Fixing Myself

I hate to admit it, but I am such a computer freak. Any moment I see a computer, I just wanna sit down and start making games, watching videos, playing BZFlag, and everything. But over this past week, I realized probably from the support of my parents also, that I need to start getting a grip on myself, mostly for school and my family. My school grades are starting to rise again, but not because they just want to, but because I have changed. I have been making improvements to my schedule, use of computer time, and myself so that I can have some time to study. Even though I’m barely studying, it’s a start from when I was never studying at all. My family is great. I have a father, mother, sister, and two small brothers. They are all great but I never talk to them anymore. It’s as if I’m isolated to my computer and room which is a very bad thing to admit. I am starting to get my eyeballs off the computer screen and spending more time with my family also. A healthy relationship with your family is always good. So today you won’t see any new game update, or some exciting story on computers. Now, is this the end of computers? No way! Just saying I need to cut back and fix my priorities in an order that will make sense.

I really wish I could try AirSoft one time. Some of the people I talk to at school do it, and I watch videos of them doing it, and it seems really fun. Sure, you can get hurt, and it teaches you some violence, but it is like a video game. You play it, you like it, you move on. I so want to try this sometime.

I did another video of Earthbound today. Uploading now, link won’t probably be up until tomorrow. This one goes from Winters III to Lost Underworld, and I aquire the 7th “Your Sanctuary” Location in this video. Only one more to go.

Tomorrow I will do some real work on Video Game Mayhem again. What I want to do is get all 4 player slots working, with at least CPUs for now. Then later add 2,3, then 4 players. Then I will start working on character and stage creation again. (I might add items too) Once the 3rd and 4th character slots are done with real working human players and CPUs, this game will reach version 0.4.

Video Game Mayhem 0.2 Released

Whew, I did quite an amount of work on the game today. I made a new character and a new course. The new character’s name is “Kiara”, as in the lion from The Lion King. Although the name and animal species is the same, it’s characteristics are really not from that game. Her normal attack is practically useless in most cases, but it’s a very small claw strike. If you look at her paw and press space while standing still, you’ll see a little claw come out for a moment. It really isn’t that useful considering it has a very low hit rate and very low range, although is quite powerful. Then you have her flame breath, which blows a flame from her for a brief moment engulfing any player that hits it. It’s not as powerful as the claw, but is much more useful because of its longer range. The new stage is very colorful. It has three rings, and then a bunch of chopped off rings that form almost a roof above the stage. Most of the battle will take place on the rings, but it’s hard to knock an opponent off the top because of the semi-rings at the top but it’s easy if you can get them off of the lower side. You can download this game at http://www.box.net/shared/9oepbqyo0k.

Also, instead of playing Earthbound yesterday, I played Yoshi’s Island and recorded a video of that. Yoshi’s Island was always fun, and it was a game that you could always pick up and play whenever you’d like. You can find the video on the right hand side.

I also finihsed updating my Ubuntu distribution tio 8.0.4 LTS yesterday. Some of the functions are really nice. The new file manager is a good change, and so is the button to click to enter your password in, so you know when you have to enter your password into the boxes. I did have to reinstall my bcm43xx fc-cutter to get my wireless card to find my router again, but other than that it did no real harm to my computer.

Video Game Mayhem Version 0.15 Released

So today I continued working on Video Game Mayhem and it turned into Version 0.15. Version 0.15 adds a new character called “Spawny” into the game. Spawny is a frog character and just like the other characters, has two distinct moves for that character. His normal attack is a tongue attack which does not have much effect when you first attack your opponent, but is a good finishing move, as instead of shooting an opponent upward, it shoots them sideways and usually far enough to prevent them from coming back. His other move is a spinout move which causes him to spin for a second and can rack up some heavy damage when close to the opponent. He is quite strong for a character you may think, but one problem with him is around 60-100%, he pretty much flies off and dies and has a very small defense, so using him would require some deep avoiding strategies. Future plans for this game include obviously more attacks, more stages, more data collection, saving the data, and level editor. And I will try to include 4 player games with 3 CPUs for now, and then eventually leading up to 4 player games. Maybe even…online games? I do not know, but one step at a time here.

I also played some BZFlag today, and we had 6 soccer matches on BZSoccer. A lot of people find the league exciting and I think its success will continue to grow continuously. We are planning on turning the bzsoccer fields slowly into ice fields from the center a few days and eventually ice covering the whole area, but obviously all that will melt during the summer, so we’d have to wait.

That’s all I really did today, I relaxed for most of the day and games do take lots of time to make, so it’s not as if I did nothing all day.

Video Game Mayhem 0.1

About a year ago, I started to work on a game called Video Game Mayhem, so this is kind of like a revival of this game too. Video Game Mayhem is based on Super Smash Brothers, and will have a large amount of similar features to the game. I am declaring this file Version 0.1 as there’s a lot of work to be done. I will explain the game a bit in its current state. When you start the game, you are shown a Select a Character screen, which lets you select from three characters. There’s Red Square, Blue Square, and Purple T. Red Square and Blue Square are obvious, and Purple T is a purple Triangle. Currently all characters have two attacks, and when you choose a stage and use them, you can see how they work. The spacebar is your normal attack and down arrow key is your special attack. Red has a sword that swings around him when you press space, and when you press Space, it creates a small red square that spins downward to the ground and bounces off anything it hits for about 1 second, and then disappears. It’s powerful but quick and you can shoot up to 3 of them at a time. The Blue square has a slightly longer sword than red’s, but is not as strong. The special attack is a lightning bolt that can really hammer opponents under platforms. The Purple Triangle is more known for its great recovery moves and longest survival rates if you know how to use him. Whenever you turn right or left while ever falling, your falling rate slows down by 2/3rds the normal rate, so you can get back on platforms easily when you fly off. It’s normal move is a black line that moves upward from it. It’s very hard to hit someone with it, but can do about 30% at a time when it hits someone as it goes up and brings the person with them. His special move is not an actual attack, but more of a recovery. When you press it, for about 2 seconds, it turns into a black block and moves quickly downward and if it hits a platform, it’ll start bouncing. No one can attack it while it is in the black box, but you have to be careful about using it. Whenever you fly really high up and about to die, you can use that to stop falling. If you do not choose two characters, one for player and one for CPU, it will cause an error currently, but I am going to fix that in future versions. Once you’re actually playing, you’ll see two numbers on each character. The black top number is the percentage of your character. The larger it gets, the farther you fly off with each attack and the longer it takes to regain control of your character when you go flying. The green number is how many lives you have until you lose. The goal is to not fly off and die. Going too high or too low kills you and you lose a life each time. On the character selection screen, you can select how many lives there are by clicking the Stocks:3 button and then it’ll ask for a new number. Making it 0 will cause a game to end instantly. It will also keep track of your wins, losses, and total games played for the time you play that game. The camera system works quite well in the game as I have fixed it from a rather buggy camera system before, but now it always keeps both players on the screen at least. You can download this game here: http://www.box.net/shared/u5nqdrascs. I will update the Z-Gamers site soon.

Enough of that for now. I also completed the next version of Ball Amnesia with a few extra fixes, and the official level 3 added in, so now levels 1-5 and level 10 are now all in the Easy path to play, so I am halfway there to completing the official Easy path levels. You probably are wondering what the medium path will be like, hehehehe. Link to new version here: http://www.box.net/shared/o2m5m2es8s

The reason why I didn’t post for a whole day was because I was at my friend Michael’s house again yesterday, this time with my other friend Charles. It was fun. We played some Super Smash Brothers Brawl and that was fun. At the smash league, I was told that I really should start learning grabbing. They say I can become a much better player if I start implementing grabbing into my move arsenal, so should I? We also played Mario Kart DS and all three of us did go on wifi. At one point Michael and Charles found each other in a match against two others. One was a noobish player and the other was a decent power slider, but it ended up only being against them two. All three of us are snakers and love to play Mario Kart occasionally. We played some Magic: The Gathering. Now, I never was into the game and still never will be, but I guess it was ok. It took me about 30 minutes to learn the basic rules and terms of the game, but I did ok for the dark deck I was given. I was playing against a so-called Control deck and some other deck. My problem was using all my life for cards that were really good but sucked life out of me each term, which I eventually learned was bad. So that was all exciting and such.

We now have our general music for next year’s marching season for band, and I decided to take my E flat Alto Saxophone this weekend. I’ll put up some audio clips of me playing the tunes. Obviously just my part won’t sound that great, but I guess it’s ok to hear me play. I am not too good at playing my instrument but the effort is there. I will put some audio clips up tomorrow.

I also did another part of Earthbound today and am uploading the new video now.

So that’s a summary of what I did today and yesterday.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 RC2 Not ready

So, as a thought to the problem with the security certificates, I decided to try and install Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 2. What happened when I was done was terrible. I got the blue screen of death. I won’t go into detail about it, but I ended up going through the painful process of repairing my XP installation which took a good 40 minutes. Obviously Service Pack 3 is not ready. At least I hope not.

So, how did I solve this security certificate problem? Well, when I was brought up the security certificate warning popup, I decided to take a look at the details. It said that the certificate expired on 10/21/10, so I’m like, what? So I take a look at my system clock and it says 4/24/99. I’m like, what??? Something, somehow, changed my system year to 2099, and I don’t even know how. After I changed it back to 2008, it worked perfectly fine, no more errors. Weird if you ask me.

I finished the next version of Ball Amnesia. It’s version 0.25. Version 0.25 includes Ball No. 6, which moves around quite like No. 2 but not as rigid as it, and at random, it teleports around the level every once in awhile to try and distract you sometimes. This is included in what will become the 5th level of the Easy path which is also included in this version. This level will take some time to complete, so don’t expect for this one to be simple. Of course, I don’t think any of my levels I created are easy. You can download it at http://www.box.net/shared/pe7yrxs00g. The Z-Gamers website has also been updated with the next version. Hope you like it.

Busy Day

Today I had to take three tests in my classes, so I was really pushed to the max with my brain today. And when I got home, I worked on some of my stuff.

First, I worked on Ball Amnesia. I fixed some minor bugs that Brayney has pointed out a day before. I fixed the obvious getting stuck on the walls bug. This was a large issue, but I’ve finally found a good way to prevent that. Also, you sometimes still got stuck along two walls if you bounced at a perfect 90 degree angle along them, so I fixed that up a bit too. As an additional bonus, I added in Level 4 today. Level 4 is the third set of levels now currently in the group of levels. When you click the “Easy” path button on the Main Game menu, you’ll play through levels 1, 2, 4, then 10. I also fixed up the pause menu again. Even though you click your character, if you had already used a warp, you cannot click on your character anymore. As an addition to the game, Level 4 introduces Ball No. 5. He’s crazy. He bounces at a set 45 degree angle in one of four directions really fast, so he’s hard to avoid without dying once or twice. I also made a playlist of songs so that when you click on tutorial, instead of just one song, it’ll choose from 23 different songs to play. They are all mostly peaceful since it is the Tutorial. The levels keep their set songs. I updated the http://zgamers.selfip.com site with the new links. You can download it at http://www.box.net/shared/dha6umtc08 or alternative download link at http://sigonasr2.servegame.org/zgamers/individual/Ball%20Amnesia0.23.exe. Also I include a screenshot below of part of what the 4th level looks like from the editor. 

I also continued playing Earthbound today. Got from Scaraba to Deep Darkness.

I have reset my router, reset my internet settings, and played around with the firewall and what not, and I still get security certificate errors here and there. I think it has to do with a Windows Update, or some kind of spyware or malware or something that has decided to make security certificates dead, and make my messengers not work. I’m gonna try installing Release Candidate 2 of Service Pack 3 of Windows to see if it does anything. Just letting you know, it does not do this on my ubuntu installation, so obviously something’s up with Windows.

Also, some guy decided to write about what the outside world of Earth would be like if it was reviewed as a video game review. Quite hilarious and leaves you thinking, whoever thought of this was a genius. http://rlupdate.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/outside-review/ :)

MyRPG, a source of fun when bored

As the title says, I have created a fun little RPG to play when bored. It does not use any fancy graphics, it simply uses Notepad, Paint, and either my program MyRPG Fighter, or Winamp. It may seem cheesy, but it ends up working out pretty well and can be entertaining. The reason why it can be so much fun is because you have to make up how the game works. It’s quite expandable too, you can add new worlds, add to lists of enemies, weapons, etc.

In order to do so, you need to understand how to play first. You can read the How to Play file by clicking the link below. If you do like it, you can also download the ‘MyRPG Pack’, which contains everything needed to get started.

How to Play MyRPG: http://www.box.net/shared/ury0d4ke8c

MyRPG Pack: http://www.box.net/shared/v3jf6f3swo

I mainly spent all day working on the MyRPG Fighter Engine, because I kept thinking, there needed to be some way to easily calculate damage and provide the user with stats and stuff right on the screen. So I created a custom program. A screenshot below. MyRPG Fighter Engine is included in the MyRPG pack. I have included an image of MyRPG being played by me, as a whole.

It supports the ability to add up to 6-7 different players and keep stats for each of them. The Add player button adds a new player obviously. The player can be an enemy or player. The Heal/Hurt button you see, when you click it, a menu with 6 options appear. “Add HP | Subtract HP | Set HP Directly | Add MP | Subtract MP | Set MP Directly”. You then have your little sword button. When you click it, and then click another player’s sword button, it’ll calculate damage based on what you told the program for the player’s ATKs and DEFs and then converts it into a secret formula that combines power and randomness together, including critical attacks here and there. You then have that yellow button to the right of their stats which when you click on it, shows you a large menu to let you change everything about the character. Name, HP, MP, ATK, DEF, etc. That’s where you would go to set up the character. This is my first game I have integrated manual game saving and loading. The .myf extension is used for filenames, and you have to select where to save and load the game file, just like most programs nowadays. So I have included some great features in this program, and it’s a great addition to MyRPG, making it so much easier and fun.

Hope you take a look at it, cause I have taken a long time to prepare this for you.

Also, I am having some deep trouble with my computer recently, something’s going on. First of all, I am getting invalid security certificates everywhere I login, even on wordpress. Everywhere else is fine, just my computer, so something happened obviously. I’ve reset Internet Explorer’s settings, but the problem appears in Firefox and still Internet Explorer. Also, I can’t sign in to any of my messengers, and have to use the online ones, which I also have to accept a certificate for. Any ideas appreciated.

Lost & Found!

Today was a very strange day and indeed different. I started off my morning as usual and couldn’t find my white Nintendo DS, so I just brought my black one. Then after we got off the bus, I realized I didn’t have my DS case with all my games and the black DS inside the case in my backpack. Oh my gosh…I started to worry, as for anything that’s worth money I would start worrying over. So I decided “Ok, relax, maybe the bus driver will find it and save it for later.”, but then I also realized a kid could just plain steal it too, as the bus goes through a middle school and elementary school route too, so I was definitely scared. Later on during the day while we were using the computers in our band room, I found a flash drive. Just a blank one plugged into a computer. I didn’t take it, but I knew that someone definitely forgot it. I then found my jacket I lost about two weeks ago during my 5th period class, and then finished up the day by realizing that my science lab notebook was in my backpack the whole time! When I asked my bus driver if she saw a gray case, she said “Maybe I have” and pulled it out. I was so relieved. Now I’d better start keeping a closer eye on my valuables, as there was still the possibility of me losing my DS and all my games.

Once I got onto the computer, I started working on a bit of my Ball Amnesia game, the one I was talking about yesterday. So I decided to release it to you all to try it. Leave a comment if you like the game, and yes, it’s supposed to be that hard. If you play the Main Game, you’ll notice there’s only three levels. Levels 1, 2, and 10 are the levels you’ll be able to play currently. Level 10 is the final level of the Easy path, so expect it to not be too hard yet . Actually, this game is really challenging, but I did add checkpoints so the game is a bit easier now. I will be adding a puzzle mode where you have to aim your character to bounce from one side to the other through a path and reach the finish line. I guess a little bit of angle preciseness will be needed. Screenshot and download link below. [EDIT] Released Version 0.21 Clicking on your character did not bring up the pause menu. Also updated http://zgamers.selfip.com with the new game.

Ball Amnesia 0.21: http://www.box.net/shared/4kd0bthc0k

Ball Amnesia 0.2: http://www.box.net/shared/i6×1w1xgk8

New Earthbound Video, as always, my continuation through the game. This one is only 35 minutes and does some dramatic things in the game. I did screw up when someone IM’d me, so I put “Uh…Short Intermission” in the middle of that video.

CamStudio as I said before is pretty good, but on my computer, I don’t like the Record from Speakers feature that much. It’s kind of torture, I mean the sound is ok and everything obviously the videos are fine, but I have to shift the whole sound every 30 seconds by about 0.2 seconds to keep it synced through out the whole video. It’s a good recorder and I love it, but I wish it would just keep the audio in sync and then I’ll be happy. That’s why you hear tiny sound lapses every 30 seconds if you listen closely.

I also made my name using Notepad. You know, when you take a bunch of symbols and turn it into a title or a fancy name or something. I decided to do that since I was bored.

It could be a nice little signature if I wanted it to be.

Bringing Back Old Games

A game I started working on long ago was called “Ball Amnesia”. It was a game where you were a simple ball, called No.1, and you had to navigate through levels avoiding walls. If you did hit a wall, you’d bounce off of it and couldn’t control your direction for a few seconds, which was bad in some cases. The game has aspects to it such as spikes, other balls which try to kill you, switches to unlock doors, warps, and power-ups which change an aspect of your character. I have decided to start working on it again, so look on the Z-Gamers page under “Individual Projects” soon for more info.

I also recorded my next Earthbound video, and am about halfway there. In total, I’ve taken about 6 hours to get this far, so I think I should complete the game around the 12-13 hour time.

I am planning to start a tournament for BZFlag called “BZRacecourses” which will feature numerous players competing in 3 different events on 8 different race courses. The time trial event, which includes the player avoiding all the good flags. Each flag grabbed will cost 5 points, and then every second of holding afterward costs 5 more points. The race battle event, in which 4 players complete 5 laps of racing while getting flags to either get more speed, or kill other tanks to slow them down. When the tanks respawn, they just start from where they last died. During this event, it is not possible to fall out and die. The final event will be the trick event. The trick event gives the player points based on how well they can perform various tricks. For example, if they jump over a corner, they can get 5 points. If they can do a whole lap driving backwards, that gives them 50 points, and if a player jumps and spins at the same time and land successfully, they can gain an extra 5 points. Only bad flags will be on the course during this time. If you can grab a bad flag, you can get 10 points if you don’t die with it. If you cannot complete the course in 1 minute, you’ll lost 10 points, every minute costs you 10 points. In some courses it’s not possible to finish the course in 1 minute and you’ll always lose 10 points. If you fall, you’ll lose 15 points, which can really add up if you try to perform lots of stunts. I am planning to start this within 2-3 days from now, so any thoughts on it would be good. Either we’ll need some admins that can accurately record time and know all the rules will reinforce the servers and determine when players will do the events, or maybe i will just try to find players that are online whenever I can and then contact them then. I think one week is sufficient enough to find everyone that goes online and drop out anyone that doesn’t participate. The races will be the hardest to manage as 4 players need to be online at the same time which is uncommon.

I am still confused by how Python works. I really want to learn and possibly make games with it, but I still need some really good walkthrough any comments or tutorials that help would be nice.

Ubuntu Theme for XP

So today I pressed the Stumble button and came to this page. http://www.kevinsblog.net/?p=199. The page lists 4 different desktop transformation packs for Windows XP, perfect I thought, since I was always interested in changing my desktop themes every so often for a different change. The one that caught my eye was the Ubuntu theme, since I am a UNIX freak now hehe. I already tried the Vista Transformation Pack back when it was 6.01, now it’s 8.01 and hopefully it’s alot more stable and less buggy, though I never tried it ever since 6.01. Anyways, I decided to install the Ubuntu one. The ubuntu pack is less automated and takes more time on your part to turn your system into Ubuntu, but personally, I loved it and it was very easy to configure. One thing I really noticed was that the system performance increased dramitically! Supposedly this theme is a lot simpler and takes a lot less CPU than Windows XP’s default theme. Two screenshots below, even though some things are changed around, it still has that Ubuntu feel to it.

  

That was pretty much all I did today. On BZFlag, I might get a new member for our BZSoccer team called “MegaLoManium”, but we’re still deciding.