AFV: Hail of Gunfire

Here's the announcement of my latest game. 138 levels of Shoot Em' Up mayhem!

On Google Play

AFV

After heavy coding this weekend, I have a good beginning on my next project which is in spirit a sequel to FlaTank. View this:

 

 This game uses hardware acceleration and it is enjoyable to stream bullets and rockets out at a high rate of speed.

PC Rejuvenator

Computer repair in Colorado Springs- www.pcrejuv.com

I know the guy personally and he's cheaper than the other guys and seems to know what he's doing. He also can convert nerd or geek speak in English the rest of us can understand.

Flatank Prime Now Free!

Just like FlaTank Prime but free! GO GET IT!

On Google Play

I'm giving away my password.

Leading up to big moment of password disclosure with a sentence like this has a purpose beyond what it appears to be- namely to garner suspense. The real reason for this wind up will be made known shortly as these first two sentences are merely filler like one would use in high school when told to write a 500 word essay. This is difficult when you only have a paragraph of substance. That's not why I am doing it, either.

I just didn't want a preview to show I was not giving away my whole password or even telling you which on on the source page was mine. This the google plus preview(or search engine preview) of this post doesn't see the misleading nature of the title. The first few words might have caused you not to click on the post.

Anywho, part of my password is one of these posts:
http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html
http://www.ericfay.me/blog/3

I think I put this in the draft for my own purposes:
http://mylikes.com/

Next Project!

 

Below here is the original post about a project I have abandoned due to lack of skill and/or interest:

Check out my new site!

Holy crap! I am very excited about my next project. There is nothing like it- the combination of two very popular genres. But, I'm not tellin what it is!

WHY NOT?!

Because it may just be a knee jerk reaction to the idea and it may prove to be more than I am willing to do.

THEN WHY POST ABOUT IT AT ALL, YA DOOF?

Because, I'm excited about it and no one is paying attention anyways! Hahahaha! It has something to do with SteamPunk.

Update 15feb:
 I'm not nearly as excited as before. I spent about a week studying the artform and then I had some dental work done which didn't go well. I've been practically incapacitated since then and that was about a week ago. All the Ibuprofen I was taking was making me sick.

I have a job I need to work on first and after I'll start flipping bits for the next game.

vBonsai -Video Tutorial at the Bottom!

A menacing looking vine grown on my phone from an algorithm I wrote for my next android app:

 Here is the same algorithm with branches, texture, and leaves!

I drew the leaves in Microsoft Paint, but the bark is real bark from a picture edited in Gimp for the shadow, seamlessness, and color(And you can't see if from here but the bark of that tree was covered in cicadas). Note the draw function knows when to 180 the shadow in the right direction so shadows aren't on the top of the branches.

Not all of the trees look this good. Many are scraggly or unbalanced. Meh, it's a work in progress!

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST! Got the gameplay mapped out.

You will grow your tree from a seed and care for it and shape it to your whim using real(virtually) bonsai techniques. Watering and feeding schedules will be determined based on seasons and whether or not the tree is in training(stress) and health, etc

Most recent emanation: 

Whew! The trimming algorithm was difficult!

...well not the trimming part but rearranging the database after removing tree cells from it to make room for more to grow. My phone starts to lag when the database has more than 5000 cells so I made that the limit on which the total allowed biomass is calculated.

Watch for a demo video in the next few days.

Clipping demo is still in the works, but the schedule menu is almost done- and some sound effects. Health and stress coding is next and after that, game menu or wiring functionality and music. I have decided there won't be background music per se, but rather one or two chords on a koto during growing.

I built the health gauges last night and made a video showing trimming. Tonight, I will make leaves die based on the health of the tree working ultimately up to the dramatic death of the tree(should the player neglect it)

Now, when the gauge goes outside desirable parameters, dead foliage appears and I have built a small help file. An online leader board is in the works where you will be able share your tree and see the trees of others. Several categories of leaders will be included. Save image function has been added and is working just fine! It saves an image of your tree centered without all the game play graphics such as the buttons, score, etc.

Here is a 300 year old tree I grew today:

Here is a before/after of a tree's death:

 !

It's been a while since my last update because BlackBerry had a port-a-thon I participated in. I cranked out 6 more apps for Black Berry 10 last week so I didn't have much time to work on this project.

However, tonite I added some koto music and it gives a nice feel to the growing sequence- a far cry from the disturbing deathscene. Only a few more things on my to do list and this sucker will be done.

I had quite a bit of difficulty getting my leaderboard working. This one shows the name of the player, their score, age of the tree and the picture of the tree. You can see a nuts and bolts page here. The final page won't have much more on it, but what what you see there is live and gets updates when my phone gets a high score.

A poor video of a cool effect doesn't do it justice without sound but here it is:

I'm setting the release date at Friday January 18th, 2013. Monday January 21th, 2013

Today!

Search for it on Google, BlackBerry10, and Amazon.
Hall of Fame- needs repair.

For ranking reasons, I named it Bonsai Bliss on Google Play.

Here's the long awaited tutorial!

 

Some Mornings I Just Don't Feel Like Slaying Dragons.

I read that on a bumper sticker the other day and the last three days have been awful days. I had to drive 70 miles an hour on Platte to keep up with that dude to snap this picture(the sticker in question is the one closest to me):

Brace yourself because I think this post is mostly just a bunch of pictures. Here you see an axe head that broke in half when I was splitting wood for a client. You can see the piece that broke off laying there in the sun:

While working in the back yard the day before yesterday, I heard a strange noise. Looking over the fence I discovered that I was an auditory witness of a car accident so I jumped the fence and walked over there to find out some stuff:

The chic was driving when her husband told her he wanted a divorce so she swerved wildly and took out this light pole which I didn't even know was on that corner:

Tonight, I finished a commission gig for a dentist in Florida. She will be using cheap android tablets as status boards. So if you are in Exam Room 1 with a patient, you hit the corresponding button and that button lights up on all the other devices on the network. Pretty spiffy! You can see it running on four different devices here:

Final design looks like this:

 Designed after this:

I took both of these pictures this morning. The first one shows a bird on a light. Note that the teardrop shape part of the light is roundabout 2 feet long so that bird is friggen large. He or she could carry a small child methinks. The second depicts a nastygram on a door where an eviction occurred.

I made it 41 years without ever being sting by a bee. Wednesday that long streak was broken and I partook of three bee stings- one is on my head above my eye. That one swelled up like Rocky Balboa. I took not a picture! I may be mildly allergic because I still feel dreadful. If I still look like ass in the morning, I may share photographic evidence on the morrow! Or not.

Scatological Palette Sensation is Often Indicative of the Presence of Corn and Peanuts.

Move along- nothing to see here.

Marital Bliss

"You can't drive around with a black widow spider behind your seat." She said, her face incredulous. And then she added, "Its irresponsible." That's how my day began today. She told me she wasn't leaving for work until I killed the spider. And she had the gall to tell me how to kill the spider.

I did what any trained monkey would do- what I was told. And then I passively aggressively blogged about it. I'm really not a thrill seeker and I really was only allowing the spider to go on in there because it's interesting. Right now, I think my van has about 20 spiders in it. Sometimes I get in my van and a spider hangs on its web from the headliner right in my face. Legs all splayed out- I just grab it by the thread it's hanging from and drop it out the window. So when I saw the black widow, I filmed it and made the mistake of telling my wife about it. That sealed its fate.

Good thing she doesn't know about the two brown recluses and the hobo spider!

Spending is Better than Mending!

A slight misquote of Huxley created by adding the first two letters in the post title came to mind as I sewed up a large tear in the shorts I am wearing today. It really was a waste of time as the shorts have many many holes on them which will eventually cause them to be recycled as firewood. Just in time for the cool of fall! It took about 20 minutes to sew them up and in that time I could have earned four times the amount needed to buy another pair.

The inefficient use of my time has a hidden value(aside from having something to blog about) What is it, Richard?! I can't freaking wait for the answer! A therapeutic respite from the hubbub of constant multitasking AND I did it in silence without a DVD or YouTube video or music or talk radio assaulting my mind! My phone has 2 Hotmail accounts, a Gmail account, a Google Talk account, Facebook, Twitter, texting, it tells me when volcanoes blow up and when earthquakes happen AND it's a fricking phone too! I do FAR more on my computers. I have a computer in the bedroom, garage, van, office, and one I use in the bathtub and about 50 more of them laying around. I am getting agitated just thinking about it!

It is a nice break to pull some thread through some fabric in peace.

Headless iMac Adventure

About 4 years ago, I came into possession of a nice iMac. I was pretty stoked about it because it was 500 MHz model- pretty respectable for an iMac of that time period.
I had even heard of them running OSX!

I took it home, plugged it in, and turned it on. An unsettling "ZZZZZZZT!" emanated from the back of it and it lost power. Not to be dissuaded, I tried it again- this I looking into the back of the case through the vent slits. Same noise and I saw lightning bolts up to 6 inches long in there and it lost power.

I noticed this model had a sexy VGA port on the back of it and an idea began to form..

During the next couple hours of searching on the net, I came to the understanding that what I was imagining had been done before and it had a name. It had come to be known as the headless iMac.

I couldn't use the power supply after disassembly because safety is fairly important and the high voltage part was inseparable from the part that supports the logic board. So I needed to use an ATX power supply (gasp! Not a pc part!)
Unfortunately, another couple hours searching on the net revealed ONE site that told how to do it- in French. I don't speak French. Or read it. Enter translate.reference.com! Weeee!

After the translating and soldering, it worked.

And booted into OSX. That's right- OSX! The person before me had loaded OSX. Sadly, he did not read that you must update the bios before you bring it up to X or you get a blurry screen. Note the picture below- that is not a cam quality issue you are seeing on the screen (well some of it is)- the dock actually blurs toward the right like a comet.

Here is where my memory fuzzes a little in- terms of versions. I bought a disc on eBay to reload it to the old os 8.6, I think, so I could update my BIOS. I never got it to work and lost heart.

Now my lonely little headless Frankenstein iMac/PC sits on a shelf between 2 PowerPCs.

I know what you are thinking! Just update the BIOS. By 'just update the bios,' you are saying reload 8.6(because that bios update utility will not run on OSX- which I don't have the disk) update the bios THEN re reload OSX- which I don't have that disk either.

But one day...

A Skunk, a Quesadilla, and a Day Off.

Several years ago when I still smoked cigarettes, I was preparing to go to work and I went outside to burn one and start my car. As I walked toward the house, a skunk turned the corner from in front of my car headed in my direction at the normal waddling pace that skunks use. Startled, I stopped walking abruptly and backed up slowly. The skunk turned around and walked away leisurely. When I first encountered him/her, I was within about 6 feet and I counted myself fortunate. The distance between us grew to about 12 feet and I heard the faint ffft noise. I smelled that skunk smell, but I still was glad none of it hit me so I went back in the house to make a quesadilla for breakfast, eat it and left for work.

I was an apartment maintenance technician at the time and my job was to repair common apartment problems such a garbage disposals, doors, and sinks. I arrived at work like normal and went to the leasing office to get some work orders to do that day. One of the girls that worked there, said, “What is that smell?” She was on the other side of the room and she said I could not go into apartments like that so I was sent home for the day. I didn’t even know I was sprayed!

After I got home, I took off all my clothes and threw them outside on the deck. There they stayed for the next two weeks. I then took a regular bath and used soap and that is it. Oh, and water. I then put on clean clothes.

I received a call for a computer client to fix something on their network (I had a business doing that on the side) and I reported there to take care that issue. I asked the guys there if they could tell I was spayed by a skunk that morning. Only one guy could smell something but didn’t recognize it. So, two things could have been possible in that instance. One, women have a better sense of smell than men do or two, soap and water really do work and there is no need to run to Costco or Sam’s for that case of tomato sauce.  Were I to venture a guess, I would have to go with both being true. One day later and another bath and my skin was no longer skunky.

Two weeks out on the deck and a cycle in the washysheen were sufficient to rid my clothes of the smell. The out of doors has a wonderful power of cleansing.  But one mention my breakfast is not enough to warrant the word quesadilla in the title of this article. Three days after that event, I opened that bag of tortillas to once again indulge in quesadilla goodness and, to my horror, the house was filled with skunk smell. Those tortillas had soaked up the odor just by having me stand near them and the odor was sealing in the bag with them. No way am I eating something that smells like that!

It’s disturbing to think I that I ate them like that the day it happened. At least I can check getting sprayed by a skunk off of my bucket list.

Sqeeqee

I think I have 200 accounts scattered all over the internet including 10 or so forums, 3 facebook accounts, a twitter account, google plus account, like 10 emails, 50 places I have ordered from- on and on! Why not add a sqeeqee account?

I am not going to say that I am too lazy(as it is en vogue to say so) to check it out because I am not. I just have other priorities. Such as writing about something I am not going to research and know nothing about. Now THAT is important!

That being said, I know mostly nothing about Sqeeqee.com. What I do know is that it is yet another social network that seems to be an amalgam of facebooklike features and ebaylike features and several others I am unaware of. I found it as the result of my marketing efforts for FlaTank and joined up. The appeal that it has for me is that it is still in beta testing. I am still seeing php errors in the ranking box sometimes and the claim to be 99% error free at this point.

Usually stuff like this escapes me until it is commonplace and people say to me, "What? You don't know about <insert old news here>?!" Not this time. In fact, FlaTank is the third app on that website and I am not sure that the other ones are real. Fruit Ninja is on there, but it is under a person's name not under Halfbrick Studio as it is on Google Play. This leads me to believe that it is just being staged there for testing only. So, I got in on the ground floor on this one. I hope it goes somewhere. Check it out.

$100(New Text in Blue)

I stopped in at Wal-Mart to get some vitamins for my brain and some corn beef hash. I had wanted to get more sardines because the ones I had at home were from a warehouse store and I don’t like them as much but sadly they did not make it onto my mental list until I was thinking back on the visit. It took me a while to find the DHA supplements I was looking for to help lessen the effect of my ADD, but eventually I made my way to the canned meat aisle.

As I was looking for my beloved hash meat, I saw on the floor ahead of me across the aisle, what looked like a hundred dollar bill folded in half! “Woo!” I thought and froze in the face of my good fortune. It was one of those new ones with the large portrait and I could see most of Franklin’s face as it was folded almost exactly at the tip of his nose.

To my horror, a large woman with peach colored hair approached my yet unclaimed hondo. In her mouth, was one of those cigarette stalk things you would see in Cruella De Vil’s possession. It had a cigarette in it but it was not lit of course. “Why carry it around in the store like you were smoking?” I mused. Distracting as her appearance was, my main concern was whether or not we were going to argue about my money, because at that point SHE was closer to being one C-note richer than I was. Since she was looking down at what presumably was her grocery list, it was a very real possibility she would see it before she passed it. My heart pounded and I had a sudden inspiration. “Do you know where the corned beef hash is?” I said very pleased with myself. Annoyed, she looked up and pointed, “Ain’t that it there?” I was so glad I outfoxed this cantankerous woman because she would have just bought more clown makeup with MY money! Politely, I said my thank you and waited for her to walk by. 

Two quick steps, and I was in position to claim my prize. My cell phone rang. I ignored it. As I started to kneel to snatch it up, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I turned with a start and saw a guy I used to work with as a security guard. “Remember me?” He still had his jagged teeth that made him look like he chews rocks but he had gotten so thin since the last time I had seen him. When I worked with him, he was fresh out of the army and had been a little buff from being a mortar and he lifted weights right there at the guard shack. Strategically, I covered a certain part of the floor with my foot as I got my phone off my belt to silence it. It looked like a sales call anyway and I made small talk with dude who’s name I still don’t remember.

We concluded the banter and reverie and it became safe for me to get back to what I was doing. I moved like a ninja and in a flash it was safe in my front pocket. I looked both ways and determined I was not seen procuring my booty. I collected the hash and paid for my stuff at the automotive counter, because I always park there so I can get in and out quickly. In the protected cocoon of my van I pulled the bill out to inspect it. I was the proud owner of about sixty percent of the bill. The rest had been torn off and there was just enough to fold over at the middle making it look and feel whole. “Oh, for the sake of Pete’s dragon!” I didn’t say that in my head. If I would have been standing rather than sitting in my vehicle, I may have jumped up and down like a cartoon. What a bummer. Still fuming, I flipped it over and saw the writing. With a Sharpie, someone had written “Want the rest? Text!” and then a number.