Well, I worked on my game some more this weekend, and got game save/load working without too much difficulty. Currently it allows the game to be saved at any point, which leads to some minor issues with the screen being “updated” when it shouldn’t have been yet, but for the most part that’s avoidable. Loading works like a charm as well.

I did notice that some stat keeping properties that I put on the player class aren’t being used yet, though I saved them anyways. Now all that’s left is to put the options dialog in there, and add in the sound - which I had been having troubles with, but I think I’ve figured it out now.

I suspect that I’ll launch the game officially on this site when I get back from the cruise.

I’ll post a news story here for you, just cause the headline is so funny: Legless Man Wanted in Pants Heist In other news, bald men everywhere have been stealing combs, and there’s been a rash of ice cube thefts at the North Pole.

See, you thought Frink week was done, but little did you know it had been extended yet again… “We studied traffic patterns and found that drivers move the fastest through yellow lights, so now, we just have the red and yellow lights, hu-hu-mm-hey.”

I was doing some thinking (hold your applause) about the game I’ve written - “Galactic Empires 2051 A.D.” - for those of you who knew it’s previous title, notice the change in year - It’s now set 10 years after world war 4…

Anyways, I’ve been thinking about ways that I can change/improve the game, and I think I’ve come up with a couple. They will have to wait until the first edition leaves the beta testing stage though.

Two quotes for the price of one today:
Bob: “Fleshy headed mutant, is you friendly?”
Fleshy headed mutant: “No way, eh! Radiation has made me an enemy of civilization!”

Frink of the day: “Oh. Well, to be honest, the ray only has evil applications… you know, my wife will be happy. She’s hated this whole death ray thing from day one.”

Overall a pretty relaxing Christmas. We spent most of the last 5 days at Mom & Dad’s, visiting with my aunt, her husband, and my Grandma. Other than the fact that my back has been killing me since Saturday night, everything went pretty well. I managed to cross off 7 more movies from the list of Jackie Chan movies that I don’t own - now my non-Jackie Chan DVD collection is smaller than my Jackie Chan DVD collection again.

I finally finished up the basic structure of that game I’ve been working on - it’s still pretty beta level stuff, and a couple of features need to make their way into the final product before I’ll put it up for a download. We (being my brothers and I) gave it a couple of test runs last night, and came up with some good tweaks. I think when I’m done it, it’ll be better than the original was :)

Hey, by the way, look at the bottom of this posting, bet you didn’t know it was 1899, did you? I’ll have to mention that to Fahim :)

Frink quote of the day: “I have captured the signal and am presently triangulating the vectors and compressing the data down in order to express it as a function of my hand… They’re Over There! “

Turns out the 1899 thing was partially a problem on my end, which I’ve fixed. I haven’t republished the archives yet, so you can go to the archives and see what the heck I was talking about.

Among other things, I’ve been working on a game lately. Nothing earth shaking, just a little turn based strategy game that we used to play on the Commodore 64. It was written in Basic, though I can’t find the darn thing anywhere. Anyways, I’ve finally decided to write it up for nostalgia’s sake. It’s coming along pretty well, just an hour or two from being “playable” After that, some serious tweaking will have to take place, to try and recreate the feel as faithfully as possible.

That project has been one that I’ve been meaning to do for a long long time at any rate.

The other thing I’ve got to get working on is a birthday present for Erin from a couple of years ago - That’s right, a couple of years ago. Erin’s got this tape that she likes to listen to, and seeing as it’s a one-of-a-kind tape, she’s wanted it put on CD for some time now. Well, I tried to do it back when I came up with the idea, but it wasn’t feasible. The old P200 just couldn’t handle audio capture beyond the size of available RAM - causing skips and other bad stuff in the middle of the track… Anyways, now that we have the laptop, it’s got more than enough horses to do the job. I’ve got both sides of the tape captured to the machine, now I just have to figure out the best way to reduce the noise, and clean up the sound a bit, then break it into tracks, and burn a CD. I played with some noise reduction, and wasn’t that successful, but I think part of the problem was with capture settings - I might have to re-capture the tape and start over again. Not a huge deal I suppose, but it’s got to get done :)

So, since my HD went bad last weekend, people have been backing up their stuff - not a bad idea, I just wish I wasn’t the example that reminds people to do it:)

I think I have enough time to do up a fourth stylesheet today, then I’ll put style-changing ability a little more prominently on the page, so those of you who haven’t found the links yet can get rid of the horrible default scheme :)

Oh, yeah, and Merry Christmas to all!

Frinky, you’ve done it again: “You’ve got to listen to me. Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok, in an orgy of blood and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.”

Well, I’ve been taken out for lunch the past couple of days (with today being the departmental Holiday lunch) So, that’s why no updates.

I’ve got a couple of links, but that’s all for today: This table is a bizarre oddity. Who wants to be moved nine centimeters per minute while eating?

Second, a link to the neverending online argument Which I found at another weblog that I read, Davezilla.

I see Davezilla has posted a link to the Funniest Joke in the World Announcement. Personally I find even the joke that Davezilla put in his story funnier than that one…

Frink Week will continue next week for sure… Here’s another one to tide you over: “Well, as you can see, when the burglar trips the alarm, the house raises from it’s foundations and runs down the street, round the corner to safety… well the, the real humans won’t uh, won’t burn quite so fast in there.”

Yesterday, just after I got home from work, our renter came up and gave us notice that she’s moving out at the end of the month. While we do have every legal right to require a full month’s notice, since we aren’t planning on renting it out again, we let he go with the slightly less than two weeks notice. Not really a big deal I guess.

The end result? I think I’m going to move my arcade cabinet into the second bedroom in the basement, cause it’s already wired up to the LAN, so I won’t have to deal with any of the wireless crap for the cabinet (if I ever get it finished) The only problem is that I think it might be too big to fit through the doors, so I might have to take it apart and re-assemble it in the other room. If that’s the case, I think I’ll just scrap it, and start from scratch, with the knowledge gained in the process making Cabinet V1.1 a success. My control panel already needs to be redone, so other than having to buy materials again, it shouldn’t be too big a deal. Plus, I’ll be able to set up shop in the basement and work there.

You know how I said that all the fires had been put out yesterday, and I could get back to work? Well, that wasn’t strictly true, so I was still working on little flare-ups until this morning. I still don’t know what happened to our server(s) to cause them to misbehave like they did. I think I can settle back into development mode a bit now, and hopefully the stress levels will have dropped a bit by the end of the day.

I’ve been playing Gauntlet Dark Legacy, which is just the kind of brainless action game that I needed to relax with lately. There are a couple of spots where it’s pretty tough to do single player - specifically, some of the triggers bring up bridges that stick around as long as someone’s standing on them, but as soon as you step off of the trigger, the bridge drops, and you can’t get to the bridge in time. Gotta coerce the baddies to stand still for you… It’s pretty mindless, but still fun.

I’ve got those dynamic styles working here, but I haven’t done up any new styles yet. Since I’ve got some time today, I might just do that. For now, the styles will look largely the same, just with different colors, but in the near future, I’m going to separate them out a little, so that the font style and the color style will be individually selectable by the end user (That’s you…)

What else is new? Not much. After the positive response to yesterday’s Frinkism, I will continue with Frink Week, and I might even extend it over the holidays, Frink willing.

Frink Quote of the day: “Oh my great good God! Gentleman your attention please I am detecting a gigantic amphibious life form! It’s 80 meters long and it’s heading this way Oh, good guyvin it’s on my shoe! it’s…a small frog… just get off just get off get outta—stupid machine. Oh, wait a minute, this isn’t the monsterometer, it’s the Frog Exaggerator!”