Bronze Monkey Floor Lamp
This phrase appears on a number of junk pages I didn’t want when doing a search at Yahoo. So I’m blogging it.
Untitled Project Day 3
Worked on the game a little bit yesterday and a little bit today, so we’ll consider that a third full day.
I spent some time trying to insert a preloader into the game, as the file size is now around 215kb. Unfortunately all of my graphics are library symbols that get loaded in frame 1, and the workarounds for fixing that in Flash MX (not 2004) just aren’t worth it. The best I can do is create a second preloader movie that will load the game file as an external swf — which makes it difficult to put this game up on some of the Flash sites, such as DeviantArt.com, because they want exactly one file, not two (or more).
Untitled Project Day 2
A minor update for the day. The interface is here.
There are 37 building graphics, and the file is now 174kb. I will have to add a preloader at some point.
Today I converted a few more graphics, and made some adjustments in scale and positioning. Then I started to put together the Block object, which is used to store and display a set of buildings for each room in the game. Some temporary interface elements to test the functionality, and so I can post this second version of the prototype.
Untitled Project Day 1
Reading for December, 2005
It was a busy month, but a good amount of time for reading, at the hospital, visiting relatives, and so on.
Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb. Book three of the Tawny Man Trilogy. This was my least favorite of the FitzChivalry/Elderling novels, so much of the story is spent tying up loose ends, and the book lacks any real conflict on a scale equal to the previous books. The Tawny Man certainly didn’t need to be 2000+ pages to tell the story it told.
Untitled Project Day 1
I have started working on a new “stupid flash game”. You can view the most recent version of the interface at http://www.antimodal.com/hideseek/.
The inspiration for this game came from a dream I had a few months ago. Aliens have landed on Earth, and are able to disguise themselves as buildings. Your job is to find the camouflaged aliens in a metropolitan sized game of hide-and-seek.
The screen is a section, or block, of a city. Each block has a number of buildings. The layout of each block is dynamically generated for each game.
The player can move north, south, east, or west to another section of the city, depending on the city layout. When the player moves, the aliens also may move. The player can identify an alien disguised as a building when one of the buildings on a block appears or disappears on subsequent visits, because otherwise the buildings should always be the same.
The aliens keep the same disguise as they move around the city. Just because a building is incongruous does not mean it is an alien, since the city blocks are random.
The game is scored by time elapsed. When the player guesses incorrectly, time is added to the score. I don’t want it to be “three tries and you are out”, nor do I want there to be a fixed time limit for the game.
Looking at White Chamber
I first played Crimson Room around February, 2004, hearing about it through Nick’s GrandTextAuto post. Viridian Room came out in June of 2004, and Blue Chamber later in 2004.
It has been over a year since we have seen a new locked room puzzle from Takagism/FASCO-CS. Interestingly, the news on the site, dated August 4, 2004, claims the next room is going to be “Pink Prison”, followed by “Tangerine Room”.
(update 26 Jan)
White Chamber
Another puzzle from Takagism and FASCO-CS: The White Chamber. [Link is to the FASCO-CS front page.] Click (and sometimes drag) to escape from the White Chamber.
Trackback Attack
Starting from December 8, this site has received over 400 phony trackbacks from 60 assorted referrers. It appears that someone is testing yet another spam client. The ip address varies, with one or two hits from the same ip with the same referrer, and 5-7 hits per referrer. Probably a network of zombied clients controlled over IRC.
Many of the referrers are for older, archived blog postings. Why would a blog article posted in July submit a trackback ping in December? It wouldn’t, of course, because this is just another attempt at spam.
I am also getting attempts to POST trackbacks for Drupal and whatever package uses the file “xmlrpc.php”.
Special Announcement
Corita Elizabeth Kahler-Rickman was born at 9:18 am on Tuesday, December 6, 2005. She is 7 pounds 5 ounces and 21.5 inches in length.
After a brief recovery in the hospital, we are now all back home. Corita is a sweet child, she is quiet and likes to sleep.