nothing to see here

i go away for a month or so and come back to find mozilla only CSS everywhere. one time i had a nightmare where everything in my house had rounded corners. furniture, doors, walls, picture frames... rounded corners on everything.

i have one day and six hours left of my BYOND membership.

if someone would like to buy me a membership, i would really appreciate it.

if that's not convincing enough, i can get a doctor to tell you to buy me a membership. maybe you'll listen to him.

P.S. crashed, you owe me a membership!

JavaScript has the ability to draw rectangles and ovals. by moving these shapes around you can create animations. by varying the size and position of the shapes you could create the illusion of rotation. by combining the two, you could make animated models that can rotate and you don't have to draw a single image yourself.

of course, the model would be made up of rectangles and ovals, so it wouldn't look pretty. but, since i can't draw a decent image of a person myself, i wouldn't want to try drawing an animation of a person walking in various directions. instead i'll go with ugly looking models that can easily be rotated and animated.

i wondered how this would look in BYOND. i don't want to draw ovals and boxes at runtime in BYOND, so i had to go with shapes that look the same from all angles.

here's the result:



(click on the image to download a playable demo)

i was recently working on a little project in BYOND and i came across an interesting problem. the project uses pixel movement, so the up arrow key moves you forward and the left/right arrow keys turn you. i was using something similar to loduwijk's KeyState library so that you can turn left or right while moving forward. the library works by having an HTML popup window use JavaScript to capture keyup/keydown events and relay them to DS via client.Topic().

there was a glitch, and it would happen rather frequently. i'd be holding down the up arrow, tap the left arrow to adjust my direction, and when i let go of the up arrow i'd keep moving forwards. it wasn't always that the up arrow key would "stick", it would happen to all keys. after inserting some debugging messages in the BYOND program and in the JavaScript, it seems that JavaScript is never calling its event handlers. its not that JavaScript's call to client.Topic() fails, but that the JS is never (in some cases) making the call at all.

maybe it was just my code. so i tried loduwijk's demo from his KeyState library. it doesn't have this problem, ever. this is strange because our programs are almost identical. the JavaScript code is essentially the same, and that's where the failure seems to be.

loduwijk's demo program and my project are different, but that shouldn't really matter. his demo lets you press keys to move a mob around the screen, mine too. his, being a demo, is a little simpler than mine, but that shouldn't affect it.

did you ever find a strange bug, one with no seemingly logical explanation, so instead of logically and systematically trying to track down the problem you try what would seem to be the most random solution and by some miracle it works? well that happened here. there is one difference between my program and loduwijk's: my program displays the coordinates of your mob in the stat panel, loduwijk's does not have any stat panels. i remove the stat panel from my program, and now i cannot produce the glitch. i add a stat panel to loduwijk's program, and now his demo has this glitch. DS's stat panel is affecting the execution of JavaScript code in an HTML popup? strange indeed.

i wrote a handy autohotkey script today. in your HTML editor of choice (notepad, personally) the hotkey finds the last corresponding open tag, and if its unclosed it types out the closing tag for it.

for example:

hitting the hotkey with the cursor at the end of that chunk of HTML will type in the closing head tag, pressing it again will type the closing html tag. the purpose isn't really to close tags that would otherwise be unclosed, its just handy for saving me the hassle of typing out each closing tag hundreds of times. as long as its closing my tags, it might as well do it smartly.

also, since i do prefer notepad, the script automatically indents (somewhat) intelligently when you press enter. kind of like how DM keeps you at the same indentation when you press enter. except since its designed for javascript it recognizes curly braces and indents accordingly.

i don't have the script handy, at least not right now.