Stu's Rusty Bucket

Sunday, January 28, 2007

SDLRL Cracks and Crevices

Slowly moving all the rest of my stateful data into my memory manager.. Once thats done, loading+saving willl be complete (more or less).

Because the memory manager serialises the entire state, I have to be carefull about what all my initialisation routines do, the downside, in the early stages, savegames become incompatabiel between builds (a rule change here, an event there on a map etc) all dissappear between save games…

So until we hit the mythical ‘1.0’, save states will be incompatible between builds.

It really comes down to an either/or. Everything uses the memory manager or nothing uses it, because when you get half/half things get icky.

Im trying to keep things out of the memory mamanger that dont need to be ni the save state, it just makes initialisation very nasty.

The flipside in storing all that spell data, item data, I can easily generate random items or special items and not need special save code… 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.

Monday, January 15, 2007

=stu

I’ve had an i-name since 2004, but only just turned on my forwarding (forwarding was only added I think in September).

anyway, you can use my iname to hit some of my sites no matter where they go

http://xri.net/=stu/(+blog)
http://xri.net/=stu/(+photos)
http://xri.net/=stu/(+contact)

blog will resolve to my MT blog, MT gallery etc, but thats ok. (I duplicate my lj entries there or here depending on how I feel)

i-names / OpenID really needs to come to the fore this year. I’m pretty sure you can use your iname to log into LJ. nmmmnnn probably openid instead of iname for lj. But I think they are merging which will be very nice.

=stu or stu.myopenid.com

New Mountain Bike

I have a mountain bike arriving (this week I hope)… Its a closeout sale special, GT i-drive 5 4.0. Same frame across all the models just different components.

It should be mostly built, but I will be removing the tektro disc brakes and putting my Hope M4’s on… assuming cable paths + cable lengths are compatible.

Its running 5 inches of rear travel, and for my weight I probably only need 4 inches rear travel.

Ive heard a few people have snapped the dogbones attaching frame to the bottom bracket but other than that the frame is supposedly rock solid which is nice. Easier to slowly replace cheap components than the frame.

dog bone picture

Downside is the frame can be a bear to clean when muddy.

Sure, I wanted a more expensive bike but with a mortgage and baby coming, beggars cant be choosers and going from no-bike to bike will just be great.  Its so nice of GT to dump prices on last years models and give them away for a bargain.

Ive already dusted off the helmet

Monday, January 08, 2007

Sony PSP

Spent my xmas money on a Sony PSP. Its a TA-082 motherboard with 2.71 firmware. The good thing is I can run homebrew with this firmware, I can also downgrade to 1.50 if I want.

I dont think I will bother. I have my GP2X for homebrew.

Played Wipeout Pure last night for a couple of hours, and dang, its cool. Also ran around in GTA3: Liberty City Stories.  Dang its quite cool. Same city layout as GTA3.

I come 6th in WP all the time. I drive like crazy hahaha

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Babies, roguelikes and dogs

Christmas come and gone. New Years come and gone. Worked my xmas holiday, we are now on the back end of our project that went live Jan 1st… So hopefully I will get my weekends back now.

Christmas was nice and not so nice. Sister in law had an ectopic pregnancy and they took her fallopian tube which was sad but good thing they caught the ectopic pregnancy before it became fatal.

We got some disposable nappies for xmas, since its never too early to start. I still like cloth nappies but we dont really have a washing line to string them out on. (electric dryers dont run cheap!). So I guess its disposable we are going :/

We also got a pack-n-play. All we need now is the baby to put in it. Not quite sure how the dog will react to the wee one when she/he arrives.

Speaking of he/she. We have a docs appointment this friday. Not sure if its a belly ultrasound or not but I think it is. 15 weeks? I dont think they can tell the babies sex yet but we are holding out till its born if we can to find out.....

The dog has not been feeling the best lately. She is all mopey and sad and off her food a bit. We are at the end of her shedding so thats good. She was quite interested when we got our bbq gas grill delivered by my in-laws and paid for by my parental units. She probably knows juicy steaks, hamburgers and chicken get grilled on it. Took her for a nice walk yesterday and she perked up a little, I think the rich xmas food scraps from the table didnt agree with her… she is nothing but a food thief…

The grill is nice, its a 3 burner, cast iron grill, side burner. 44000 btu. We are going to test it tonight with some london broil I have been marinading for 24hours. We seasoned it up to 700F for a while on the weekend, so should have burnt off all its factory oils.

One of my xmas presents this year was an awesome gardening book, its all about creating your own varieties of herbs + vegs, cross pollination etc, dehybridisation. Growing for particular colour, taste, shape etc and how to cull just for a specific trait. (eg: Hot Chilli Peppers and Bell Peppers/Capsicums are of the same plant.) (Imaging crossing a hot pepper with tomato and getting a spicy type tomato… that would be cool).

For the first time in a long time I spent some quality coding on my roguelike, sdlrl/cracks and crevices… It progressed very nicely.

I migrated I think all game saving structures into my own memory management system. This way I can save the entire state of the game by just dumping the memory manager. It abstracts out memory pointers so need to worry about any of that crap when saving/loading.

Fixed some issues with attributes (one of the corner stones of my game) and now it plays sweet. Since attributes are only add/sub and not ‘set’, you can turn on 5 lanterns to increase your FOV by a huge margin. I dont see ‘stacking’ like this as a bug, just like turning your car headlights to high-beam..  Stacking is one of the other cornerstones besides time/speed. There are no levels for advancement, the idea is to stack items that increase your life etc or find rare items that can do it for you. Same goes for magic points. To concentrate on magic you need to stack items that increase your magic point accrual rate for the big spells.

Got three skill levels working now, easy (you get 3 seconds per move), medium (you get 1.5 seconds per move), hard (.5 seconds per move)....