Wrote a Program

 Egadz Batman, Where have you been~ Assuming anyone has actually been visiting the whole time i haven't updated. I apologize. I tend to get less updated when i have hard classes.. And my classes this semester are most deffinitely that. On the bright side i only have a little more then a month left before i get a break :) The classes i take afterwords may be more difficult. but some of them should be easier so that'll be cool.

 Anyway i've created a program Factorial which should showcase recursion pretty well. I was working on my calc h/w and they kept asking for factorials so i thought it'd be nice to have them written somewhere... Now i may have gone a little overboard writing a program to do it for me.. but that's who i am, and what i do.

Java Sucks

Well not reaaally.. the language concept is amazing. Write some code that'll work on any computer? And you can make applets too? so it'll work on the web or as an application? It sounds like it comes out of a magical fairy tail.

I found this extremely intriguing. The fact that it's made to be a little more idiot proof with it's lack of pointers didn't really mean much to me, but it's also written to force you to be more OO conscious. which is cool too since i had trouble with it in some C++ Class. Now i'm taking Data Structures and i believe learning java was a great thing to do before jumping into it.

Buuut there's some major problems. As there has been a heated battle between java applets and Flash for quite some time.. Well it was recently.. maybe 5 years ago before java applets started getting neglected. Now Flash has apparently won this battle, And what great Strides Flash has made.

Although people still carry on making Java applets.. well Notch made the extremely famous "Minecraft" which can be played in an applet.. and then there's Runescape.. And that's about it.

But applets are about to take a pretty big hit with mozilla recently deciding to stop allowing java to be used in Firefox because of certain security issues.. This doesn't bode well for Java on the web especially considering about 30% of users on the internet use Firefox.

Now consider the fact that i believe it's every(?) just in time compiler for java is written in C++. And if you want to use spiffy new libraries written to make your life easier. you'll need to use native libraries anyway. Killing that great portability that java is known for. Plus it has that stigma of being slow which i don't believe is necessarily true. But it's got a lot working against it.

Honestly i've recently grown fed up with it. And for good Reason!!! Now as i understand it, there's great applications for server side crap that i've never gotten into. So i'm not saying this is a useless language, but i don't think it's for me. Not now anyway, it has a really cool concept behind it but i think Flash/C++ just might be the way to go.

Think my next step will be flash, i haven't decided whether Canon Attack will recieve any more attention. If it does it'll just be for death animations or something similar. I'd like to create something that i feel can go somewhere. or be shared.. or maybe i'll just put it on newgrounds. But i'd like to share. And with the kind of support Java is getting right now i just don't see that being a feasible direction to go in. Especially since i haven't sunk Enormous amounts of my time into it yet.

Well a good chunk of time has been spent, but who knows it may be useful at some point?

And School Begins again

I was really looking forward to finishing my game before the next semester started, now i gotta work on math way to often to be able to give my game proper attention. It's a sad day, i realize i won't be able to work on my game for awhile :(


I also want to do a sidescroller by the end of the year but i don't want to work on it until this game is done.. soooo~ That's that.The rate at which this game is shaping up as is, forgetting the low amount of attention it will be receiving i don't have much hope for finishing this game by the end of the year let alone manage to finish another game. But i'm not giving up. It may happen all the same.

The classes i'm going to start taking aren't to be triffuled with though.. Calculus, Data structres and Modular math. Gonna be lots of fun this semester! :D ... .. . not really. But i gotta get through it. and i would like to Ace my classes..

Hopefully i can get some work on the game in, on the weekends or whenever i have a bit of free time, but i won't make as much progress sadly.. Or i could just switch what used to be my "Web Development Day" into a "Game Development Day" That way i'm more likely to get some work done.

Cattack Progress

I've added stars and sounds when you explode things up :)

The death animations still need to.. be put into existence.. because they don't exist yet.. things just *pop* out of existence.. ergh explode and turn invisible? Yeah that's not good. Plus the ships need to be bigger.. bombs too.

I planned on using Affine Transformations to make them bigger, but lets face it. it's my first game just going to take the easy route and make the pictures bigger for now. should only make a few kilobyte difference for now. and since it's already like a meg after adding the stupid native libraries it shouldn't make a big difference.

The game can be found: here

Blog with an Iframe!

admittedly this looks kinda dumb right now.. if i can't get it to look right i'll probably end up going back to the old blog.. which isn't really convenient.. and i don't really want to do that >_>

If i recall correctly there's a whole "community" for iframes, so i'd imagine this is a feasible way to do it.. but when i looked around for finding a way to put an rss feed into a website. Php seemed pretty popular..

A lot of the tools that take care of the work part of displaying an rss feed only showed the titles.. which isn't what i want.. ideally i only want the latest post to be showing..  This all should be possible with php, and although our webserver allows php.. i'm not that good with it >_> Plus it's just something i don't want to spend any more time fiddling with.

Cowboys and Aliens

Went and saw it, It was great!

Jake our main character was played by the guy who was the new "James Bond" did a fantastic job playing the main character. Felt like i was watching a Clint Eastwood flick. Harrison Ford and the Fireworks guy from Joe Dirt were also in it.

Although Harrison Ford wasn't playing the good guy like you might expect.. although i'd have a hard time calling anyone in this movie "the good guy". Maybe there's some deeper message here? Bunch of bad guys doing good things, my kind of movie really. Deadpool-esque in a way.

Cowboys and Aliens was a general shoot em' up with some serious parts. Basically what you expect to see when you throw on a western, tough guys shooting at each other, whiskey, cards, Preachers and Indians.  Except there were aliens in it so expect a little bit of future tech.

The movie was pretty awesome, i'd give it a 10/10. It's worth seeing in theaters.

Beer

Girlfriend went out of town and brought me back a fancy beer :) Put me in a good mood. it's 8.2% alcohol by volume.. which is  a lot more then the beer i usually make.

Oh yeah i brew beer in my free time. I have about 8 bottles of Scotch ale left sitting in the fridge. Anyway this kinda put me in a good mood and i thought i'd share :D