Maybe you represent the Mac, Linux, or Windows XP Evangelists, or are part of the Holy Crusade Against Microsoft, but Windows Vista just isn't as evil as you'd like it to be.
I've heard plenty of reasons not to convert to Vista, but the sad thing is, none of them are even close to rational.
Some of the great yarns somebody is spinning include
Continue Reading »
I mentioned that I'd be playing with C# and games using the XNA library.
Well, it turns out, its not very easy to redistribute XNA games at the moment….you have to redistribute the code, so that your 'target' can compile it and play it on their computer.
Not so fun.
I've now begun working on a "raw" DirectX implementation of the Pong game I made (once I do a few tutorials on DX), and then I'll start porting my Snake code from Turbo Pascal.
I decided to get chickz0r a Canon Powershot S3 IS as her Christmas/Birthday present.
First, we (mother and I) went to JB. A Whirlpoolian reported that they would price match from MSY (cheapest I could find it).
"Sorry, no can do, that's well below cost price. If you get it from them, its a grey import, etc etc"
Then, Teds Camera's "….haha we'd be out of business in a week if we sold it at that price"
Then, Harvey Norman. Guy says "eh, okay, sure. Lemme ring them up"
<insert 5mins waiting time>
"They didn't have any."
"Try CPL?"
<insert 5mins waiting time>
"none either" (Although, 9:30pm the night before, CPL responded via email that they had a few in stock…)
Disheartened, we walk away, go to the JB near that HN (JB may or may not have called them up, so that was our reason for trying), but called MSY first.
They had 2.
So we go back to Harvey Norman (and after explaining what had happened…three times)
"MSY eh? Did you use a special password to get these prices?" (Obviously he knows MSY, and that they used to have such a thing)
"No?"
"Uhm, well…we can't price match, its below cost"
"But you can price match?"
"Technically…but…I don't want to say anything I shouldn't. Let me just see"
<walks away/walks back>
"Lemme just get one from out the back"
In the end, we got the camera from Harvey Norman, which was fantastic (price-wise).
This 'story' was delayed a few weeks, because I couldn't blog about it until I gave the present to chickz0r! ;)
I know the latter was more fun to make ;)
One of Word Press' greatest features is its comment spam detection features, which picks up people spamming their website to attract visitors. Often its penis enlargement spam.
I've had a few…interesting ones of late..
Yes, that's right, Google is apparently spamming me?
It turns out its the IP that's the advertisement. Its a little weird, its spam designed to be picked up as spam, so that the blog owner will check out the IP (its a porn site).
A novel approach for an over flooded market I guess…
The Wii rocks, okay?
First Andrew came around with his on launch day - I still thought it was fantastic. My sister played just one game of tennis, and she was trying to encourage me to go down and pickup my pre-order.
A few days later (the Sunday after), Ryan comes around with his Wii, and we played on it from ~3pm->11pm.
My mother got a shot.
Despite adamantly telling me I was not to get my Wii before Christmas, after that, she told me I could. The Wii is so fun it had my mother in hysterics while playing.
I only have WiiPlay and WiiSports, but they are some of the most enjoyable 'multiplayer' games around.
Wii will, wil will rock you indeed.
I started with University of Texas' CS105 Assignment 1, and wrote Boggle.
Its not perfect, or very well written, but I was just getting the basics, and couldn't care less about refining it.
Then I followed LearnXNA's tutorial on creating Pong.
Its very basic - no score counting, not much in the way of difficulty increases, etc. They could all be added, but I'm worrying more about learning the means to make a game, rather than tweak said built game.
I used my 'own' collision detection method, which brought back memories of my version of Snake (Snake 2K1 I think I called it) that I wrote in Turbo Pascal 6 for a Year 10 programming class at Melbourne High.
If I can find that, I'll be sure to convert it ;)
Update: I've found it (funnily enough, in my Document/Programming/Pascal/ folder), and it was Snake 2K+1!
I'll look at the code, see if I can figure out what I was doing (I wasn't big on comments back then…), and try and convert it when I get back from my trip
I'm 'over' sprite based games, I might try my hand at some sort of 3D Game (or at the least "move X object around Y scene with the arrows and mouse")
LazyScroller is updated to v0.5, as well as creating a project page for it.
Changes:
I've moved from Fuyucorp to Dreamhost, to match with my other web stuff (anonymoose, anzgw, anzfury).
If you see this post, your DNS is up to date. If you don't, your DNS is behind?
I've been slowly starting to learn C#. I really like the look of .NET2.0, and .NET3.0 is looking even better with WPF.
Microsoft have some great tools for .NET 3.0, or more specifically XAML based interfaces.
XAML is eXtensible Application Markup Language, which allows you to design/define your interfaces for applications much like HTML (poor example, but it works).
The big thing about this is that you can get much much prettier interfaces, with less effort.
Expression Blend is a XAML Designer (its 'sort of' like Adobe Firehand meets Visual Studio), which integrates tightly with Visual Studio, allowing you to very rapidly develop a very polished product.
I might do a few of the included tutorials and modify them to put online.
However, I'm also interested in XNA, the framework that allows you to develop games easily using .NET for both Windows and XBox 360.
Okay, sure, I lack an XBox360, but the potential! Think of the potential!
I've just downloaded XNA Game Studio Express to evaluate, to see if this is the sort of thing for me or not ;)
