Turn it on

Posted on 23rd October 2010 in Something Daily

Today is going to be a good day, I believe. I’m listening to the Flaming Lips right now, “Turn it On” from Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. It’s always been one of my favorite Flaming Lips songs. I love when a band has a catalog of material that you can look back on and see how many different changes they’ve gone through from album to album. These guys started out making noisy punk-type music, and it slowly grew more and more mellow and theatrical from album to album, an recently we’ve seen a return to some heavier styles in Embryonic and, to a lesser degree, At War with the Mystics. But the thing about the Lips is that despite all the artistic phases they’ve gone through, you can always tell a Flaming Lips song when you hear it. Obviously it’s Wayne’s voice, to a degree, but they’ve so often got that heavy overdriven bass sound and drums that sound like they’re right there in the room with you. I think the Lips have accomplished something that’s really tough to do here. So have the Mars Volta. One could make a very similar argument for their catalog as well. In the words of Tim and Eric: “Great Job!”

I stretched this morning as soon as I woke up. It was awesome, and I recommend it highly. Other things that are awesome: the Street  Fighter II shirt that I’m wearing right now (see yesterday’s post), cinnamon raisin bagels, orange juice, Dragon Ball Z, and Left 4 Dead 2. By the way, that’s not an inclusive list of things that are awesome, it’s more of a primer in case you wanted to get better at knowing what’s awesome. These updates will continue, I just decided. I’d think about renaming the blog “Things that are Awesome”, except I think its current title is essentially synonymous with that already, so it would be overkill.

Another thing that is awesome is the game that I’m currently working on. In case you didn’t know (how would you know?), I’ve taken a total of one year of programming courses in college, and that was last year. The rest of the knowledge that I have about computers is pretty much entirely a result of reading programming books on the beach when I should have been relaxing, or independent projects that I’ve worked on in the last half a year. So the idea that I would make a game that one would, you know, sit down and actually play may be a bit of a stretch. And, in fact, it’s proven to be really difficult so far. I’m teaching myself basically everything I don’t already know as I go along. Now obviously this is how pretty much every programmer works, the difference is that I know a lot less than your average programmer. Also, did I mention that I’m not using any APIs and I’m doing it all by hand? It’s really a learning experience, so it’s slow going, and I’m not really ashamed to admit that I’ve been working on this for a few months now.

But, as it turns out, it appears that this project will indeed be finished one day, probably not too long from now. It’s about dinosaurs who live on the moon and have to escape to show their existence to the people of earth (add to the list of things that are awesome). The gameplay is/will be similar to Ikaruga or 1942: like an upward scrolling fly-around-and-shoot-guys type game. All the graphics (drawn by me in Gimp) will emulate NES/SNES graphics with a pretty large pixel size, and all the music (composed by myself) will be from a Gameboy. So it’lll have a real serious 8-bit old school vibe. And it’s getting there. And it’ll be on this blog…and you’ll play it!

This is, according to reddit, the best version of the “order a bunch of pizzas for some other house” trick in history

Ok, sounds great!

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The importance of stretching

Posted on 22nd October 2010 in Something Daily

I learned the importance of stretching today. I spend a lot of time sitting up straight at the computer and/or holding my backpack on my shoulders, and the pain in my back today was getting to the point where I couldn’t really stand up straight. But then my roommate London showed me some stretches and we did them together, and now I can stand again! Remember to stretch in the morning, especially your back. You will not regret it, since your back will be mobile, as opposed to immobile. It’s funny that I didn’t know how to stretch until today. Maybe I should engage in more physical activity, then I’d know a little better. But now I know. So there.

I went to this comic book store on Broadway today called Forbidden Planet. That store is incredible. They have so many different comic and sci-fi franchises represented with all their merchandise. I got a shirt with a lot of the main Mario characters and enemies on it, and a Street Fighter II shirt as well. They are…quite awesome. In case you were wondering.

Also, I just downloaded the Opera browser a few minutes ago (and I’m currently using it to type this). Definitely check it out if you’ve ever thought about switching from Safari or Internet Explorer. So far it’s decently speedy for me, and I much prefer the speed dial function to Safari’s top sites, mainly because you don’t need to visit a site a bunch of times before it appears in the list. Opera’s cool. I like free and open-source software. I tried running Ubuntu 10.04 on my white MacBook over the summer, but ultimately I found the issues with firmware to be too much of a hassle for my needs. It took a lot of work to get each individual piece of hardware working – the iSight camera, the USB ports, the trackpad. Maybe I’ll try Linux again sometime in the future.

Maybe I’ll code some more tonight. We’ll see, but my hand kind of feels like it has carpal tunnel. So I may just take a rest. Either way, here’s the new South Park that makes fun of Inception. It’s awesome.

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Christmas Present, perhaps?

Posted on 21st October 2010 in Something Daily

Wow, I can’t believe that in yesterday’s post I said that the game I’m working on might be more awesome than Ikaruga. No way man, Ikaruga is incredible. The color switching gameplay dynamic adds something to it that I’ve never seen in any other shooter – or maybe it’s just a lot harder than any other shooter. I’m getting back into it recently, as I didn’t play that much over the summer, and that game is hard. Really hard, actually. I’ve never finished it. Although I did just discover how chaining in that game works, and it’s helping out a little bit, with the extra lives and all that. I’m going to try and finish it eventually, all it takes is a ton of practice and a fast reaction time. I remember playing it when I was really young and thinking “this is the game I’ve been waiting for”, and ever since, I had it in the back of my mind without knowing what it was called. I finally stumbled upon it and had to have it, you know? Go check out Ikaruga, though. I managed to find it in the original box, used, for $40 at a Gamestop, but apparently it’s really rare. Even if you have to pay a lot for it, it’s certainly worth the price.

If my calculations are accurate, I have one more piece of core engine material to code for “The Game” and then the engine will be (more or less) fully functional. At that point, which will hopefully be around, I don’t know, tomorrow sometime, I can start really focusing on design – more enemies, bosses, levels, et cetera. The levels will be scary to draw because they’re each over 100,000 pixels tall. I need to figure out some way to automate this stuff. But it’s coming along, slowly but surely.

I recently bought the ROM of Little Sound DJ, a Gameboy cartridge that lets you track audio with the Gameboy’s internal soundchip. Like chiptunes or whatever. And I’ve used that to compose and record track 1 of the game’s soundtrack. It sounds like it came straight from an old 8-bit system (which it practically did), the only difference being the physical hardware. LSDJ is awesome though, if you’re into chiptunes then definitely check it out (actually, if you’re into chiptunes, you probably already have LSDJ, so in that case, check it out if you’re not into chiptunes). By the way, I’m not really sure how I feel about the word “chiptunes”. I guess every genre needs a name, but it would be cool if it were called, I don’t know…something else?

As could be pretty easily inferred from this blog so far, work on this project is sort of consuming my mind. So hopefully it will be done sooner than later (say, before Christmas?) so that I can breathe once more. But until then, well, you know.

Also, Dr. Dog are a wonderful band. Check out “Fate” or “We All Belong”, they’ll make you happy.

Here’s some love for Moog’s new Slim Phatty. Never played it, but the Little Phatty is a great sounding synth.

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The Whiner’s Bio

Posted on 20th October 2010 in Something Daily

I would just like to make it known that Mates of State are a really good band. Especially their album “Team Boo”. I think I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve talked to who’ve known them since an ex-girlfriend showed me “Bring it Back”…and I think that’s very sad. They’re way too much fun to listen to for me to ignore them; I feel like it’s the kind of music that you can’t help but like, at least the first time you hear it. Opinions on Mates are formed after the fact.

I guess the Farfisa sound isn’t all that popular in modern indie pop, but I am crazy about it on all of Mates’ stuff, especially the aforementioned favorite album of theirs. I think it’s a wonderful combination of sounds that these two have discovered – the uncluttered arrangement of drums, organ, and two voices that’s (sort of) their signature at this point. I mean, I don’t want to write a music review here, but I do want to make sure that my opinion on the matter is clear: Mates of State are a great band, and I love them completely. Go see them in concert. Last time I saw them, you know who the opening acts were? A musical standup comic and a sword swallower. She swallowed two swords at once. It was crazy. Icing on the cake. Go see Mates of State.

Work on “The Game” is progressing much more quickly than at any other time in the past few weeks: I’m finishing up a framework (am I authorized to use such words?) that allows fairly intuitive control of the motion of enemies on the 2D plane. After that’s done, my last big non-design goal is to create a system that allows laser shapes to be shot by the group – like Ikaruga but more awesome (maybe). And a title. A title would be great. Hopefully this is all behind me by the end of the semester. And you, reader, will be playing a sweet dinosaur-based arcade shooter set in space on these very interwebs.

Oh, and check out Mac OS 10.7. App store? I don’t know, man. I’m incredulous over here. But we’ll see.

So having said these things, here is a reminder of the importance of radness.

This is going well. I like blogging.

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How to learn Java in 9000 easy steps

Posted on 19th October 2010 in Something Daily

It’s hard to match the feeling of solving a difficult programming problem, especially after it’s been an obsession for far longer than would seem appropriate. Having learned a big portion of what I know about programming through trial and error, I’m certainly used to this type of issue popping up – you know, the kind where it seems so obvious that there theoretically exists a solution, but what that solution is is so completely beyond you.

Like last weekend when I learned how to load fonts into a Java app (a game I’m working on involving dinosaurs in space). It’s a sweet 8-bit videogame type font that I found on a free fonts site, very cool looking. After finding some example code from the Sun (now Oracle?)  demo pages and adapting it to my needs, my program was completely laggy and using about 20% of the CPU time. I tried moving the method that loaded the font, I tried saving the font in a Font variable, but kept hitting a wall when I tried to show paintComponent() the font data.

As I’ve learned time and time again through hours of  smashing my head against things, procrastinating, and eating too much chocolate, the surefire way to solve one of these issues is to start thinking like a computer. (I guess I don’t do this enough as it is, maybe I should have played with Legos more when I was little). But upon going line-by-line through the changes I’d made to the program since the CPU-destroying slowdown had begun, I discovered another previously unknown quirk of paintComponent() and the Timer class. As it turns out, my getFont() method was in the body of my main GamePanel class, outside the constructor and right next to paintComponent() (the GamePanel constructor contains the main Timer I use for animation, which uses repaint()). As a result, my getFont() was being called once per frame (!!!) which was causing the font data to be re-grabbed from the disk forty times every second. So apparently the Timer does that to methods that are on the same hierarchical level as paintComponent(). Who knew? Not me. But I moved getFont() to a completely separate .java file and that solved the problem immediately. And it took about 45 minutes to figure that out. Needless to say, that was the last problem I attacked that night.

That’s a pretty typical coding session for me. To summarize:

  1. Find the simple solutions to a bunch of problems that seemed impossible last session
  2. Gain confidence and decide to tackle a big new area of the app
  3. Quickly run into new, seemingly unsolvable problem
  4. Try at least five different approaches to solving the problem
  5. After about 90 minutes of this, close computer and play Super Mario World
  6. Repeat

Check out these pictures from the set of The Empire Strikes Back. Very cool.

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“You kids just haven’t been to college yet”

Posted on 18th October 2010 in Something Daily

I arrived at my dorm from lab this evening and found a bunch of clippings from a newspaper taped up everywhere. There’s a shirtless stripper guy wearing a sombrero on my desk with a caption that says “Every Monday: come out to the fiesta”; a black and white clipping of a normal looking guy looking up thoughtfully with the caption “Curious about men? Other guys are too.”; a clipping from Cosmopolitan (which Ivey so thoughtfully left about fifty copies of on our kitchen table) that says “give his junk a once-over”. I believe there’s also one on the mirror in the bathroom advertising a male stripper competition.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t a new thing. Last year, Justin’s room was tastefully decorated with a cache of nude men from a Playgirl magazine. I think it was an April Fool’s thing.

I think it is awesome that I live with a bunch of dudes who do this kind of stuff. Mainly it’s hilarious, but it’s also way more respectable than saying “no homo” when you’re about to do something that might be considered gay.

I’m enjoying my room’s newfound silliness and watching some South Park. Here’s wikipedia’s list of dinosaurs; my favorite is the Megaraptor.

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