Stu's Rusty Bucket

Friday, October 26, 2007

Die Monster Die

Did about an hour of work on CnC tonight, I cleaned up monsters dieing and doing gold drops.

Yes, we now have gold drops, depending on what each monster carries around, there is a chance when they die they will drop loot.

I am still building toward an 0.4 release and its looking much nicer than the 0.3

screen shot behind the more

Cold Hard Cash and Directional Facing LOS

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Converting from Bazaar to GIT

I’ve been poking around with GIT and thought I would do a test and convert one of my repos over.

After a LOT of messing about and false starts I managed to figure out what Tailor was trying to do, I converted one of my bzr repors.

Yes its nice and fast. Some things are like huh?  If I want to revert my changes I have to check them out… revert does something else.

I want to like it.. it just doesnt fit to my needs. I cant bind to a master repository, I have to push.. and I’m forgetful, I remember to commit but doing a push is an extra step.

and the biggest downside, you need a ‘smart’ transport, aka git running as a server on the backend, which is useless to me since I cant run servers on my hosting account.

So for the meantime I’ll be sticking with bzr and sftp pushing…

Interesting but right now, not for me.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Some overdue pics

Some overdue pics I said I’d post ages ago and never did..

pics behind the jump

My Lanber 2087 stack barrel, full length on its gunsock

The scroll work doesn’t like the flash but you can see some of the wood colouring

Better shot of the scrollwork

The breakopen mechanism, you can see the ejectors

This is where it lives, locked away, being guarded by the trusty GT mountain bike, ready to pounce at a moments notice

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

New Car

Joys faithful Isuzu Rodeo died.

Well it didn’t die as much needed a makeover. We had been having problems with the radiator guzzling fluid, it was coming out of the overflow bottle due to a blockage somewhere (pressure test found nothing and block test on the engine found nothing)… So we put it in to have Merchants check it out. Well I never!

It needed four new tires, we’d done the CV boot and damaged the axle, radiator to be flushed and hoses changed, pressure test + block test.

It was going to cost us over $1,200 to fix (and we had paid out $500 the previous week on the rear bearing). Its only worth $1500!!

So we found ourselves at the Saturn dealership that was doing zero percent finance on 2007 models.

They gave us $1700 for the rodeo (whoo!!) and we got a new car for less than we would have got for a second hand car.

The downside is it is a 5 speed manual transmission on a 2.2 liter engine.

Joy cant drive a manual transmission.

So last night we found ourselves in the church parking lot with me trying to instruct joy in her first lesson which was ok. We learned joy cant keep the revs constant (she pulses the accelerator). Once we learn how to keep the revs constant we will be ok, We did a couple of smooth starts and we stalled a couple of times, which is ok.

In the meantime I am driving it to work. 

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Increase the Length Of Pull

A week or two back I added a LimbSaver slide on recoil pad, Its nice and soft. Instead of removing the old standard rubber pad that came with the Lanber I just added the slip-on over the end of it, this increased my length of pull by about half an inch bringing the LOP up to abount 15 inches which is nice.

Shouldering it is nice but the rubber of the Limb Saver really snags clothing and feels like you have to do a big thrust-away and shoulder deal rather than sliding up and under the armpit.

The Lanber also opens nicely now, its still a little tough to pop all the way and the ejectors pop the shells right out, which if your not ready for it can be a shock. I was expecting extractors not ejectors and piing! snap caps come flying out at me.

I will try and take some pics of the Lanber tonight.

I also picked up a bore-snake, and when I opened it, didn’t realise a segment of it is covered in brass spikes, not fun grabbing that thing thats for sure.

Last thing was putting a box of moisture absorbing crystals in the bottom of the gun cabinet. Apparently you can stick it back in the oven to re-active them when they become full of moisture, which will probably have to be done every couple of months this winter.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Paypal Keytags

I see paypal are doing the RSA key tag deal, only its by Verisign, but I am guessing its the exact same deal as the old RSA Keytags. For $5 I think its a pretty good deal so just ordered one.

Monday, October 08, 2007

Unified Inventory

Made all the changes last night to my data structures to convert from single player to multiple player party. Changed all my scripts and cleaned up a few points.

One thing Ive done is move the players inventory into one unified place, this should obviate any need to do inventory management at all.

It will complicate things a bit in code but reduce frustration on the player so I think its worthwhile doing it and getting it right.

I will need to increase the number of items the party can carry, which will also probably mean I will need to have a scrolling list to display it.

Right now I’m thinking items PC’s are using/wearing/wielding wont show up in the inventory list at all. This will reduce the need to have some weird display like

4 x Long Sword (wielded by Char A, Char C, Char D)
1 x Bow (wielded by Char B)
....

If its in the inventory list its up for grabs otherwise not.

Gold + Food were already ‘global’ to the party so there will be no juggling of gold to buy stuff.

I’m thinking FOV will be based on first character in the party right now, which will work with all my existing code without changes.

I do have to have a ‘re-order’ party command now but that shouldn’t be too difficult to add.

Upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy

I did a dist upgrade on my laptop last night to Gutsy. It was a long process, only because I kicked it off before I went to bed, it downloaded 1800 packages over an hour and a half then began installing it, so I went to bed.

When I got up around 12:30am to feed my little boy I checked on it and it had a prompt up to do something to some config file I’ve never touched in /etc so I let it do it and go back to bed.

This morning around 6 when Alexander wanted to get up, I checked and it had another prompt so I ok that, make piping hot tea and sandwiches for lunch, and its asking me to remove a whole bunch of packages, so I ok that after looking through the list, and reboot.

Came up without a problem but I need to check some of the packages. It will be interesting to see what it has done to my ruby gems and some other stuff.

Ive also realised its time to remove a lot of cruft I don’t use (bluefish, anjuta etc). Will have to check my third party repositories which probably wont be updated until a couple of weeks after Gutsy’s public release.

Didnt notice it boot any different and my login all seemed to run fine (unison backed my home path up, my bash script dumped my redmine db.

Friday, October 05, 2007

Foray into 16x16 tiles and Multi-Character Parties

I’ve decided my foray into 16x16 tiles is over. I tried it, converted my tiles overland tiles to smaller variants. Since this is primarily designed as a handheld title, I felt they were just too small on the GP2X.

I could, technically, do 24x24 for handheld and 16x16 for tv-out but cant be bothered with the extended exercise duplicating all tiles. (I only duplicated a few to get the basic overland working) indoor and outdoor. Since I already have my 24x24 for what I need right now, I’m going to concentrate on just doing code.

I’m also slowly converting scripts over to a multi character party, this will involve some small but fundamental changes, mostly adding things like ‘Which character’ selection.

Food/Gold is automatically shared by the party and I’m thinking of making unused items local to all players, so no need for complex inventory management. Anything unused/unequipped etc will be in this pool. If a player is removed from the party (ie: disintergrated), only what items are equipped are lost.

This also removes my arbitrary item limit (well increases it anyway), yes a mythical and invisible trunk monkey will be following the party toting any unused items, you know the 12x Plate Mail, wagon load of arrows and 3 bronze life size elephant statues (what else would you use a spell like animate golem on!)