Posts by Neil Graham
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Food for Thought
Kiwis do neat stuff from time to time.
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You can get styli for capacitive screens. Not sure who stocks them in NZ.
I saw a thing where a stick/pencil/whatever was wrapped in foil with a tip made from extremely fine grade steel wool, which, news to me, can come in 'so fine it's not scratchy'.
I sketched up the idea I had http://i.imgur.com/yLuh8.png
Having an active communication channel means you can distinguish stylus from fingers. They way I envisioned it was using touch to control the view and stylus to control the contents of the view. That would address the text selecty issues that Russel mentioned.
Pressure and angle sensitivity are just bonuses.
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Relativity Deniers of the 20's!
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No time to write what I'd say on this right now, so in the meantime here's a thing. I think PAS might be the sort of thing that could benefit from this.
Which looks interesting but I couldn't actually get them to take my money.
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What sort of unbalanced imbecile would try and peddle such an amateurish farrago of easily verified falsehoods in the expectation they'de be run uncritically in a main stream publication?
You really think that criteria narrows the field?
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Picking a programming language as a learner is fairly irrelevant. For better or worse, you get taught what your teacher (or tutor) prefers.
Having said that I'll throw in my two cents as a self taught game programmer.
I'm really not very fond of the dumbed down 'Its for kids so it has to be simplistic' approach. Especially for visual only programming systems. It's like teaching people how to express themselves by _only_ drawing pictures. Unless the system has a mechanism for migrating to a text representation and retaining their old work they are simply building a barrier against advancement.
As for programming languages. The language itself doesn't really matter unless you are considering issues of portability or resource usage. Python is slow and uses lots of memory but runs everywhere, which is a category growing in popularity.
More important than the language itself is the support libraries and community. Ask a C question and you'll get "RTFM", ask a Ruby question and you'll get "LOL N00b, RTFM luser".
My reccomendations are
BlitzMax:
Not free but Auckland made, good community, very easy to get something flashy going quickly. Easy to build identical Win/Linux/OsX programs.Lua:
The language that should be in many of the niches that python occupies. http://love2d.org/ is what you want to get going doing game stuff fast.Haxe:
It's the up-and coming language, Compiles to Flash, JavaScript, C++, and a standalone Virtual-machine.I'm a bit peculiar in that I also would also not rule out Assembly. While many people consider the notion of Assembly as a first (or early) language, laughable. It depends on the mind of the learner. Assembly shows what is actually happening. I consider Assembly instructions like the moves of chess pieces. Each piece has simple move rules and can be learned easily. The complexity grows from the interactions. A mind that sees the growing complexity of a chess game as appealing rather then daunting would appreciate the growing complexity of an Assembly program. You don't stick with Assembly as a language of course. what it does is gives you an understanding of what is happening and a desire for solutions to problems you have encountered. Other languages then make a lot more sense. Rather than Doing X because that's the way X is done, you realise that doing X simplifies the problem you had earlier in Assembly.
Here's some food for thought. I periodically enter a 48 hour game writing competition. The best way to learn to write games is by writing games. The 48 hours lets you try something, draw a line under it then move onto something else.
The Ludum Dare 17 is scheduled for April 23rd-25th weekend. Invite Leo to have a go.
Here are some I knocked out in various languages in 48 hours.
Blitzmax (win exe) -> http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/Cruft/VoidGame.exe
Haxe (flash) -> http://screamingduck.com/Lerc/LD14.html
AS3 (flash) -> http://screamingduck.com/Lerc/LD13.html
AS3 (flash) -> http://www.screamingduck.com/Lerc/BoomShakalaka.html
Object Pascal (win exe) -> http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/teenytinyninjasetup.exe -
I slept through December. Doing a trial increase of Venlafaxine to see if It was causing my Tiredness (the theory being if it wasn't, increasing keeps the therapeutic benefits, and there'd be no down side).
...so I slept through December and in January proceeded to come off Venlafaxine. This is not easy. The fact that this url even goes somewhere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuation_of_Venlafaxine could be considered a bit of a warning sign.
January was not as fun as it could have been, but I did get down a pretty good Michael J Fox Impression.
Then my brain decides that what I really want now is Tourette's, I flapped and yipped my way through February. The hope that this is a withdrawal symptom is fading now that it's March. It may be the new me.
In the last six months I have heard the following lines from Doctors
"I'll Just go and fetch my colleague"
"That's a new one on me"
"Oh, maaan"But more importantly. The Fatigue is gone, Once I got over being a wreck I started to get things done. I had a crack at making something that does Flash like things without being Flash. here's a working prototype (Firefox/Linux). I've gotten heaps done on my big project (a netbook OS for kids). Being productive is good, real good.
This is maybe one of the less interesting clips posted here, but it shows AN OLPC-XO running many of the bits I've been working on strung together
Needless to say, I didn't see a lot of sun during the summer, but that's ok because I'm mostly blind in sunlight now anyway. I bought a hat which helps.
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Thoughts?
Add a secessionist movement and you got yourself a movie deal.
Were you thinking Burton Or Gilliam?
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If I had a dollar for every kid I knew who started off doing law with a 400+ bursary grade from a top ranked hothouse school and ended up taking five years to get a BA in Classics,
Was that a failure? Were they happier individuals after their change in direction?
'cos that's the problem with standards of achievement in a nutshell.
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Worlds.Com suing MMO companies because they patented "virtual 3D worlds" first
So to calculate the worth of their idea (as opposed to the implementation) you'd take the median revenue of any commercial attempt to implement virtual worlds?
That'd be a nice round figure.