The map editor project, Castle Tilemap Editor, is now open-source, and available on SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/castletilemaped/

No binary releases yet, but the source can be checked out from Subversion.

I'm putting development of Genome Protoype for XNA on hold for a little while. Now that the actual beta for XNA Community Games is underway, I've noticed a lot of the downloads on there are very small in size.  Based on this, I've decided I'm going to drop back to the basics, and go back to the original 2D version of Spiral Island g, as a challenge to see how much I can push into the currently 150 MB filesize limit and see if I can fit the whole thing.

Today I'm going to announce the game Genome Prototype. Genome Prototype will be the introduction to the Phobia series. It will be available for the XBOX 360, as a Community Games title. It will be for the most part a 3D, first person puzzle game, with its own goals for just this game and at the same time introducing the storyline to follow in the later Phobia games.

I'll give regular updates to this as I'm working on it, both here in the blog and on the forum, as well as possibly making available for download builds for XBOX 360 owners with XNA subscriptions, or PC builds for anyone (the XNA platform is Windows-XBOX 360 cross-platform). More details to follow!

Since I think I've solved my hardlocking problem, I resumed installing the rest of my applications. After installing Visual C# Express 2008 I loaded up the CastleEngine project to test out to make sure Visual C# Express works, and after that I decided to do some more work on it for a while.

I duplicated all the menu entries for each of the static menus from Castle of the Winds (File, Actions, Window, and Help) and set the shortcut underlines for everything, but those don't seem to show up when running the thing. I also implemented building the map from a chain of images instead of images separately, so only one file is needed for a tilemap. And that was with built-in functions, which made it very convenient :)

I also got it to redraw the map continuously while resizing, and upon program initialization, neither of which it could do before. I was aiming for the drawing it upon program start, the continuous redraw while resizing was an unexpected surprise.

Finally, with the multiple images, I began a simple test map. It loads, it moves upon scrolling, however, I'm in a bit of a pinch with redrawing it. It'll redraw just fine, but not in the space that is the original size of the window before any resizing. I found one way of fixing this, but that caused all sorts of graphic glitches, from constant problems with the scrollbars being drawn, to everything being blank upon the programs start, menues, buttons, everything blank. So, I need to find another method to do that.

According to AWStats...

AnacondaSoftware has had 139 unique visitors so far visitors this month, and a total of 18586 hits.

This blog has had 779 unique visitors so far this month, and a total of 2564 hits.

1101 of those hits are recorded as being from traffic that stayed here from 0 to 30 seconds.

No comments are ever posted on here, aside from spam.

There are 22 recorded hits from a Russian search engine for here.

There are 7 recorded hits from links from other sites, six from the Irrlicht forum and one from a malformed version of this blog's address.

There are 3 recorded search phrases that led to this site, one of which is the name of a drug that's been among the spam links.

Google AdWords has recorded only 52 page impressions for this month.

So I guess the real question is, where does all the spammer traffic actually come from?

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/16/iphone-delayed-until-october-leopard-delayed-again-until-januar/

Okay, so someone faked an email so it looked like it was credible from Apple internal, so it got reported as news. Then information came from Apple that it was fake.

But here's the interesting part:
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2007/05/16/apple-has-a-worm-no-waitcancel-the-worm/



This is why authentication to e-mails is important, and technologies such as PGP were created. The world nowadays online identity is critical. I sign most of my e-mails, through the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird. More people should do the same.

EDIT: I'm not sure what was wrong, but for some reason this wasn't publishing. Now I finally got it to work (somehow), so just FYI this is an older entry.

So, after trying to figure out how to use BlenderPocket, I picked up the ability to model in Blender. So, to test this out, I decided to make this scene over again:



I plan on actually completing the scene this time :p

Not much to mention right now, just wanted to show off my new monitor:



Its only the 20" model (they have a 24" and a 30", and just launched a 27" as well), but its already freaking massive compared to my old 15" CRT.

Been a while since I posted last, so I figured now would be a good time to bring things up-to-date.

I started a new tech support in the beginning of October. Didn't exactly want to go back into the call center tech support field again, but it works. It's a good environment to work in, much better than the place I was at the time before. My first paycheck that I was able to use (first one before that was a half check, and needed to go to other things), was on Halloween, the same day of my very first paycheck at the first place I worked at.

Now that I'm making money again, I got a new video card, an ATI X1650Pro. Since Vista is coming out soon (next month), I decided to get a low-cost but powerful card, because I would be upgrading once again when Vista comes out to get a DirectX 10 card to do DirectX 10 development. Since I've been using this same computer for two years now, there are a couple more upgrades I have to get to get it up to speed for use still. Next I plan on ordering an LCD, the Dell 2007FPW. Next paycheck is the day after Christmas so will order it then. Then, sometime in late January or February I'll get an X2 to bring my desktop up to speed, and then Vista. Other than that, nothing else to upgrade for a while.

No updates on CastleEngine, I had set it aside for some other projects. I was thinking of redoing it for something else tho, maybe a GBA or DS homebrew. Also, I had started a networking library project on SourceForge (link can be found on the main site), but I haven't had time to do any work on it because of other things.

I've been playing FFXI a lot the last month, and so I've had my notebook open as well so I could get to MSN and the internet for communicating with people (since FFXI doesnt have a windowed mode). In that I'd noticed my notebook had a problem. Under XP Pro x64 (not under the Linux installation though, so I know it wasnt a hardware issue), the clock would fall behind.

A lot.

I'd look at it after it's been on for a while and it would be 2 hours behind what the time actually was. I'd sync it with the timeservers, and 15 minutes later its already 5 minutes behind again.

I couldn't find any solution to this problem, so I ended up giving up on it. Killed x64 and put XP Home back on it.

Now I need to reinstall all my development tools on there.

I picked up to do some more work on this today, after not working on it for a while. I finished solving my problem with drawing the map (at the point I had left it, it would only redraw when I minimized and restored, not when I resized the window). I then simplified the drawing methods, so it's all done automatically.

I then moved onto trying to solve the problem of easily drawing multiple images. Basically, I needed an array of images, to draw whichever one was needed for the cell by the drawing method. I first tried writing my own method, but it didn't work quite right. Then I found the C# ImageList class, which works really nice for that purpose. :)

Have that all squared away, everything working now. Next time I work on it (maybe tomorrow, maybe not), make up a basic map, and start implementing other functionality.

And for a little laugh, here's the result of my first successful use of the ImageList (didnt know it defaulted to images of 16x16):

Not that much improvement today... I figured out a couple methods to use later on, but I was primarily dealing with the problem of the image disappearing every time I'd minimize the window, and not updating if I resized the window.

So after several hours of reseraching, I found the solution to the problem, and got it all implemented so it would function properly (it was for a while recreating the backbuffer image each time that call was made, which still made it not doing what I wanted it to). a "Load" event for the form, and a Paint event for the drawing area, and then all was good.

Tomorrow I'll move the methods into separate functions (one for redrawing the window and resizing the scrollbars each time it's resized, another for drawing whtever the current map is into the bitmap, so on and so forth), then move on from there.

So I decided I wanted to implement a copy of the old Roguelike Castle of the Winds, which was probably the first RPG I ever played.

I decided, however, to be even more challenging, I wanted to make this remake in C#. Someone tell me if I'm being scary yet.

Anyway, I wanted the convenience of Windows.Forms so I could visually design the window, then add in the function after that. I wanted to RAD it, basically. So I mounted the ISO for Visual C# Express I downloaded when they decided to release all the Visual Studio Express products as free (that way I didn't have to download any of them later), and got to work.

Learned a couple odd things, like AutoScroll doesn't allow manipulation of the scrollbar values manually (which is needed for tiling images), but so I had to dump that code and replace it with separate scrollbars.

So, compare the original:


to what I have so far:


I've got it drawing a 25x25 tilemap, which you see the width on that window is wider so the scrollbar isn't needed (its dynamic based on the size of the window :) ), but no actual maps or scrolling yet. That's where I'm leaving off for now, will work on it more tomorrow.

I've been thinking of making a networking library of my own, rather than using someone elses like RakNet or HawkNL or something. Haven't really spent much more thought on it, though, cuz it's not something I need right now.

A friend of mine was talking to me the other day about some router problems he was having, and we got to talking about Universal Plug n Play (one of the things he was having problems with) and whether I was using it or not. I didn't really know anything about it because the only software that I have that uses it is Azureus.

So I began doing some research on UPnP, starting at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPnP

Its a rather interesting protocol, actually. It can open and close ports in a firewall, and set them to forward to a specific part in a NAT setting, all with zero user interaction. I actually like this a lot, myself. I for example have all my port forwarding slots filled up in my router (my router has 10 Port Forwarding slots), and have to go remove an entry and put something else in whenever I need to forward something new.

Now from my research neither HawkNL nor RakNet, both libraries I had considered using in the past, have UPnP support. So, when I make a library, I'm gonna make sure there's UPnP support in there.

I made a simple skybox to work with while developing the terrain manager for Spiral Island:



There it is... a skybox of the middle of nowhere on the water :)

It at least is a lot better than that mountains skybox that comes with the Irrlicht demos... it works as something quick and dirty, until I make the environment dynamic (not anywhere close to a concern right now).

My keyboard has died. My video card is currently unusable. My mouse is being rather unresponsive. All this at once, complicated by the fact that I still don't have a job -_-

Doesn't quite make it easy to do any development work in this case.

Well, theres a comment! from Xharock, a legitimate comment, meaning my comment spam protection isnt totally shutting off everything :)

Hmm... waiting on calls back from a couple different places this week that I've interviewed at the last couple weeks. E-mailed one place today, I'm gonna call there tomorrow as well. But thats all the current goings-on in the job hunting.

In the meantime, my progress programming has all but stalled. The fan on my 6600's been acting up, and making a lot of noise. I took it out to get around to trying to fix it, and have been running on the integrated x200 on the motherboard. Problem is, that thing is REALLY slow, and I can't really do anything development-wise with it (I can play like HL2 on lowest settings at 800x600 with no problem, but all of my 3D modeling tools need OGL and the support for that on this ATI card is bad anyway).

I've been trying to do research on normal mapping, and loading models with normal maps into Irrlicht. But I need something stable to work with to try this. I've got two models sitting on my desktop right now, one hi-poly at 13824 polys, and the other low-poly at 216 polys (really low-poly :) ). I normalmapped it with nVidia's MeLODy tool, which turned out rather well with the normal map. Only thing is that saves in DDS textures, which are not compatible with Irrlicht yet, nor seem to be working correctly in my Paint Shop Pro either :/

I tried pulling the heatsink off my card earlier, to try to open it up to get at the fan to try to fix it, but I couldn't open the thing. So I stuck it back on, and stuck it in to make my test normalmap object earler. Then I jumped into Garrys mod in Steam, and within like 2 minutes I started getting graphics errors. It seems, the heatsink isn't absorbing the heat off the card very well now, since I pulled it off. -_- And I can't find my tube of AS5 to scrape the sticky thermal material off and replace it with Arctic Silver, either.

So I can't really do anything more programming-wise until I get this problem taken care of. *sigh* Such is life, I guess.

Hahaha well some of the patches don't work with Irrlicht 1.0 yet, so I gotta wait before applying those patches. So in the mean time, I've got to get something else done.

I have an interview for a job on Friday, hopefylly I get the job. I'm running low on my reserve funds

Irrlicht just hit version 1.0. DeleD just recently passed version 1.4 (its 1.42 at this moment, but I haven't downloaded that version yet), fixing several inherent problems with the file format. ODE is preparing for an official move to version 0.6. And so that means I should start working on something new probably :)

My video card is acting up lately tho :( It would be nice to win a new one in the sR drawing. I also need to get David and Ian to register on NBF, and then get them all to actually post so I can have a chance at the referral contest.