Rincon High School

As you may know from previous posts, I am in the marching band for our school and we go to football games to play and cheer on our football team. So yesterday we went up to Rincon High School. By now, we’ve had 3 games and I didn’t expect to see much of an improvement from our 0-3 win-loss record for our football team. We arrived at the high school, got into the bleachers on the visitors side and started our normal stuff. We got to march our pre-game show and I say it wasn’t the best, but decent. Pretty soon (I think it was 4 or 5 minutes into the first quarter), we make a touchdown! Well, this happened in our first game, but we ended up getting beat, so we were like, ok that’s great, now let’s see what happens. So we wait and wait, and I think 3 minutes before the first quarter ended, we make yet another touchdown. The kick gets blocked, but that still has the score at 13-0. So the game continues into second quarter, near half time, Rincon gets their first touchdown and kick. So score is 13-7. We then got to watch Rincon’s half-time show, which I must say is pretty dang impressive. Although I did watch their off-step’ness happen here and there (They wore black pants compared to our white pants so being off-step isn’t as major for them), but other than that, they created some impressive sets. The fast follow-the-leader move at the beginning of the show was great, and near the end they got into a perfectly made diamond. I noticed there were a lot of gaps, but other than that they did impressive. Afterward, they played their fight song which was also one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen, not just the quality of the song, but what they did during it. They bobbed up and down, turned left and right, moved here and there, and was just all-out fun. I do not think any other band has ever done something as spectacular as this before. But this wasn’t the only thing that made this day probably the best football game I’ve ever been to. It’s also when we got to meet them. Rincon has about the same amount of band students as we do (A Division One band just like us) and we got to meet and greet them. These people were great, I couldn’t believe how exciting they were, how they felt about everything, and most of the Alto Saxophone’s names were short 3-5 letter names (Like Sam), which I found kind of funny. We got to make a crazy train of people and about 100 kids all ran around the tennis courts we were at turning this way and that with others grabbing on to the end, it was crazy fun, probably the most active group of band students I’ve ever seen. After that, we got to watch the rest of the game, and only from the third-fourth quarter did I notice their band in the bleachers and got to see exactly what they did. During some of their songs, they would start doing little dances in the bleachers, the trombones would duck while every other trombone turned to the left or the right, and they’d alternate this throughout the song. The tubas turned left and right and it was very noticeable as the bells were very large. And all the other sections also did nifty things in the stands. We were in awe at everything they did to make their band look so fun. (Even makes me think about joining them XD) They even got to play the Mortal Kombat Theme Song, which was amazing. And as if it couldn’t get any better, our football team won 13-7 and making our win:loss record 1:3. Go Buena!

Oh man, I just wrote such a long passage on that, but this is a moment I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life. I do not think I will ever forget yesterday. So, want to know what else is going on? Some less-exciting things (In my opinion) including that we’re gonna be joining in on this 3-month YoYoGames competition. The Z-Gamers are going to try to win money if we can and we’re gonna create hopefully what’s gonna be a great game. (For more information on this, see http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/competition04) This is going to be called Project GLOBE for us, since the competition needs to be based on Saving the Planet in some way or form. (From Natural Phenomenon, not Alien Invasions) So that’s something to think about.

I also have never talked about a neat little desktop-viewing program I found called TeamViewer. (http://www.teamviewer.com/) What is this program you ask? Well, it lets you easily view another person’s screen by just giving them a 9-digit ID and 4-digit password. You may think this is a little insecure, but who would really need to view someone else’s desktop and guessing could still take forever. Anyways, I can’t tell you how easy this program works. As a very convenient feature, you can simply run the program from the installer, and not even install the program! This is great for just trying it out and I installed the program thereafter. This program also easily passes a firewall, so you don’t have to sit around wondering why you cannot connect. The reason why this happens is because it authenticates through another server, so your computer won’t bother blocking out that connection in which a user can pass through. By default, the user that connects with you can interact with your desktop (As in move your mouse around) and type things, not just watching. If you do not want to do that, you simply go to the Options menu before connecting, and change what you want to let them control. I also like how it’s easy to simply switch to the other person’s monitor, this makes it so that you don’t have to restart the program and give out a new id and password. Also as a final note, your id will always stay the same, so you just have to give out a new password!

What else has been happening? (As if that’s not enough reading already!) I started playing BZFlag again! I think it’s kind of a bored-sense thing, but I’m back now, and I introduced to myself to the players that still played. It’s still pretty fun, and I still have my servers I run and everything. Warinthestar wants me to rebuild Twilight, but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. I just wanna play for now. One thing I want to create is a large randomly generated BZFlag maze, where there are different colored teleporters so that you can distinguish if you’ve been through a path already. This will hopefully be nice once I complete it, and there will be I think 400 different “squares” in the teleporter maze. This will make for a pretty challenging teleporter maze, and I’ll probably let it rotate mazes every once in awhile. (I may make an added challenge where you must find the flag, then the base!) This’ll be a fun Bash Script to create!

Hmm…Is there anything else I have to discuss? I think that’s it for now! This is the longest post I have made so far, but I think it covers 2-week’s worth of missing posts, so that should do it.

The PAINT Game

The PAINT Game is a game I made up because I was bored in school and they disabled the games. So I was sitting there, playing around with excel and word, trying to invent some kind of game I can play with the resources I got. I came up with the PAINT Game. The PAINT Game’s goal is to dominate the whole playing field with your color and win. The gameboard looks like this:
 Download Link: http://sigonasr2.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/paint-game-gameboard.png

You can have colored “Teams” and change the colors to reflect those teams. Basically it’s a 280 pixel wide by 290 pixel high image with a vertical and horizontal line that perfectly divides it into 4 squares, and then two diagonal lines coming from the lower right and lower left corners to make the two center areas. Whichever two edges connect the center, the opposite color goes in there. (Like on the left side in the middle, the two blue pieces have 4 sides and one edge is touching the middle, while the red piece’s points only touch with their points. Therefore, red goes in there.

Gameplay: To play, we will use a feature in Paint that allows you to use the image as a paintbrush. The player that goes first presses Ctrl+A to select the whole game board, then holds the shift key and drags the image in one direction, making a copy of the image as he drags the image off. Once the image is dragged off, it’s the other player’s turn, and then players alternate to try to get their color covering the whole canvas. Make sure you only do it in one direction!!! It can be slightly curved, but you can’t turn around or go back! The goal is to dominate the whole board by strategically getting all of your color to dominate the whole thing. Sometimes the black color will end up taking up the whole square, and in that case, the game ends with a tie. If you want to keep a record of your scores/teams using Microsoft Excel (You can keep a winning percentage), download my preformatted document at http://www.box.net/shared/adnh9rq78k. That’s about all for today. Just a fun game to play when you’re bored, especially with friends!

Here’s just an image of it during play. Red vs. Blue

The Actual Hype About Vista

So, I have recently gotten a new computer, and I really like it. Not just the new computer, but believe it or not, Vista itself. It seems that it is true that you can’t say something without trying it out first. As an average user of the computer, Vista is more user-friendly in a sense. First and Best thing I like, the Aero interface. Yes, I admit it seems to be a resource hog, but turn off all the fancy effects and just have the Vista Aero theme without animations going, and you have a pretty nice-looking window GUI already.

Second thing I like, the Sidebar. It really is useful. I have the weather going, a clock, system meters, to-do list, dictionary search, and picture viewer in that order going down. It seems to be a very useful at-a-glance object to look at. Next up, the Vista Start Search, it is so much faster than searing windows search due to the fact of indexing. I know Vista uses more memory, but it doesn’t heavily lower your system’s performance. All my old programs work much faster, and multi-tasking is as smooth as ever.

Maybe at the beginning Vista had a bad start, but now it’s reaching a nice plateau. You can get all technical and argue over these positive statements about Vista, but I personally love it. The Dell Dock has been included on my computer and makes accessing stuff much easier. Everything has been ordered in a more sensible and logical way. I don’t mind using Vista now. All that stuff about what people said is bad about Vista, well, I have to say is alot less than what’s good about Vista. That’s about it for today’s post.

Nothing else going on. Going to try to make Fighter’s Field online, this’ll be my second attempt at it, and hopefully it will succeed. That’s all for now! ( You can see what my screen looks like on my online desktop at http://mydesktop.tk with Vista now )

Starting an Ultimate Game Maker Guide

I notice that no matter what websites I go to about Game Maker Tutorial, I either find separate parts to tutorials or unfinished websites. Also, these tutorials are not progressive and usually assume you know quite a bit. To overcome these limiting factors to learning about Game Maker, (Especially for new people) I am working on a guide that will cover everything from the drag and drop all the way through 3D coding. I will need help near the end because I do not know much about C++ and writing DLLs in Game Maker. Until I get more in-depth information about that, I will be sticking to just showing how to add DLLs into Game Maker, the basic structure to them, and listing a few common DLLs. I will be able to explain Libraries and Extension Packages though, as those aren’t too bad.

So far I have this for an index:
 
Unit 1: Drag and Drop
Getting Game Maker 2
Sprites, Objects, and Moving 2
X and Y Positions
Using the Keyboard and Mouse
Collisions
Score, Lives, and Health
Direction, Speed, and Gravity
Rooms and Views
Persistence
Animations
Draw Event
Variables
Saving and Loading
Checks and Blocks
Parents and Masks
Paths and Timelines
Unit 2: Game Maker Language
Variables and Strings
Object Movement
Drawing Codes
Image Variables
Mathematical Functions
If statements
Keyboard and Mouse Controls
Enemy AI
Rooms and Views
Dialogs and Menus
Scripts and Arguments
Saving and Loading Files
Loading Files Externally
Effects
Particles
Mplay functions
3D Games and Views
Unit 3: Extending Game Maker
Extension Packages
Libraries
DLLs
Continuing Your Game Making Hobby

If I have forgotten a topic, I will eventually add to this list to make it more thorough.

Second football game last night, we lost again so we have a 0/2 win/loss record now.  The band was more active than the first game though and we did fine in cheering them on.

Finished 2001 A Space Odyssey, since I already read the 2010 odyssey two book, I see how the two stories connect now.

I’ve also started playing Shaiya Online. It is a pretty decent game, I am level 16 at the moment and I like it. I like it better than fiesta because they seem to have more skills altogether and the game is more explorable and keeps you wanting more because you get cool skills. Priests aren’t stuck with just lame heals like Fiesta’s Clerics, they actually get magic and help out with killing. It seems to keep me more “awake” than Fiesta.