Do we as geeks/techies feel superior to the average human being? :p I was listening to the radio on the way to work today and they were talking about the Nintendo GameCube and the XBox and I was feeling amused at the mess they made trying to discuss the whole thing. One person started reading the specs and they were like “it has a 700 M-H-Z processor” (they spelt out the letters in MHz) and I was like “ah, why don’t they get somebody who know’s what the heck they’re talking about?” 🙂 Anyway, I guess it’s easy to feel superior to other people who might not know so much about tech stuff but then again, I wonder whether it is sensible to be ignorant of tech stuff in this day and age?

The game is now actually working online! I still can’t get it to work from Tripod (the browser crashes after displaying the loading message for a bit …) but it seems to work fine from Nortiq and RazorSys. I still haven’t figured out the math for making the ships move correctly but somebody online gave me some pointers which I intend to try out today and maybe it will work better. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from jugg as usual and I’ve also been thinking of making the game harder and more complicated. So if I get the ships to target the Earth correctly, then I intend to try adding another twist by making the ships shoot at the Earth as well … All in all, I’m having a lot of fun coding the game and it just got better yesterday because I found out that I can use Delphi to code for the WildTangent engine as well 🙂 So, if I get tired of Java coding and making the game online, I can always take it offline and make it a stand-alone executable …

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 🙂

I’ve always liked Billy Joel’s music ever since I heard Uptown Girl sometime way back in 1986 or so … Darn! That seems so long ago – I can’t believe that time has passed by so quickly … Anyway, I was watching Billy Joel’s “In His Own Words” yesterday and I realized why I liked his music so much – well, not exactly “realized” since I’m not sure that I can still put into words but it basically comes down to the fact that he was writing about life as he saw it and experienced it and I could relate to everything he sang about. It was a kind of nostalgic, wonderful, magical moment (or string of moments since the show lasted for two hours) and now I have this urge to listen to Billy Joel :p

In other news, I got a lot done on the game (which I’m calling “Peace Mission” at the moment even though the current incarnation is nothing like the actual game I have in mind for which the title is appropriate whereas the title is kinda unsuitable for the current implementation …) on Friday since suddenly I figured out how to solve a couple of problems which had been bugging me. Now the camera movement via mouse works fine (but keyboard movement is screwed up), I have the basic model animation working, background music and sound effects work and explosions work … So I decided to put the current implementation on the web to see if it would work. At first, I ran into problems but was able to sort them out and once everything was at least loading, I discovered that the game would crash out soon after it displayed the loading screen and I’m still not sure what the heck’s happening … If anybody wants to give it a shot, you should be able to find it here or here. I am not certain that the Nortiq link is totally updated and so the Tripod one might be your best bet … Let me know if it works for you, since it doesn’t work for me :p

I did run into one final problem – figuring out how to move an object in 3D space towards a second object. I can do the movement fine in 2D space but I guess I’ve forgotten too much about 3D geometry to do the calculations in 3D space :p I never thought I would need all the math I learnt in school but boy I sure do need it now … I did some web searching yesterday for appropriate material and found a couple of references but got busy with other stuff. I’ll eventually get the calculations straight and then the prototype should be ready to see if it actually works … Of course, then I’ll have to figure out what’s wrong with the web deployment of the game <g> If I get past both those steps, I guess I can get started on the actual game I originally envisioned …

I’ve not been working on the game I’ve been mentioning as much as I would like to – mostly because I got sidetracked by 3D Studio Max but also because I have been reluctant to get back into coding. I had originally done some work for the game using JavaScript since the engine I use, WildTangent, allows you to use a variety of languages to do the coding. But I realized after I’d done quite a bit of coding that JavaScript would basically leave my code open to the rest of the world :p So I decided to recode everything I’d done in Java as an applet but while I would often think of doing this during the last week or so, I never actually did <g> I finally decided to get off my rear-end and do it a day or two ago but it turned out to be not so easy – I should have known, right? :p I did finally got the basic stuff in place but then I’ve run into problems with the actual in game components … aargh!

I had been working till now with basic objects (like spheres, cones etc.) to represent the in game objects but now I wanted to have actual, good looking (or not so good looking since I was doing some of the models myself :p) models and then I discovered that WildTangent could only work with DirectX (.X) format models and I was doing my stuff in 3DS Max! I found a couple of freeware converters which would convert .3DS files to .X files but none of them seem to do the job perfectly and the better class converters are obviously commercial and cost a lot of money. Now I’m on a quest to find a good converter that I can use … ah the joys of working with computers :p

I got a PlayStation 2 after I came back from Sri Lanka – I’d been waiting for the prices to drop but I got tired of waiting and decided to go for it :p Maybe I should have waited since I discovered after I bought it that the new Sony DVD remote doesn’t work umm … exactly right with the model I have <g> Don’t get me wrong – the remote is great! I first tried the Mad Catz remote and that was a piece of crap compared to the Sony remote which works like a charm except for a little problem … it needs a newer version of the DVD player software (than what’s on the internal ROM I assume) and so the DVD player needs to be copied onto a memory card and the memory card needs to be always plugged in … bummer! I hear that there is a different PS2 model out there – I believe SCPH-3001R) which is supposed to not need a memory card plugged in – probably because the ROM has the updated DVD player) but I don’t have that … so I have to have a memory card always plugged in and for some reason I don’t like that 🙂

Anyway, I’d got “Dark Cloud” with my PS2 but after playing it for about a week, I found myself extremely unsatisfied <vbg> I had expected more from the game after all the hype about it being “the game to get for PS2” but I found little quirks in the graphics (like the characters in some of the cut scenes moving like puppets – you know, their feet hardly touching the ground) that I didn’t really care for. Plus, I had thought that this would be a classic RPG and was disappointed to realize that it was not – it was an Action RPG with lots of button mashing and I’m not particularly fond of that. The good news is that a lot of great classic RPG’s (like Grandia II, Grandia Xtreme and Wild Arms 3) are coming to the PS2 but the bad news is that they’re not here yet :p

In order to while away the time till all the classic RPG’s come out, I went out and got “Ico” and “Escape from Monkey Island” yesterday and I must say that I’m pretty impressed with both the titles. “Ico” has this brooding, eerie feel to it which is almost palpable and the world of “Ico” just seems to come alive as you play the game and the puzzle aspects of the game are pretty interesting – not your usual, get this key, pull this lever, open this door kind of thing. I have only played through the first level (and I hear that the game is pretty short – only about 20 to 30 hours of game play …) but so far it looks very promising. To fans of LucasArts games, it is not even necessary to say that “Escape from Moneky Island” is a great game 🙂 The humour, the characters and the settings are all back and except for the frequent stops while new scenes are loaded (and that gets to be really irritating after a while – this is where I’d like to have the built-in hard drive from the XBox :p), the game is really neat … I do wonder though, are the puzzles in this incarnation of Monkey Island easier, or is it just me?

Interesting … I’ve been using Eudora as my e-mail client ever since I got online (and that was … I think around 1994 or 1995 – wow, that’s a long time, isn’t it? :p) and while I’ve tried out almost every other client that came out, I’ve never really liked any of the alternatives. I did notice somewhere around Eudora 3.0 or 4.0 that Qualcomm was replacing the standard MAPI32.DLL with one of their own but never gave it any thought since all of my apps worked fine without a problem – that was until I decided to try ActiveSync 3.5 with Office XP installed for my iPaq. Since MicroSoft decided to do away with support for SchedulePlus in ActiveSync 3.5, I decided that I would use Outlook to maintain my contacts, tasks, notes etc. but that I would continue to use Eudora … wrong!!! :p Every time that I tried to sync my iPaq with my desktop, all the other stuff would synchronize fine but none of the Outlook stuff would work. I searched the web and the MS knowledge base to no avail – it was as if nobody except for me had ever had this problem …

I did discover along the way that if I used the repair option in Outlook (which is actually a pretty handy tool since it makes sure that all necessary components and settings are valid for Outlook and if anything is missing, re-installs it from the install CD), that the synchronization would work fine but that after a while it would stop working again. I was still at a loss as to what was going wrong when I finally stumbled upon an MS knowledge base entry which said something about replacing MAPI32.DLL and I suddenly realized where the problem was! It was Eudora!! Every time I ran Eudora after repairing Outlook, it was replacing the darn DLL file again!

I now had to make a choice as to what was most important to me – to keep Eudora as my default mail client or to have trouble-free synchronization with my iPaq. I decided in favour of keeping my iPaq synchronization healthy since I depend on the information in my iPaq a lot. The added bonus (or not – depending on how you look at it …) would be that I would only have to have one e-mail client on my machine and could uninstall Eudora. So regretfully, after using Eudora from version 1.0 under Windows 3.1 to it’s current incarnation for about seven years, I decided to uninstall it and go with Outlook. Oh the horror of it all!! :p

Of course my troubles still weren’t over since I discovered that Outlook could not import my Eudora address book and mail though it imported my Eudora profiles (I have about ten <g>) without a hitch. It could have been because I had my Eudora mail folder in a non-standard location but it still should have worked fine, right? I was again beginning to smolder when I decided to try the import option in Outlook Express and what do you know? Outlook Express imported my address book and messages just fine!! Then it was just a matter of getting Outlook to import the stuff from Outlook Express – which again worked just dandy.

So now I’m using Outlook as my e-mail client and one good thing to come out of the whole deal is the fact that I can now check my Hotmail account from Outlook itself … and since I rarely check my Hotmail account, this is a good thing because I found out that my account was getting choked with spam :p

Woke up from a series of dreams (or one long, continuous one – not sure which) which started with me being in a strange house with an aunt of mine and then the house filling up bit by bit with all sorts of people – some known to me, some supposedly known to me (I was supposed to know them in the dream but once I woke up, I had no idea who they were) and some actually known to me. It was all wild, chaotic and kinda messed up since it brought back a lot of things that I’d left behind a long time ago. I really didn’t feel like getting up and didn’t feel at all like going to work but dragged myself out of bed, got ready and left.

Big mistake!! Just as I was getting on to the highway, another car slammed into me. I did see the car coming towards me a fairly good distance behind me but since I was merging (and had my turn signal on), I thought the other car would either slow down or switch lanes. Turns out that the lady in the other car thought I was going faster than I was and so decided to stay in the same lane till the last moment and then she tried to switch lanes, was cut off and so switched back to my lane and collided with me. Nobody was hurt but my car and hers are both damaged and I decided that I wasn’t going to work since it was raining at the time and I really wasn’t sure how badly my vehicle was damaged. So I returned home and am now waiting to call the insurance people, the body shop etc. Ah well ….

I had written my last entry a couple of days ago but in the midst of that entry I ran into a weird problem with Blog – any changes to the entry would result in an Access Violation error and though I checked all the data files for corruption, there was no problem with the data files. I meant to do some debugging to find out what was wrong but then got caught up in my 3D stuff since I’m still heavily into getting back into 3D animation stuff since I’m working on the game I mentioned a while back … To cut a long story short, I didn’t look into the problem till today and while I still have no idea what caused it, I was able to fix it by copying my data file into another instance of Blog and doing a minor change and saving it and then copying the data files back to my normal Blog directory. So I guess I’m back to posting …. but not coding – at least not till I get this game done so that will be kind of out of my system :p