nothing to see here

warning: blog contains sharp edges

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:25:37 GMT

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.

one day left...

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:57:53 GMT

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!

people with real balls

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:14:48 GMT

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)

an interesting glitch

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 09:43:45 GMT

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.

handy ahk script

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:18:01 GMT

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:

<html>
  <head>

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.

PNGs in IE

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:00:36 GMT

http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html

i stumbled upon that site earlier today, it has a lot of neat things aside from the PNG stuff.

how does hair work in dbz?

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 11:17:09 GMT

pretty much all i know about dbz is what i've picked up from other BYONDer's conversations about it. i've been able to piece together a lot of things, but there's one thing that has particularly confused me... what's the deal with their hair when they go 'ssj'? i don't even fully know what 'ssj' is but there are apparently different levels of it and i imagine that people get more powerful at higher levels. but their hair changes color and grows excessively? does the color and amount of hair match their power? i've never quite understood that, could someone explain it to me. really, i'd like to know.

programming lol

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 14:12:35 GMT

its staggering how many people struggle to learn DM, never make anything in BYOND, and then move on to c++, VB, or some other language to work on the next smash hit 3D MMORPG. its as if they were all sleeping geniuses and one day they woke up and saw the light that is c++ and suddenly they are moving on to a more powerful programming language to make mindblowing games.

that, however, is a load of bull. anyone who "leaves" BYOND in favor of a more powerful language probably doesn't know a for loop from a hole in the ground. languages are sets of rules. languages don't have power, programmers have the power. the only "power" that c++ or VB gives you is the power to download lots of code from a quick google search. download a tutorial on directx or opengl and a demo on sockets and all of a sudden you're working on a 3D MMORPG! nevermind that the project never gets anywhere, but most projects are never finished anyway. you can blame the collapse of the project on your artist or mapper quitting and nobody will ever know the difference.

even the most complex programs are just a bunch of loops, if statements, and calculations. most programmers wouldn't be able to write those programs, so clearly there's a difference between knowing a language and knowing how to program. if you don't know how to program in DM, the light bulb isn't going to go on if you try c++ or VB. the only difference is the availability of source code on the internet so you can feel like you're accomplishing more with your failures in c++ or VB, but really you're not doing anything that you couldn't have done in DM. once you learn the rules of a language then its time to learn to program. if you instead keep moving on to new languages you might not ever learn to program.

AutoHotKey

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 01:18:46 GMT

God created the earth in six days, and then on the seventh day He rested. I suppose He was tired and needed a break. but, He wouldn't have needed to rest if He had AutoHotKey. He could have just written a script to create the world and have finished on the first day.

ok, maybe AHK isn't that awesome, but it is really neat. as i mentioned in a recent forum post and an old forum post AHK can do some really cool things to enhance your computing, and especially enhance your development environment. it may seem useless at first, but once you use it for a little while you can whip up some scripts that really come in handy.

AHK can interact with applications in many different ways, which allows for some nice scripts which enhance other programs. many of the commands are hooks to windows API calls, so the scripts are pretty quick.

.ahk files are plain-text files that are mostly script code. symbolic representations of hotkeys are placed in the script and serve as entry points into the code. when you press a hotkey, the script is executed starting at the entry point as marked by the hotkey. its easier to show than explain:

#m:: MsgBox, You pressed windows + m Return

each hotkey is followed by two colons, and # is the symbol for the windows key (all key representations are listed in the documentation). so, this script is executed when you press windows + m. it doesn't matter what application you're in, AHK will detect the keystrokes and run the script.

any code that is placed before the start of the first hotkey entry point is executed when the script is loaded. this allows you to do whatever necessary initialization you may need to do. as far as i know, all variables are global and do not need to be declared. functions may be an exception to that, but i seldomly define my own functions in AHK and i can't remember how scoping works then.

a simple (and very handy) script that i wrote a while ago contained two hotkeys, both slight variations on the same thing. when you held down a certain key combination and clicked the mouse the script would get the color of the pixel that you clicked on and copy it to the clipboard. one hotkey copied the RGB values in decimal to the clipboard and the other hotkey copied the hex values.

even if you can't think of a handy script to write, i encourage you to download AutoHotKey and try it out. some day you'll think of a neat use for it and you'll be glad to have it then.

thanks

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 01:11:35 GMT

thanks to whoever bought me another membership.

lol, i got a membership and i'm the laziest person i know.