only thing that the PS3 doesn't have that the X-Box will, is ESPN. And to add insult to injury, on the PS3 you can pay for a plus membership (about the same as X-Box live) and you get free games (whole games), discounts on downloadable items (some drop from $50 to $5), early access to demos and beta invites, and, if you get the year subscription for $49.99, you get 3 bonus months.

To me, the PS3 offers much more bang for your buck.

DHTML for dummies

Just got off work and figured I would add a post to my blog.

Topic for today: DHTML 101

Most people know HTML so today I'll talk about how to code some basic DHTML (Dynamic HTML). The concept is simple to grasp; Any HTML that changes itself to suit the user is DHTML.

First you must give each object that is going to change in the HTML a name (this makes it easy to find later). To do this simply add:
name="bob" id="bob"
to any HTML element. (change bob to whatever you want as long as you remember it) some browsers will only support either id or name so I add both which doesn't hurt.

Next you usually want an easy way find it, which varies from browser to browser. To make this easier to made a simple function that gets it for any browser.
function getByID(id)
{
var ret;
if (document.getElementById)
ret = document.getElementById(id);
else if (document.all)
ret = document.all[id];
else if (document.layers)
ret = document.layers[id];
return ret;
}
Now that we have that function you can get the element 'bob' by calling getById('bob');

The most common form of DHTML is a pop up menu when you mouse over a link.
We do this using the <DIV> tag. you can do a lot of things with the div tag but this time we will focus on their ability to be hidden.
simply make a div tag like this:
<DIV id="bob" style="visibility:hidden; position:absolute; left:100px; top:150px;">
As you may have guessed this box will be positioned 100 pixels to the left and 150 pixels down from the top left of the page and you can add extra settings for color, style, etc.

Now the easy part: showing and hiding the div tag. To do this simply call Object.style.visibility="visible" (or "hidden") to show/hide the tag. So all we need to do is make a link that has
onmouseover="javascript:getById('bob').style.visibility='visible';"
inside the <A> tag then add
onmouseout="javascript:getById('bob').style.visibility='hidden';"
to the div tag.

Since I can't show you everything, you can have the fun of figuring out how to add a timer to auto-hide the div if you don't move your mouse into it.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

History 101


I figured today I could share some of my back story. (picture unrelated)

I grew up in Arkansas of all places. Most people try to pin being gay on not having enough paternal influence, but my father was always there for me. He wasn't able to work, as he had to take care of my mother who had lost both kidneys before she was 16, so we lived off of government money.

By the age of 5 he had taught me how to read, write, do basic math, and had started teaching me to program. It was only Q-Basic (on a Commodore 64), but It was still pretty fun to get the computer to do what I wanted. I quickly branched out and now know quite a few languages. C, C++ (6.0 and .Net standards), Visual Basic, JavaScript, HTML/DHTML/XML, CSS, etc.

Having grown up in Arkansas, I didn't have access to any good computer courses through high school so I had to teach myself as even my dad only knew the tiniest bit of C. Through FBLA in high school I had won a few awards (1st in state for visual basic programming, and 5th in nationals) but mostly my talents went unnoticed.

When I finally moved out and went to college, things got more interesting. I worked at the University's Geographic Information Systems division as a programmer (really a webmaster mostly but I did work on stuff other than the websites). During my stay at college I had stumbled upon this group of social outcasts much like myself and found the community to be quite friendly. Only later did I find out that most of the internet hates furries.

That's enough history for now (which was the only class I've ever failed. lol) so until next time. Have fun.

Introductions

Hi, I'm a furry. If you didn't know that by now, I feel sorry for you. :P

I'm new to this whole 'Blogging' thing but figured I would give it a shot.
I am a programmer so a lot of my posts will be about the program I am currently working on, I'm also gay and an atheist so some of my posts will be about those as well but nothing too risque.

I am currently working on the client side of a MMO I have been developing for about 5 months. lol. I just wanted to see if I could do it so I started making it work. server side is about half done just starting on the client now so nothing to show you really.

That's it for now so have fun and I will post again tomorrow