Intentional Blankness

 You wait... time passes...

As it turns out there's been nothing much happening in this space.  Of course, there's been lots happening in the world, but I have neither taken the time nor had the motivation to write anything about it or anything else, at least not on this blog.

I do keep meaning to find some use for this blog, but again, time and motivation have been working against me.  Also, figuring out things to say takes effort and my creative efforts have been channelled elsewhere.  While none of that is likely to change much, I may nevertheless make an effort to write up some posts regarding the major project that I have been engrossed in for the last few years or so.

Maybe.

I make no promises, and it's not like I have an audience, so this is likely to be for my own amusement, whichever direction it goes.

Enough rambling for now,

Freak Out

-TFitC

A Bunch of Stuff

As I've been lazy about writing over the past few months or so I'm going to start out what might be a posting bonanza (might not actually be a bonanza) with a summary post.  I've made some convenient bolded headings that are mostly indicitive of the sections so that those reading this can skip stuff they're not interested, which might be the entire post for all I know, but oh well?

New Car Smell

Starting with a follow-up from my previous post, I submitted my order for a Model 3, two years and a day after having made the reservation in the first place.  Delivery is supposed to be in 4-8 weeks, so we'll see what happens!  I got the long-range battery (499km range) and the premium interior, because those are mandatory at the moment, and decided to get the midnight silver paint which was the only optional upgrade I went with.

Nice and NEET

I spent the first couple months of this year, more or less, as a "NEET" which stands for "Not in Employment, Education or Training".  To my knowledge, the acronym is primarily used in Japan, despite being made up of English words, and is used to refer to people who have essentially dropped out of productive society.  Not entirely applicable in my case since I was actually looking for (and eventually found) full time work - I consider those two months to have been a much needed vacation as much as anything else.

So why use the acronym if I don't think it really applied to me?  Partly because I think it makes for a clever section heading, but mostly because it ties into an anime I watched back in the fall as I was facing the prospect of, lets say, a "NEET"-like few months.  The anime was "net-juu no susume" or "Recovery of an MMO Junkie" to use the crunchyroll title.  The series is about a 30 year old woman who decided to quit a highly stressful office job and became an "elite NEET" (in her words) and play MMOs all day - and then stuff happened.  I'm not going to get into any other details here (I may write another post about it) other than to say I absolutely adored the series (one of the highlights of my week while it was airing) and it really resonated with me, and not just because it had some similarity to the situation I found myself in for a couple of months.

Project Progress

One of the main things that I occupied myself with during my NEET-like period was my FR project that I've mentioned in some previous posts.  As I had a lot of time on my hands I pushed forward with it and tried to make as much progress as I could.  And I was at least somewhat successful!  As I was musing in my final post of last year, I decided to start working towards a "demo" of the game's first area.  The first part of this was to work out the plot details of the area.  I started out working on an actual detailed script and got a decent amount written but eventually decided that I would be better served by doing something on the level of a flow chart to get the major points worked out before getting too lost in the fine details (I do that sometimes).  This met with success and I currently have a mostly finished flow chart detailing the first area - there is one small branch that still needs to be finshed but it's not high priority for now because...

Unity

...I have started learning the Unity game engine for the purposes of putting together the eventual demo.  I am currently working on creating a framework that I can use to test out ideas for the combat system.  It's going along fairly well so far though now that I'm working full time again, the majority of the work is getting done on the weekends with a bit of poking at things in the evening.  I may write some more posts about my experience with Unity in the future.

Anywho, that is the summary of things that might be coming to this space in the future.  Please look forward to it!

Freak Out,
-TFitC 

 

A Tale of Two Projects

Hello once again, people of the internets.  I bring a follow-up from my previous blog post regarding the two projects contained therein.

"Arianis lavi Moriquendi is under arrest.  We are to bring her home to face judgement.  And now we learn that the crime of shortening her name is to be added to the list of charges against her!  I fear that we may be too late to save her."

As mentioned previously, I was partaking in NaNoWriMo (continuing the project of about six years ago).  I decided from the start that I was not going to aim for the full 50 000 words due to not really having the time and instead aim at 25 000 words, a sort of mini (or chibi, if you will) NaNoWriMo.  My final total was a word count of about 25 400 words, so success (or Qapla', if you will) on that front.

I have also been continuing to work on the second draft of the outline for my FR project.  I am happy to say that that too has been successfully completed as of today.  So, yay!  It is now at a point where I feel I can (and should) start delving into the details, though I have to decide how to approach developing a detailed game script.  I'm considering the possibility of focusing on the first area and maybe trying to build some sort of demo for it.  Decisions, decisions!

Well, that is something for another day.  For now I bid thee farewell.

Until next time,
-Freak Out

Orthogonal Projections

Greetings interwebs.  Today I bring you an update on a couple of projects that aren't The Word Smith (with any luck it will hopefully resume early-ish in the new year).

First, that long running project - lets call it FR for short, if I haven't already - that I've commented on in my last couple of posts.  I'm currently about 3/5 of the way through the second draft of the outline.  The goal of this draft is to expand slightly on the details of the notewall draft, specifying some additional details without getting too deep into the nitty gritty.  This draft is being done the old fashioned way with paper and pencil.  A picture of a couple pages of my notebook is below, featuring my lovely handwriting.

Isn't it lovely?

The other project that I wanted to comment on today is a writing project, so no pictures for it.  I've decided to do some NaNoWriMo writing this year.  I'm not planning or expecting to hit the 50 000 word mark (which I did manage on my previous attempt - back in 2011) since I've got too many other things that a want (and in some cases need) to do that I'm unwilling to put on hiatus for a month.  Basically, I'm using this as motivation to do some writing and continue on with my previous NaNoWriMo project.  I've currently written about 8000 words and if I manage to keep up my current pace I'm hoping to make it to about 25 000 words by the end of the month.  We'll see how far I get and perhaps I'll write another update at the end of the month.

And that is all for today, interwebs.

Until Next Time,
-Freak Out

Getting Drafty

The Word Smith is still on hiatus.  Today we here at The Freak Report bring an update to the previous post regarding one of my long running projects.  In the previous post I showed off the start of a note wall that I had put together in an effort to help move the project along.  I am happy to say that the note wall is now complete!

Well, it would be more accurate to say that the first draft is complete.  Regardless, this still represents a notable step forward and is somewhat of a momentous occasion.  This draft represents what I think is the first complete draft of the game since its very early versions, but those early versions were so long ago that I don't remember how complete they actually were and I suspect that they may have been missing some details.  (I could probably still dig up my old notes and check but I suspect that may be an exercise that wouldn't really interest anyone other than me.)

There are two main things to do next.  One is to potentially revise the draft and tweak things and whatnot.  The other is that the above draft represents one particular path through the game.  I intend to make it possible to visit at least some of the areas in the order of the player's choosing so I need to create alternate paths through some areas as they may change depending on the order in which they are visited - this is the next task that I will likely undertake.

And now without any further commentary, here are close-up shots of each area, presented in the order that the current draft  intends them to be visited in.

 Until next time,
Freak Out
 -TFitC

Projections

The Word Smith is still on hiatus, for the one or two of you out there who might actually care (in much the same way that one views an annoying relative).  I have been meaning to do a write-up of one of the projects that was responsible for pushing The Word Smith onto the back burner, namely a 2D sidescroller:

However, that project has already received a write-up here so there doesn't seem much point to dedicating a full blog post to it.  I'll only add that the scope of the project was never meant to be a full game, rather it's more a coding demo for use in my job search and an opportunity to learn some new things.  At most I intend for it to be a single level, though how much further it goes might depend on how the job search works out.

Instead, today, I thought I'd say a few things about a much older project, one which I think it's finally time to try and turn into some sort of reality.  The project has been rather long running (though it has seen long periods in which nothing much happens on it) and to try and move things forward I've put together a note wall:

The goal of this is to help to visualize an overview of the entire plot and it also puts it somewhere where I can't help but look at it on a daily basis which will hopefully force me to set aside some time to work on it at least semi-regularly.  I made a similar sort of note wall for working out the plot outline for The Word Smith and it seemed to be useful.  Note that the creatively named "Final Area" is currently blank - that's one of the parts of the game that have never received much attention.  Whenever I resolve to make progress on the darned thing I always seem to start from the beginning which means that the first two or three areas have seen several revisions at this point with much less for the last couple.  Also, any resemblance the blue post-its have to the outline of a fish is purely coincidental; the individual post-its each represent a location and are arranged roughly geographically within each area.

Here is a close up of the "Terdain" area which is the game's first area:

So with any luck this setup will help me make some progress.

Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Lets Get Digital (digital)

I set aside some time over the weekend to finish the digital version of page 3 of the mini-comic, shown below on the left to show off my photoshop n00bness in all its glory. For comparison, the hand drawn version is on the right. One thing to point out is that readers will notice that a couple of panels in the digital version are missing backgrounds. That's because I decided to add in those backgrounds after I'd scanned in the original pencils. The background for the panel in the lower left corner was also added after scanning originally, but I decided to draw it in the digital version in photoshop since it counterbalances the panel in the upper right.

Left: digitally inked version of page 3; Right: hand inked version. (Gah... you'll probably have to click on the right hand image to see all of it 'cause blogger's too narrow. Oh well. Also grr... I just noticed I forgot to colour in the Word Smith's mask in one panel of the digital version. Oh well. Not going to worry about it now!)

I also ended up leaving the pencils in the digital version since I decided I was too lazy to remove them (plus I screwed up a bit and drew some stuff on the background layer so I couldn't just go and delete it... oops) so you can see some of the pencil drawings underneath.

This now officially concludes the mini-comic project, though I seem to be having some bad thoughts... I've had various random ideas related to continuing the project (such as the Word Smith's origin story) so I might actually do some more with it. We'll see, I guess...

Freak Out,
-TFitC

The Epic Conclusion!

Here, at last, is the fourth and final page of my mini-comic project:

Won't say too much more beyond that, as the process was the same as the previous two pages. With this page, the project is now complete - a rare finished project for me! I guess I still need to do the digital version for page 3 (and maybe page 4 as well), but that's a side thing. I'll probably do a follow-up post in the near future to sum up my thoughts on the whole project, but for now I'll just say - it was fun!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

P.S.

The mini-comic is also available, sequentially, at this location.

Three Down, One to Go!

Well, almost a month (yikes!) after page two, here is page three of the mini-comic!

Everything was done by hand, same as for page two. I'm also working on a digitally inked version of page three, but in the interest of getting the entire mini-comic complete before the end of the summer I'm going to be focusing on finishing the fourth and final page before spending much time on the digital version of page three, but it'll be posted for comparison whenever its finished.

Now, if I ever want to do a longer-term project than this, I've got to get faster than a measly one page a month!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Page Two

Page two of the mini-comic is complete! There's not really much to say about this one. The main difference between page two and page one is that I did every thing for page two by hand, including lettering - and I apologize for making everyone read my hand writing. I also inked a larger percentage of the page with the brush this time, but otherwise my process was pretty much the same as for page one. Some things didn't turn out like I'd hoped, but, well, I guess that's part of the learning experience. Anyway! This means I'll be starting page three in the near future - guess I'm about half way done!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Character Design Part 4

This is the last part of the character design for my mini-comic: one of the waitresses at the Street Meet Cafe (rough sketch below).

I actually ended up putting the character into the first panel of page 1 which was not originally planned so I did the quick rough sketch while in the process of drawing that panel. The more detailed design was not done until more recently. For the purposes of this project, the character is a minor one, but there's an off chance she'll become more important should I decide to continue this project (most certainly not a guarantee or anything) so I did a bit more of a detailed design than my other minor characters.

The "action" pose was meant to be some sort of discus throw type thing, but didn't really turn out how I wanted. That's a problem - I'm not really particularly good at doing action-y poses, but I suppose one of the points of this project is to get some practice at things like this. The above version is actually the second attempt - I erased the original pose and redrew it. The second one turned out better, even if it still wasn't really what I was trying for.

I also ended up doing another quick sketch with another variant on the pose. I think I like this one better (for the most part), even if it still needs work!

Lastly, I also did a quick sketch on an alternate design of The Word Smith's mask (it's actually loosely based on the logo for the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds concerts):

And that's it for character design! Since I don't expect that the process for the remaining pages will be much different from the first page, I'm not likely going to do any in-progress posts like I did for page one and will just post the remaining pages as I finish them. Not having a deadline like I did for the first page, the other pages might take a while, but we'll see!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Balloons and Bonus Content

Welcome back! Yesterday, I finished off the first page of my comic experiment! Ok, well, I actually technically made some last minute dialogue changes today, but the important stuff all got done yesterday.

The final step was to add panel borders, word balloons and dialogue which was done digitally in Illustrator:
I actually had the comic page underneath all that as I was putting it in so I wasn't guessing where to put things. I used the method that Scott McCloud presented in a recent tutorial. A little bit tedious, but not too bad once you get the hang of it.

And here is the final page, all put together:

And here are some links to a larger and even larger versions, for those interested in taking a closer look.

Finally, here's a couple of extra sketches I did as part of the CGL presentation:

Hard at work.


In a flurry.

Well, that's all for page number one! It's certainly been an interesting experience and a chance to learn some new things (like inking). I guess I'll start working on page two at some point, though since I don't have a deadline for it (like with this page) I don't know when it will get done. I'll just keep plugging away and it'll be done eventually!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Inkblots

I finished inking the comic page over the weekend:

Converted it to a duo-tone image after scanning it to enhance the black-and-white-ness of the page. Inking was done in a mix of pen, marker and acrylic paint (brushing). I have a set of four "art pens" in 0.1mm, 0.3mm, 0.5mm and 0.7mm thicknesses which I've had since my undergrad days. I was a little worried they might have dried up by now, but they seem to be in working order. The marker is a twin-tip sharpie (a "fine" tip and a wedge tip). The brushwork was done with the smallest red sable brush I could find and some black acrylic paint.

My original intent was to primarily ink the page using pen, with marker to fill larger areas, and then experiment with the brush on some of the smaller panels (the character close-ups). I followed that plan for the first two panels. I experimented with the brush as planned for the character close-ups. A very quick search on the internet suggested that acrylic paint could be used either as-is or by diluting with water. I tried it "as-is" at first, but found it was too thick and kind of clumpy and hard to get any really thin lines. So then I decided to add some water and everything went so much smoother! I ended up liking how the brush was working so much that I did the characters and foreground for all the remaining panels and just used pen for the background, anything I need to use a ruler for and some of the fine details.

Overall, fairly happy with how things turned out though I really need to work on drawing shadows as the ones I attempted turned out not so great.

Currently working on adding panel borders and word balloons so the next update should be the final version of page 1!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Pencil Pushing

Continuing on with my comic project, I finished the penciling for the first page - voila!

Drawn on a 28cm x 35.5cm piece of bristol board using a mechanical pencil. Lots of smudging going on, but that seems to be par for the course when working with pencil, at least for me.

The whole process took a bit longer than I'd been expecting. When I've drawn in the past, it's usually been limited to one or two characters standing in fairly neutral poses and not interacting with anything. Drawing actual scenes where characters need to be interacting with objects and, to an extent, with each other is quite a bit different! Not to mention, there's a lot more potential detail that goes into drawing a complete scene. Additionally, attempting to draw in something vaguely resembling correct perspective is not something I've really done before and I've probably made lots of mistakes. I should probably do some perspective exercises sometime to try and get a hang of things.

The first panel probably took the longest to draw overall, seeing as it's the largest and probably also most detailed. The last panel also ended up taking longer than expected as it was giving me lots of trouble, though mostly that was due to perspective issues.

The next step in this whole process is inking the page which is venturing into completely new territory for me. I don't think it'll take as long overall as the penciling did, but we'll see!

Ultimately, I think everything's on track to be ready for my tech talk next week, so we'll see how it all goes.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Stuff I Want to Do

I guess I'm one of those people who never seems to have enough time to do everything that they want to do, though I'll freely admit that I don't always make as good use of my time as I should (or could). It also doesn't help that I'm constantly coming up with new things to work on and never actually finish many of my projects, so things end up kind of piling up. (I am referring to personal projects here, not school or work related things.)

With less than a week until FASS is over for another year, I expect to be having at least a bit of extra spare time to do stuff in, so in an attempt to focus my efforts on a small number of projects I thought I'd try blogging about them. Not that I really expect this to make me get stuff done, but at least it'll give me something to write about (and my small number of readers something to read about) other than the usually complaining about TAing and marking and stuff.

Anyway, on to the stuff! (In no particular order.)

QRT

My current programming project which I blogged about in my previous post. There's not really anything to say about it at this point beyond what I've already said about it so I'll just say that I plan to continue working on it.

Writing

I do like to write and I sometimes think that I'd like to try my hand at writing a novel - not that I really care if it were to get published or not, but I'd like to at least write one! I missed NaNoWriMo due to being embroiled in FASS edits, so I'm planning on picking a month (likely March) for my own personal NaNoWriMo. We'll see how that goes. Though I'm going to continue beyond just one month if necessary.

Comic

I'd also like to try my hand at making my own comic. This is something which will also be a useful experience for my research. I've got some ideas for a short 3-5 page test comic which I will probably get started on shortly after FASS finishes. I plan to document the process so there's bound to be more posts on this topic in particular on my blog. I also want to get back into the habit of drawing more so this will give me a nice focused outlet for that.


Those are the main projects I'm planning on focusing on, in addition to my PhD research, of course. Expect to see posts on these in the future, depending on progress.

Freak Out
-TFitC

A Look at QRT

After threatening several times, I'm finally going to sit down and blog more about my QRT project.

So what is QRT? In short, QRT stands for "Quasi RPG Toolkit" and is a project I've been working at off-and-on for the past couple of years (already? gee...) which will (hopefully) eventually become an integrated set of tools for creating RPGs in the style of what one might have seen on the SNES, back in the day, like Final Fantasy VI, for example.

This makes it similar in its goals to the RPG Maker series of editors, for those who are familiar with them. So why, one might ask, make my own version of RPG Maker? Other than simply "because I feel like it", basically, I have several ideas for improvements over the RPG Maker series that I think would be, well, improvements, especially in the areas of flexibility and customization. I think it's also a good programming and design exercise.

The QRT project also serves as a sort of updated version of my FR project. Not only is QRT much, much, much better designed, it's also much more flexible and, more important, reusable which my much older and inferior FR code-base would not have been.

Without going into too many details, let's do a brief overview of what I've done so far and what I'll be working on in the near future. (Note that the graphics in the screen shots were downloaded for use with RPG Maker 2000 from various RPG Maker fan sites and are serving, for the moment, simply as placeholders. The plan is to eventually replace these with original graphics.)Above is the main editor window. I had a map editor for FR, but it was *only* for map editing. The QRT editor will be an integrated editor for maps, scripting and the like - as one would expect from any sort of modern development toolset.

One of the ways that I am making QRT more flexible that the RPG Maker counterpart is including a tileset layout editor to allow users to create custom tileset layouts, unlike RPG Makers' pre-defined layout (to the best of my knowledge). It is also possible to use a different layout for each map in a project, if desired. One of the things that I am currently working on is improving the "auto-tiling" feature (used to automatically draw terrain feature like deserts, swamps, rivers or whatnot) to allow the use of animated tiles in all auto-tiling groups. (RPG Maker 2000 only allows animated tiles in auto-tile groups for its special water/shore groups - I don't like the rectilinear shorelines that it limits you to.)

Another customization feature is the inclusion of custom created fonts. Fonts can be created from scratch or can be based on any installed Windows font (though the import function still needs some work).

Scripting in QRT is initially going to be via a point-and-click script interface (as I feel this is easier for novices to pick up), but I plan to eventually include an actually scripting language as well (probably Python, but we'll see when I get to that). Another feature that I'm planning for scripting is a scripting API which I'm calling "Quartic" - QUAsi Rpg Tools Interface Component. The plan is to allow users to develop scripting plug-ins for custom functionality.

Above shows a (very simple) text box showing the font display and colouring at work. This is the (humble) beginnings of the in-game UI. My plans for the UI is to make it highly customizable, including a UI layout editor as part of the QRT editor. I hope to make it fairly easy to create custom game UI (which will help give each QRT game a unique look and feel). While custom UI can be make in RPG Maker, it's very inconvenient, not to mention tedious.

So far, QRT is coming along slowly, but, I suppose, somewhat steadily. As far as important functionality goes, it's roughly equivalent to where I had FR all those years ago but, as mentioned, much better designed and ultimately more flexible, powerful and reusable. At the moment, my focus is on revisiting some of my existing features and improving and/or simplifying them before continuing on with the scripting and UI systems.

I may eventually post more as I continue to progress on the project.

Freak Out
-TFitC

Blog to the FUTURE

With this post we're going BACK IN TIME to late summer 2009 when, on a whim, I decided to port my unfinished game project (from back in highschool) from ancient C/DOS to a more modern Windows-based C#/XNA app. I'd been meaning to blog about the results for some time, but just never got around to it.

Welcome to The Final Reality

The project was (still is, I suppose) meant to be a parody of the Final Fantasy series in particular and of RPGs in general. The graphics were all created by me (and, I admit, they're not particularly fantastic) though were sometimes based on other things. However, I'm not going to talk much about the game itself or its storied history. Rather, I'm going to talk about how much my coding sucked back in highschool and some about the porting process. Though I will include lots of screenshots. Yay!

A googly-eyed alien, though he doesn't seem the friendly sort.

Porting from C to C# wasn't too hard, over all. I had to make some changes to from the DOS-based "I get the whole machine to myself so I don't have to play nice" approach to the multi-tasking based Windows approach, but that went fairly smoothly. I was able to poach some code from my QRT project to handle rendering, so that was fairly easy as well. The first main challenge I came across was that I had the wrong version of the code.

It'll make you glow. Blue magic does silly stuff like that. And yes, the menu is supposed to be aged dot-matrix printer paper.

Somehow, I seem to have lost the most recent version of the code which was missing some things like object animations (which I put back in) and some menu and inventory stuff (which I did not). This caused a problem because the data files were for the most recent version of the code (I still have a working version of the most recent executable...)

Somebody seems to have left their tie hanging on the wall of this cave.

This caused a problem because, in the main program file, there is what is called a "magic number" hard coded telling the game the position in the data file where it should start loading from when the game first starts and, because the version of the code I had was out of date, this number was wrong, thus resulting in reading essentially random junk from the data file.

The Tower of Harmony: what's with all the musical instruments laying around?

Fortunately, once I'd diagnosed the problem, I had enough of my old notes from highschoool sitting around (I am something of a pack rat) that I was able to deduced what the correct magic number was supposed to be. But this is a somewhat extreme example of one of the things that was horrible about my coding back then: way too many things hard coded. I've gotten much, much better about this over the years.

The clinic in the Elf Town. The names of the Elves in the clinic were taken from Tolkien's elvish languages and all mean things like "sickly" and so forth.

Other problems with my code were, perhaps, less severe but still annoying. My style was poor, formatting was bad, comments were lack luster or missing altogether, things were not nearly as organized as they should have been. Again, I've improved greatly in these areas over the years. I think switching to object-oriented languages like C++ and C# have helped tremendously and, these days, I put a lot more effort into structuring and organizing my code well.

In the music club The Wailing Cat. For some reason, the idea of cats being famous musicians amuses me.

As mentioned, some restructuring of code needed to be done in moving from a DOS to Windows based environments, but I was able to borrow some of my code from my QRT project so that made the switch fairly easy. However, since in C#, everything has to be in a class (unlike C/C++ which can have free floating functions), some extra restructuring was needed. I had originally thought of actually reorganizing everything so that it was actually well coded, but quickly decided this wasn't worth the effort. Essentially, each code file became its own class with all public members for easy access. (Don't worry if you don't understand the programmer-speak, the main thing is I took the easy way out since I wasn't going to do anything with the code beyond a simple port.)

The Dwarvish Pizzaria. In FR, dwarves are master chefs. Note the menu says "FR Combo" and the tray (lower right) reads "Quasi". I put several tidbits like that into the graphics.

Back when I was creating all the graphics, data files and whatnot, I had several independent tools for creating various resources - a graphics editor, map editor, item and dialog editor (which I think were just programs with the data hard coded that then wrote data files) - which I then assembled via a semi-automatic resource compiler (I still had to input several things manually). It was all rather archaic. This is one area where the QRT project is definately going to improve upon by having a whole integrated IDE and overall much more data driven approach which will make creating RPGs much easier (not to mention everything will be much more reusable).

Spelunking in an ancient mine.

One other thing that did give me a bit of a problem when porting was with text and dialog. Back in the DOS days (and even up until more recently), text was commonly just 8-bit ASCII by default. In C#, everything is unicode by default. This caused a bit of a problem because I was using certain ASCII codes to represent special symbols (item icons, for example) which didn't always translate as expected in unicode. So I had to put special checks in for some symbols, but I don't think I caught them all because the port occasionally crashes when opening certain treasure chests. Oops.

The graphics for house interiors were based on the house I lived in at the time. That's the clock I made in shop class.

That's really all I have to say about my little porting project and the crappiness of my coding back in highschool. As I've said, I've improved a lot since then (lots of additional experience under my belt) and my QRT project, as a result, will be much better designed and will be much more flexible and will be capable of a lot more overall.

A multi-layered tech dungeon. I liked multi-layered maps. Note the Star Trek styled replicator thing.

Hopefully I haven't bored anyone who's bothered to read this too much (I hope the pictures helped!), I've blathered on so long basically as an excuse to use as many screen shots as possible. I've mentioned QRT a few times and I'm still planning on blogging specifically about that project, eventually, whenever I get around to it. Until then, I'll just leave you with a few more screen shots.

In town, even pedestrians have to obey stop signs. Anachronism? What's that?

In the tech dungeon it's Quasi Cola! One of those little tidbits. Not sure why since I don't actually like cola that much.

A hallway in The Wailing Cat. The picture on the left is supposed to be me. The other picture says "Quasi".

Again in The Wailing Cat. For some reason, I seem to have made a point of including bathrooms in the game.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

(I should probably say something about images being copyright by me, yada yada, wheretofore and hereunto.)

In The Works

Over a year ago, in my comic-based post (which I really should do again some time), I mentioned my QRT project and implied that I would write more about it in the "near" future. Well, it's been a while and the post has not yet appeared. And before anyone gets their hopes up, this isn't that post either.

However, I have been making progress on the project and recently got to the point where I can now script talking to NPCs - sort of. I haven't implemented the conversation system that I plan to do eventually, so for now it's really just displaying simple text boxes but hey, it's something! This also means that QRT can almost do everything that FR could back in highschool, and is much better implemented and far more flexible to boot. So, yay!

I shall no doubt talk more about this "soon" (possibly more than anyone really wants to hear about) and hopefully "soon" will actually mean soon, this time, and not a year or more.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Up For Air

So, not much has been happening here lately, it seems, or nothing worth flogging about, at any rate. The course projects for my last two courses were finished up at the end of last month and they were eating up much of my time. Since then I've spent a couple weeks taking it easy and not thinking about projects at all. But now that some time has passed, I've put together a web page for the non-photorealistic rendering project which I alluded to previously.

The images can be viewed at the results page and, for those who are so inclined, some of the technical details are on the main project page.

Now I'm getting back into the swing of things, focusing on research and also continuing my work on the QRT project again, which I still haven't blogged about though I've been meaning to. Well, sooner or later.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Status Update

Over the past few weeks I've been madly at work on my two course projects. Should I ever be in the position again where I need to take any courses I must remember NOT to take more than one project course per term. These things have a way of eating up all available time. Anyway, I'm almost finished - the projects are due by the end of day tomorrow (Wednesday). After that, I think I'm going to declare myself to be on a two week vacation since I've been work at least a little bit most days these past few weeks and I could use a break (not all on projects mind you as I did lose a few days to proctoring and marking - not fun). I'll blog some more about the individual projects once they're officially done, but for now here's a preview:

Also, it seems that the 'S' key on the USB keyboard that I use with my laptop has become terminally non-functional meaning I'll have to get a new keyboard in the near future. Ah well.

Freak Out,
-TFitC