10 August 2008
| Power tools and how to hurt yourself. |
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| That's right I have been doing man things today, Wife told me a few weeks back that if I didn't sort out the shelves in the hall cupboard that I would feel her wrath, it was quite nice, so today she asked if I would sort out the shelves once and for all... I had a brief thought that I should put my boots on before starting, I didn't, anyway I was well into putting up the supports in the fore mentioned cupboard when I realized I had not picked up the bag of screws. So I put down the power drill and walked out into the hallway towards the stairs and turned the air blue as I kicked the door frame with my left foot not mind you with any of the major toes O no with my little toe the smallest toe in existence and I KICKED the door frame with it. In a grump I was halfway up the stairs to go get my Boots when Wife finally shows some concern and says she had better check it before I cover it up, to my relief I had actually damaged it. I've taken the skin clean of the top/front of my toe, don't ask, I don't know either. Only thing is I made myself look like a total girly wuss because I have the most ticklish feet in the world and everytime Wife touched them to try and mop up some of the blood, I kept squealing, the pain was the normal I just stubbed my toe pain but she almost got my foot in her mouth every time she touched my foot. I love Wife very much. she puts up with alot, like when I'm being Mr Poopyhead. She does not deserve a kick in the head for trying to help. later she let me use the nailgun to fix bits of wood together :-D |
posted by Dave Henry at
01:00
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17 July 2008
| I'm still alive, even if I don't feel like it... |
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| Well I have plague(read cold) again and as such have taken the day off work, then I found an email from Pyro pointing out that it'll be a month since my last update. So I'm typing this wrapped in a blanket, sweating and surrounded by soggy tissues just so you get a nice mental image. In the last month I have been working at my new job in Bristol and the commute time is rather long. I'm out of the house by 6:40am and home by 7:45pm and asleep by 10:00pm to be up again at 6:00am. A small side effect of this is that I don't get to work on my projects until the weekend where I have to fit them in around spending time with family. I have managed to get a fair bit of the MapEd program done and sorted out a couple of things I didn't understand about C#, like I can now data-bind arrays of custom classes to windows form controls like TextBoxes and I'm getting better at writing my own custom Controls. Over on the sidebar menu you notice I've changed the "Dodge" and "Bert Higgins:Redux" links to a "Projects" link under here you'll find the old pages and a new one for MapEd. When I stop hacking my lungs up I'll try and do more regular posts. Labels: Asset Manager, Game Dev, Home |
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posted by Dave Henry at
12:15
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18 June 2008
| A WinForms missing method |
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I'm sure I can't be the only person to need this so here is a function I couldn't find :- private Control FindControl(string strControlName) Usage :- for (int p = 0; p < CurrentMap.Depth_Tiles; p++) If anyone has a better solution let me know :-) Labels: Home, Windows forms |
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posted by Dave Henry at
15:12
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09 June 2008
| Map-Ed v0.0.1.16569 |
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 I've been hard at work trying to get a new job and working on the Map Editor of Bert, screen shot right.The thing that has proven to be tricky is that the Bert Higgins uses over 1900 blocks at 16x16 and over 1500 Sprites at 24x24 this makes for rather a large overhead in the map editor writing this as a windows forms application with the standard objects is impossible because the application slows down too much with all those objects, so I wrote a new component to view them based on this article by Marc Clifton. As a whole I'm using the work done in Nick Gravelyn's series "The Tile Engine Tutorials" as a bases for my editor, the problem with this is that the way I'm storing my map data and nick's method differ massively and he is using individual sprites for his tutorial(I'm only up to part 4), there are also other things that I'm doing differently to nick and features that were outside the bounds of his tutorials, like I want to have an auto wall feature so you select your wall tile and just draw with it the connecting sprites are inserted where two or more blocks are next to each other, and I'm using a group system to insert objects larger than a single tile, and the random select to reduce the repeating effect, I'm also trying to come up with a way to add in the auto edging for grass meets water or dirt meets concrete. All in all The Map Editor is shaping up to be far more complex than the game, but I should end up with something that can be used for far more than just Bert. Until next time... Labels: Game Dev, Home, MapEd, Screenshot, XNA |
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posted by Dave Henry at
10:08
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21 May 2008
| Long time no post |
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Oops, I haven't been posting as often as I should, a few things have happened since my last post.
Labels: Dodge, Game Dev, Home, MapEd, Portable Apps, Site Admin, Work |
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posted by Dave Henry at
15:31
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12 March 2008
| Two weeks well spent... |
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| I finished Crysis, and started a new project, don't worry Bert is still going to happen I just wanted something I could knock off quickly(note to self don't make rude joke). "What is it this time?" I hear you all drone. Well it's still a C# project, but not a game. It stems from an idea I had back when I was writing P.A.S.S. as an AJAX app @ Source but I just never got round to doing anything about it. It's a desktop app for site administration that needs little or no server tech as all the pages and support files are compiled on your system then FTP'd to the server. Some things can't be pre-generated, so there will need to be some server side scripting but nothing that could be exploited by a hacker. The biggest drawback to using PHP-Nuke and other CMS apps is all the admin software is on the site just begging to be exploited, and lets face it how often do you need to update your site from a computer other than your main PC? plus all CMS software reliy on a database of some description and that opens up for SQL code injection if the scripts aren't written properly. Another thing is that with classic ASP there was no native way to upload files and even with PHP uploading more than 5 files is a pain. I worked on something similar to this for Pyro back in the days when I had alot of time on My hands and the less said about that the better, but it could be adapted to do that job to ;-). For the moment I'm trying to K.I.S.S., starting with the RSS module, it'll take your posts and then compile the HTML site to view them same as blogger dose. You'll know if I get it up and running because I'll replace this site with a new one Labels: Home, Off Topic, Site Admin |
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posted by Dave Henry at
22:01
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24 February 2008
| Hi honey, I'm home... |
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I've just got back from my holidays in Florida with the wife, had a great time and I don't want to go back to work tomorrow :-( Anywho I'll probably be wiping my system in the next few days so I can put in my 233Gb Hdd as my primary boot. My original plan of installing a 40Gb Primary and 233Gb secondary so I could move the users Dir over to the Secondary drive failed Badly and I keep running out of space on the primary drive. I also bought Crisis and GTA: San Andreas while I was in the Sates so I want to wipe my system and rebuild before I start playing them. So my plan for this week is:-
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posted by Dave Henry at
16:58
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02 January 2008
| HAPPY NEW YEAR! |
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| Hope you got everything you wanted for Xmas, I got a load of stuff done on Bert, I'm now looking at the FX-processer and that leads to a load of data structures that haven't been added as yet. There are one or two complications with the way that I have restructured the game loop to fit XNA better in that all the Graphic and Sound functions are no longer in the FX-processer so I'm now reading up on event handlers and the XNA component model to help fix a few problems like how I can trigger the briefing screens and sound-FX. The Map-Editor is on hold for a bit until I need another break from the FX-processer because I need to work out how to do text input in XNA, my current solution is a little flaky. I bought a few games and a new printer on new years eve, though I haven't played them much, Halo2 is showing it's age and Kayne & Lynch - Dead Men is cool. Still trying to work out how to set up my Windoze Live account so it records my in game stuff. And WHY is there noway to specify that I don't want to use my 360 controller in "Games for Windoze"?!? Labels: Bert Higgins Redux, Game Dev, Home, Xmas, XNA |
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posted by Dave Henry at
08:39
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12 December 2007
| Toys, Toys, Toys... |
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I’ve been getting in the festive spirit and bought myself a few things for my computerJ, well you didn’t think I was going to spend money on someone else?!? I had a small windfall recently due to a tax rebate so after I had given crispy a load of cash I spent the remaining pennies on some stuff for me thanks to play.com I now have a new Keyboard & mouse and a spanking new Xbox360 controller (for windoze) that I’ve been after for ages now I finally got one that didn’t cost £35 I like the fact that Micro$oft have started selling these to PC owners for less than they were selling them to Xbox360 ownersJ. Any who, I see now that the Space game template has keyboard support in it, I only fond out because I was showing crispy that my controller did work. I saw that it was a two player game I poked at a few buttons and hay presto it worked but there isn’t any indication on the screens to let you know that you can press a key sort of thing. In Bert news, I got colour bleed on the tiles when they are drawn so I don’t think I’ll be using the tiled sprite example for the render engine, if I still get this problem when I write my own render engine I’ll probably look at spacing out the tiles and see if that works. I’ve also started reading John David Funges “AI for Games and Animation, A cognitive Modeling Approach” but I’m having a little trouble with the Maths in it, Maths has never been my strong suit. Yes I’m aware of the irony, but I wanted to read it for more a grounding in AI techniques than a how to, which is good because that’s what the book is intended to be. |
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posted by Dave Henry at
08:51
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18 November 2007
| So little time, so many components.. |
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| I've finished work at Source Software Ltd now and I'm starting at the new place on Wednesday, so with my four day weekend I'm spending my time split between tidying up some more boxes, Project Redux, HM Tax & customs, spending time with Crispy. Yesterday and today I did some work on custom components for the Asset Manager for Bert mostly sprite selectors for editing the data object in the game. Tonight I'm going to Newcastle with Crispy, shes working, that means we'll be back sometime early Tuesday morning and then I have to go to the Tax office Tuesday afternoon to sort out my self assessment stuff from about three years ago. I'm hoping to have a screeny by next weekend. Labels: Asset Manager, Home, TAX Office |
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posted by Dave Henry at
20:01
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