Had another night full of dreams – dreamt of people I hadn’t seen in many, many years, people who used to be friends, people whom I considered important at one point in my life … It was (as is usual for my dreams) a very long dream – almost a movie :p I woke up with two feelings uppermost in my mind – one was a sense of loss, of loneliness and the other was a feeling of joy due to the very positive interactions in my dreams. Thinking back on it though, the feeling of loss and loneliness prevails since I guess currently I basically find myself alone, in a country where I seem to have nothing much in common with the average person, far away from the people I grew up with and called my friends. But why delve into maudlin sentimentality? :p And no, I’m not depressed <vbg> It’s just this problem I have of getting too serious about my dreams … Or maybe it was just a continuation of last night’s “Becker” (which I actually found to be pretty hilarious but when applied to me personally, it seems not so funny – isn’t that always the case? <g>)
In “Becker”, Jake (who is blind) gets lost (somewhere in New York?) and runs into a guy named Owen who is about to kill himself. Jake gets Owen to take him back to Reggie’s diner where he usually hangs out and has a newspaper stand. There Jake, Reggie and Bob (who is another regular of the diner) try to convince Owen that he should not kill himself. The episode ended with Owen deciding not to kill himself because he finds that his life is much better than that of Jake, Reggie and Bob … I tell you it was much funnier watching it than me telling it here <vbg>
Enough of that! I did work some more on the game last evening and figured out how to get the ships to move correctly in 3D space. All I had to do was normalize the vector of each ship and get the proportionate distance for the x, y and z coordinates based on the distance the ship needed to travel – if that didn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry … it didn’t make much sense to me till I figured it out either :p Of course, I did find that this still didn’t solve my problems because I wanted to make each of the ships spin while approaching the Earth but I discovered that spinning the ships throws off the calculations and that the ships went off course :p I then realized that I might have better luck with creating a separate class to represent each ship and then creating an array of ships so that I could keep track of individual ship information and handle their positioning much more cleanly … so that’s what I’m working on now …
I guess everybody must be having problems with their browser crashing when trying to run the games off the web because jugg tried several times yesterday and had the same results as me. Of course he went a step beyond and downloaded each of the individual components and ran it from his local drive 🙂 He tells me that it runs fine then (as it does on my machine too …) and pointed out a few problems with how the game was implemented – such as the fact that bullets kept on going even after hitting a ship :p So I’ve fixed that kind of stuff and I even fixed the Earth spinning on its side <vbg> Now if I can get the ships to move towards the Earth correctly so that they actually hit the Earth instead of going off into the deeps of space, never to be seen again, I’ll be done with the first incarnation of the game 🙂
Can’t try it on the laptop (no 3D support), but might be interested in trying it on the bigger machine here. How exactly do you grab the individual components (not having tried this trick before)?
What would be really useful would be to be able to grab individual components from the shockwave web site for their games to be used offline (e.g. when travelling)…. =b