Wolferey

Stressful days ahead as I am closing in on exams and stuff. I have to finish up my platform game, finish my drawings (one perspective, 3 characters where one of them has to be running/walking/jumping etc. and a photoseries with report), our film group has to do alot of filming and editing now (did most of our filming yesterday, but still alot ahead, like a scene with police - yes, real police - is still on the agenda), not to mention I got two written exams to prepare to. Oh, the joy of having only 24 hours in a day :p

(Photo by Eirik Solheim - Licenced under Creative Commons - Flickr.com - Eirik Solheim)

Christmas is coming too, snow has fallen and its getting a little less hot outside :p
I just love the photo above, it really gives you a Christmas feeling <3 I suggest you check out Eirik Solheim’s other photos too, he has plenty of photos under Creative Commons. I’m going home to Trondheim on the 16th of December now, and my birthday is on the 28th this month, so I got alot to look forward to <3!

(Homer Jay Simpson - whispering) I think someone took it (/end)

I’ve been learning actionscript coding since September-ish now, and I already have a love-hate relationship with it close to an old couple whose been married for 60 years or something. One thing is for sure, giving proper error messages is something it doesn’t do.

(Actionscript 3.0 - Normal speech?) Hey, you have some sort of type error in your 384 line function over here.. what kind of error it is? How the hell should I know, I only process your code line for line, word for word, looking at the relations of your code forming what it is you wish for me to do, I don’t have time to tell you what kind of error it is!… Oh, you wanna fight? BRING IT, BIATCH! (/end)

So yeah.. Go take one up your 2D butt, AS3.0!
Our exam film is going good, some small details like finding actors and stuff, nothing important there ;p
The flashgame we are making for our exam is going “good”. It has it’s share of bugs and “features” that shouldn’t be there, and it still needs some design stuff done to it, but by all accounts, it’s something more than the infamous “Hello World!” or just a dude walking back and forth with no aim, it’s actually something now.

I still have 2 drawing assignments and a photo assignment for our exam in december, and right now we are moving in to the final month of work before all hell breaks loose and dragons will fly over us crying jellybeans and stuff.. so I’m starting to feel things closing in, but hey, nothing beats having something to do. Atleast im not bored ;o)

Well, I gotta get back to actionscript 3 point O, take care me readers who never comment on my posts, ya evil bastards :o!

Now he can jump, idles correctly and it has background! its like winning the lottery! \o/

To not take up the whole page, since the flash is 800×600, I have decided to link to it instead:
My platform game so far

…the most boring thing in the world! That’s right, B-O-R-I-N-G! Your just sitting there, looking out the window watching foilage and landmarks pass by slowly, perhaps listening to music or reading a book. You look at your clock, 18:00.. you read some more, look out some more, and feel 10 minutes go by, and you look at your clock, 18:01.. T_T (me crying)

How can something that seems so cool be so incredibly boring? On a trip that took around 7 hours with a car, the train takes 6 hours, while a plane would take 30-45min, granted alot more expensive, the train is still quite expensive for its utterly boringness.

So here are my suggestions on making it atleast a little better:
- GET FREAKIN FASTER TRAINS, gee.. Norway’s rich, why not buy more of those bullet-trains or something?
- Radio outlet in the chair
- A screen with GPS, so I know where the hell I am and how much more I have to be bored (must :p)
- I dunno.. a free2play nintendo DS/PSP chained to the seat handle or something? :p
- Free newspapers, comic books, manga or books people could read

I just had to vent my frustration. Can you tell I’m looking forward to the train back to Hamar?

Howdy there fatefull reader of my cornerstone of the internet, if there are any that is, today’s post is about stuff!.. and stuff.. you know, about what I’m doing and what has happened, which is alot.

I’ve started playing Magic the Gathering again, the old trading card game which used to be very popular when I was younger. Its been great fun so far, getting back into building decks, playing 1on1 matches, meeting new people and just having fun. I’ve also been invited to join a D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) pen&paper table-top scenario by one of the programmers at Rena (a college university that Hedmark is sorta co-operating with), which sounds pretty interesting. I’ve only played it some in the back of a buss on the way to Narvik once when I was in high-school, so that should be quite interesting! ^^

I haven’t been swimming that much lately.. I should really focus on that and eating more healthy again, but alas, the real world is a mean place, and temptation is afoul, and thus I do not.. wow, where was I? yeah, anyway, workout and healthy food, good things, need to do it more often, making a mental note here, help me on that one! ;p

I went to an IGDA meeting last week. Turned out to be really good. I got to meet 3 students from Finland who had started a student club called “Score”, and the president of the club which was one of the 3 who held the meeting gave me some very interesting pointers on making a community and starting up stuff.. and they were fun to party with, so all good! ^^

Spillmodding.no’s new design is close to done now, and I will be releasing it from its beta status this coming week. It’s been a long beta, but I finally feel I have found a design I can be pleased with, which is great ofc! ;p As a designer, I have a hard time being pleased with my work. I always find something to improve, something I want to change, something!.. but right now, I feel its as good as it can get without me trashing it all and starting anew.

And my last update, I’m going home to Trondheim for a week now, which is great! I get to see my family again, meet up with some old friends, relax and not worry about making food while at the same time getting to eat great food at home! Yay! \o/

Until next time, stay cool! Like litteraly, - 30 Degrees is not cool enough!

So here we go, now you can move my character “Mully” to both sides. Still need to fix the animation when he stops, as right now he will automatically look to the right when you stop walking.

Here you can see my latest Flash-assignment, program a ball and its boundaries =)

So, I’m sick.. Having the flu kinda sucks, and its kinda nice too.. I’m atleast not complaining that I can watch old 80’s cartoons on youtube while I’m in bed. Could do without the running nose thought ;p I really need to go shopping soon (I never thought I’d say this), for alot of clothes. It’s getting pretty cold outside.. and well, I could use a style update ;p Help? ;p

Lately we’ve begun working alot in flash at the college university, and I like it. It’s fun trying to make walk cycles and jumps and other types of 2D-animation, and now we are getting to my favorite part, coding. I’ve always liked scripting and coding, atleast up to the point where you know you got yourself an all-week’er where you bury yourself with soda/energy drinks/coffee and snacks just to fix that damn bug. It can’t be healthy ;p We are also starting to get more assignments and stuff at school. Alot of it is group assignments where you need to work with 3-5+ people on solving the assignment, like recording sound, filming, solving tasks in flash or writing up reports and contracts and stuff. Let the good times roll.

I didn’t manage to get a WAR beta key, but according to one of my classmates the gameplay is pretty solid, so I guess I’ll get it when it comes in store on Thursday. MMO’s are always fun in the beginning, because everyone else is starting from scratch too, so atleast I can get some game value from it even if it turns out it sucks. I hope not atleast.

See, did I have any more on my mind?.. hmm.. Oh, right, Spillmodding.no now has two servers coming up, courtasy of BroadParkGames.no, one for Team Fortress 2 (yay!) and one for Counter-Strike 1.6 (not my cup of tea any more, but good for others). Haven’t heard anything about the ventrilo server I asked for thought, which is a shame, as I feel many could benefit from talking to each other when they need help, or wanna discuss a map layout or just get to know each other and meet new people. I will still push for it, but BPG hasn’t really been the most responding bunch :/

Unless you somehow have managed to turn blind these past couple of years, or year alone, you’d probably have heard about Warhammer Online. It is an MMOG set in the Warhammer universe, where you pay $15 a month to tell people they are newbs while you kill them then die by some random mob encounter a second later because you suck.

Now, my expectations are already low, I have little to no relation to the Warhammer Universe, and the screenshots Mythic Entertainment has released doesn’t really show a great game. I am yet to see how it plays, I haven’t seen any gameplay videos nor heard or bothered to read anything about it, but graphically it looks even more dated than World of Warcraft or even Epic Games’ 1998 hit Unreal or Valve Software’s 1998 Half-Life, and let’s face it, you don’t play those games anymore for graphics alone, gameplay is a critical factor in those games.

As of right now, the European Open Beta is open, so I thought I’d give it a go, and tell you how I have experienced the Open Beta. So far, it seems to have gone to hell thought, and here is why:

1) The Open Beta seems pretty closed so far. To play, you need an Open Beta key, something they only seem to give to fansites who then give them to their fans, and there is a limited set of keys. How is that freakin OPEN? O,o
2) The Beta Client downloader, which sucks donkey’s ass btw because it’s hogging up 500-2000kb/s upload and I can’t limit it and it uses up like all my computer resources so just typing this creates a lag.. Right now as I type this, it uses all cores on my Quad Core CPU, and my physical memory is at 98% O,o… anyway, as I was saying, it sucks, because it has stopped at 99% and no matter what I try, it won’t finish and the download speed is 3kb/s O_O…
3) The European Warhammer website not only looks horrible, it’s services, like registering an account, has been down for a long time. I finally managed to register an account now, and I must say, the registration is pretty broken. Not only do I have to create a nickname for myself and have a seperate login name (wtf do I need to register a nickname for? O,o), it also doesn’t support UTF-8 or Latin-1, thus all Norwegian characters in my name is redundant.. And it seems to automatically sign you up for their newsletters while you specifically say “NO” T_T…

So, experience so far has been crap. Hopefully the beta client will be done downloading sometime in the near millenia or so and I get a Beta Key somehow, so I can see if the gameplay is any good.. but if it is anything like my experience so far and my experience from previous MMOG beta’s, im pretty sure I’ll be disappointed by that too.

I’m terribly sorry that I haven’t updated my blog in a while, I keep forgetting it xD I’ve been pretty busy learning Adobe Flash CS3, creating characters and animating them for assignments. It’s fun, but alot of work making them move right and stuff.

Since we are making a platform game by the end of this semester (December), I’ve been checking out other platform games. Mario, Megaman, TMNT, Metroid and other classics first came to mind. Then I started checking out various flash-games on the Norwegian Flash-portal 123spill.no. I got a pretty clear story ready for the game:

You are a mole working down in a goldmine. One day, the mafia-weasels decide to rob the mine and kill everyone who tries to escape to tell the story. You need to save the day!

Nothing fancy, but it does the trick =p