November 1999
November 30
We took a field trip to an organic
farm called Natural Harvest today in Agroecology. Actually, it wasn't
actually organically certified, but it did follow all the rules for organic
farming. The reason for this is that they didn't want to pay for
certification and they feel they can go by reputation alone. We helped
out with some tasks in the field, and our group's job was to spread hay
on the vegetables. So we all helped in our own way, but I couldn't
lift the bales very well. I tried to throw them across a grassy area
into the soil, but they either didn't go far enough or the twine came off,
causing them to fall apart. Finally, we got most of the field covered
and saved the farmers a lot of work. I was surprised to see that
there were a bunch of houses around the farm. Usually farms are just
one small house and vast fields outside. Natural Harvest has more
houses because it's a community-based farm.
Once again, I try to play multiplayer
Drakan, hoping I could get some good playing time, and once again, nothing
but crashes. I did get to play another single player level, however.
It's called Paradise, and it's set in a tropical valley with a lot of palm
trees. There's a lot of slowdown with all the trees and complex geometry,
and it's so hard to beat I had to use the full health code. Still,
there's some cool stuff in there, like a temple with a giant guarding it,
a huge spider (like on my level), and a pond to swim in. The giant
was bigger than usual, and it had too many hit points to defeat without
getting smashed, so I had to use the Giants code to kill the giant... a
nice little bit of irony. I wish there were more cool single player
levels. All these multiplayer ground ones are getting repetitive.
And multiplayer is still too buggy to be much fun.
So here I am, writing another
installment of the Life of Zeoc... um, I mean The Sine Wave. Whenever
I get to the end of the month while typing this thing, the letters appear
about a second after I type them. I might change the archive time
to half a month next year. It was another day of Agroecology today,
and another day of realizing I don't know what's going on in that class.
The trouble with environmental issues is that they're not concrete.
We all agree that racism is bad, that drugs kill, that oxygen is good...
but when it comes to small farm sustainability versus big industry efficiency,
there are so many angles to look from. I took the midterm test, "midterm"
meaning four days since the class is only seven total, and I don't think
I did well. Then there was a speaker from Novartis, the biotech company,
who came in and told us that genetic engineering would be the hope that
saves the future. He didn't talk much about the risks, though.
Not just the safety risks (of which the tests showed few), but the risks
to the balance of farms all over. Europe is more wary of biotech
than North America. It seems we'd settle for anything if it costs
less.
I'm trying to get some walls
to lower after I kill a crimson knight in my desert level. So far
it hasn't been working. I'm afraid I might have to get rid of that
part of the challenge. It would have been a nice challenge for the
main human character, though, since the Dragonmech couldn't have gotten
in there or fired at the knight. I should have more experience by
the time I get around to making the forest level. Right now I'm thinking
about scaling up some tropical vegetation to make a jungle or something,
and I'll have a river and some rain. But my mind is blank about what
the mountain will be. Maybe some jungle stuff plus a lava flow, or
maybe just a volcano. But then again, there's already a volcano.
I tried to play Drakan multiplayer
today. Every server I joined disconnected me after a few minutes.
It happens all the time when I get the dragon in Master of the Dragon and
use the secondary attack, but today it happened no matter what I did.
I didn't get to try it in air combat mode because nobody plays that, but
it happened to me every time. I don't understand why it crashes all
the time. Do all other online games do that? It seems that
whenever Drakan encounters something it doesn't understand, its default
reaction is to terminate the game and go to the desktop. I'm moving
on to Unreal Tournament as soon as I get the full game to see if it's any
better than Drakan.
I had a little problem with the
making of the Dragonmech Desert, as I call it now. I tried to make
a knight that carried a thunder sword and threw special spears, but the
game froze up whenever I got to the knight. It just wouldn't go on
any more, and I had to reset the entire computer. There's never been
a bug like that in Drakan where something makes the computer totally freeze.
I erased the knight, but I didn't get to do much else. I'm going
to make the Dragonmech idea into a trilogy of levels: first the Dragonmech
Desert, then the Dragonmech Forest, and finally the Dragonmech Mountain.
I owe it to myself to learn how this Riot Engine works, because I think
it'll be used in other games.
I have some sad news for the
computer game community: as of December 23, The Sparrow's Nest will no
longer be updated. Sparrowslain has decided she cannot make things
better in the game community, and that she is tired of it all. I
started reading the Sparrow's Nest back in June, when the Drakan preview
pages cited it for an interview with one of the Surreal developers.
Before that, she did a lot for the Heretic II community until it was dissolved
by the unfortunate problems with the message board moderators and the expansion
pack. The Sparrow's Nest has been a labor of love for almost a year
now. Goodbye, Sparrowslain, we'll miss you.
Back in July and August, I had
plenty of cool stuff to share, like trip photos and stories. But
it's been kind of slow lately, and unless you're really into Drakan, there's
not much of value, except for Ethereal Light. Even that is becoming
repetitive by now. I'll try to provide more useful content that everyone
can enjoy. I know it means cutting back on the Drakan time, but perhaps
it's for the best.
There's not much new today.
I went to Rio Bravo, a Mexican restaurant near the Mall of America, and
ate a huge meal. It was so much that I thought I would explode.
Recently, I've become fond of chips and salsa, and I'm eating it for breakfast
sometimes. I know it's not much of a breakfast, but it's better than
nothing. After eating dinner, I went to the Mall of America and looked
around there, and I spent most of my time in the bookstore. That
was basically my whole day. That and working on my desert level.
It's turning out just like my other single player level, with ruins and
open spaces, but I'm trying to add some more variety.
That Deep Forest CD, Comparsa,
has really grown on me. I found out that the music is mostly from
Madagascar. I'm listening to it a lot lately, and I find myself remembering
the songs a lot and sometimes humming them. I even hum the words,
even though they're not in English. They might actually say something
really dumb, but since I don't know what they mean, it doesn't bother me
at all. But you have to be careful. I heard about a store selling
a shirt that said "Watashi wa bakana Amerikajin desu," which means "I am
a stupid American" in Japanese. People would buy it and wear it and
not know it was an insult. I'm sure the lyrics in Comparsa aren't
bad, but if they are, I doubt it'll matter because there are few people
from Madagascar who speak the language living in Minnesota.
There's a discussion going on
in the Drakan forum about multiplayer etiquette. Some people think
it's all right to go around killing the other players whenever they can,
while others take a more civilized approach and choose not to kill those
who do not retaliate. I personally wait for the other players to
run around or take battle stance before I fight them. There's also
the issue of what to do while typing messages, and levels made for one-on-one
dueling. I know I'm supposed to face a wall and put away my weapon
before typing in something, but I have been guilty of typing without doing
that. Sometimes there's no wall, and the situation is hectic.
As for duel levels, I always try to follow the rules, but things can get
confusing about who's supposed to fight who.
The going is slow on my desert
level. I forgot how long it takes just to make a simple arch.
You have to check all the vertices and make sure all the layers are aligned,
which they often aren't. It's a real pain sometimes, but it's what
I'm going to do, for the Drakan community. I played some online today,
mostly on that DrakanChess level. That thing is unfair because of
the armor that's invincible to certain weapons. I also tried some
new levels, such as an impressive Master of the Dragon one called the Canyon
of Doom. If there were more people playing, and if it didn't crash
so much, multiplayer Drakan would be a lot of fun.
But unfortunately, I don't have
it. I saw it in Best Buy, but I didn't get it. Maybe I should
try the demo more before I decide, but I've already come to the conclusion
that it's good. There were only 50 levels as opposed to over 70 as
was previously thought, but there's always the editor to make new ones.
I hope there's more than one character model, but that's just graphics
rather than gameplay, unless the characters have different speeds or reload
time or something. And Quake III is still on its "demo test".
I don't know how long it will be before the actual Q3 demo is released,
but I'm not waiting that long to decide which game to get. It's UT
all the way.
Well, it's here: my report #4
on advertising in the Questionable Remarks section. I just have the
basic list, but I couldn't find most of the sources. Some of the
examples are only things I remember seeing a long time ago but can't recall
the specific details. It's just a preliminary list for now, but I'll
add to it from now on. I'm sorry, I did the same thing with the Ethereal
Light character overview yesterday. I'm really kind of useless.
If you want to see just how ridiculous the advertisers for computer games
can get, check it out.
I finally figured out that modeler
utility. It seems you can only export models from the databases that
don't have animations, such as weapons and building structures. That's
okay, though, because I didn't plan to do any large-scale character transformations.
It's really hard to use the modeler, though. I haven't figured out
how to add vertices or make simple shapes, or even if it's possible to
do that. But I can turn around certain objects to orient them as
weapons to hold. For example, the spear is normally pointed the wrong
way to use it as a weapon, but with the modeler, I can rotate it around.
I can also change the ruins bricks to make them taller, shorter, or stretched
out.
Like I promised, the Ethereal
Light character page is here. You can find it in the Nalenna section
of my site. It's subject to addition as I go deeper into the characters'
personalities and histories, so it's not a final page. If you're
interested in Ethereal Light and would like to know more about the story,
you may want to check it out.
Today was Thanksgiving, at least
in the United States, and we didn't really do much. I forgot to mention
Brian and Cheryl's house, but I doubt we would have been invited there
anyway. The most memorable part of the day was 3 hours of TV.
But it consisted of all the good NBC shows, so it was okay. I'm glad
that awful sitcom Jesse wasn't on today. The writing on that show
needs some serious work. The other sitcoms are okay, but I see a
lot of borrowed material. To all who missed my update yesterday (even
though you could just scroll down): Happy Thanksgiving!
Ah, yes! I have nothing
but time today, so I can get some real progress done on that desert level.
The new editor came out yesterday, but it's basically the same thing as
the old version. There's a modeler, but I can't figure out how to
use it. All I've gotten it to do so far is crash and erase the lines
from its main display. The new editor can export textures and is
supposed to have a model exporter, but I haven't gotten it to work yet.
I put out another version of
my Metal Arokh file, this time replacing the system files. That means
I had to use the same technique as, groan, a certain other texture replacing
file. But this one includes new physics for the dragon. Metal
Arokh is super fast while flying straight ahead, but since he is now heavier,
he cannot ascend as fast. Also, he has less agility but a faster
recharge rate. You can get the new file on my Drakan links page.
Perhaps my Ethereal Light story
would be more widely appreciated if there were some sort of character page.
You know, a way to know who all the people are and what they are doing.
Don't worry, the entire story doesn't take place in a desert. I just
haven't thought of any adventures beyond that. And still it worries
me - I'm kind of afraid to write the story the way I had originally planned
it. But if you check Nalenna tomorrow or in a few days, there will
be a character page for Ethereal Light.
The video we're watching in Agroecology
is called The Farmer's Wife by David Sutherland. It's about a struggling
farm family and a couple's effort to stay together during times of hardship.
The whole thing is six hours long, and we're watching an hour of it every
day. It's really boring, especially when I'm as tired as I have been.
Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, I don't have to go to school, and that
means I have a lot of time to work on stuff, like this page. The
advertising stupidity report still isn't done, and neither is my desert
level. I should probably make a Metal Dragon trilogy now that I've
made a metal dragon. And I totally forgot about my upcoming Nalenna
game, Lunaria.
We never have any relatives over
for Thanksgiving. I guess that's because they all live so far away
from Minnesota. My aunt and her family live in Virginia, and my grandparents
live in Kansas. Sometimes they come, but they can't now because Grandpa
is sick. Then there's my uncle, who lives in California with his
family. We used to go over to my mom's friend and former boss Brian's
house to have Thanksgiving dinner with his family. I don't know why
we were invited over there so much, but it was really fun. I remember
once I had just finished eating pumpking pie when I went downstairs to
see the computer and maybe watch some TV. I turned it on, and there
was Deep Space Nine. It was the episode where they find the legendary
Klingon weapon, which causes them to all turn against each other.
My parents were upstairs talking. I would play the piano sometimes,
or at least try to. I never took lessons, so I can't play, but I
made up things that sounded like music. I think I was still in middle
school back then. I'm sorry... I know nobody is interested in my
Thanksgiving memories, but I felt I had to do something for the holidays.
Technically it is the 25th as I write this, at least in my time zone, so
I'll say Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
I finally figured out how to
change the textures of Drakan characters - apparently I'm not the first
- and I created a metallic version of Arokh. It's really cool because
now I can have a steel dragon tank to ride and I can use it to speed through
the desert, shooting missiles and flames at all who stand in my way.
Ha ha ha! But I'll have to have some situations where Metal Arokh
can't fit through a passageway and I have to slip through a passage and
open some gate to get through... just like in the real game. Oh well...
it's the first real Arokh transformation. I've got the file with
the new dragon available for download here.
It's almost 4 megs because of that animation database, but it could be
worth it... let's see what people think.
Agroecology is a complicated
subject. I already mentioned that. But it can also be very
dull. Still, we rely on farmers for more than we think, and if farming
stopped, a lot of resources would be no more. We'd have to become
a society of hunter-gatherers. I still don't think I would be a good
farmer, though. I have zero experience at it, and I'd be too lazy
to stand the long hours of hard work.
Now that I'm looking for other
games to make mods for, I'm thinking about Unreal Tournament. I'm
not going to choose Quake III Arena because they've put too many restrictions
on the demo test(?), like lack of a console, that I wouldn't have enough
experience for when the actual game is out. Besides, I lost interest
with Quake pretty quickly. Too many unoriginal military base levels.
The Unreal universe has always seemed more interesting to me, as long as
there's good level design. And you don't really need to think about
level design all that much for most deathmatch maps. I know I didn't
have to work as hard on my ground multiplayer Drakan level as I did with
my others.
I'm about ready to give up on
that Drakan editor. It's extremely buggy, even more so than the game.
Whenever I try to do anything, it crashes, sometimes disabling the whole
system. I figured out how to make that sandstorm, and it looks all
right, but I'm not sure I'll be able to do anything else with the editor.
Surreal's developers said it's what they used to make the whole game.
I'm starting to doubt that. I think the desert level will be my last
one until they fix the editor.
I know I promised a report on
stupid advertising campaigns, but I'm still gathering information.
I did have another thing that irritated me today. It seems Lowlight,
the webmaster of the Surreal News page, has heard rumors about a nude skin
for Drakan's main human character (I won't say her name here, because I
don't want this page to come up when someone types "nude" and her name,
nnyR spelled backwards, on a search engine), and now he's announcing it
on the top of the news page. (I also had to get rid of the heroine's
name in all cases for the entire month of November, by the way.)
I can see how it might be possible to create a nude skin with the editor...
but then again, no I can't. It would just crash like it always does
whenever someone tries to replace textures. Anyway, I emailed Lowlight,
asking him to take the rumor off of there, and he said something to the
effect of he wants to please everyone, including people who look for nude
computer game characters on search engines. I'm not even going to
bother trying to reason with him anymore. I can see that it's the
curse of Tomb Raider all over again.
I started my seven-day intensive
theme class, Agroecology and Sustainable Farming, today. We made
biscuits and watched the first part of a documentary on a farm family.
There are so many issues with farming, it's like politics. You have
your local farms with free-range animals, and then you have the big farming
industries that mass-produce food, keep animals locked in small spaces,
and use chemicals on everything. Basically, the industries are the
Evil Empire of the agricultural world. It's a lot like the computer
industry, with big corporations like Microsoft tramping on anyone who tries
to compete. Farm life is not as simple as people think.
I still haven't been able to
make the desert snowstorm, but I did figure out how to inhibit Arokh's
flying. It took a bit of cleverness, but it's the only thing that
works so far. What I did was create a ceiling layer above everything
else and hold down Ctrl while placing a null texture to make it an invisible
ceiling. Then I increased Arokh's required headroom to 600000 so
that he couldn't take off from under it. But I still can't figure
out those blasted weather effects!
Today, I saw the latest James
Bond movie, The World is Not Enough. It was just like all the other
Bond movies, with lots of explosions and style and sexual innuendos.
Even the plot seemed to be recycled with a few different elements.
It had some good action sequences and special effects, with plenty of exotic
locales, but it was all very forgettable. When I left the theater,
I was already thinking about other things.
Sparrowslain has noted on The
Sparrow's Nest that EBWorld has a stupid and sexist advertising campaign,
but I've seen other ads that rank right up there. For example, there
was Segasoft's "You play like a big fat girl" ad for some war game, and
another one where it stereotyped people from Sweden and France and showed
missiles wiping out those countries. I'm working on Report #4 of
my questionable remarks page, targeting the idiocy of game advertising.
It'll be up here tomorrow.
I've reached an obstacle in the
making of my big desert Drakan level. I was going to make a sandstorm
weather effect, so I tried to test out something. I started by putting
a trigger in the game for snow. I know it's not supposed to snow
in the desert, but I was going to change it into sand later. I used
Wartok Canyons as a model, and I followed it exactly, but the snow didn't
work. No matter what I did, it just wouldn't appear. So from
now on, I'll primarily be trying to put in the weather effects. Another
thing I did was learn how to use the Randomize Orientation feature of the
texture tool to avoid those nasty repeating square textures.
It appears no matter how much
I mention it on here, my Ethereal Light story has gone unnoticed by everyone.
That's okay, though - the more people know about it, the more likely someone
is to rip it off. All right, who am I kidding? The story is
still very unfocused at this point, and I still have a lot to tell.
Remember that, like this front page, I update it on my Nalenna page every
day.
I got the third Deep Forest CD,
Comparsa, today. It's a mixture of Cuban and African music played
in European techno style like the others. The tunes are more upbeat
than the second one, Boheme, and it has better balance than the first one.
At first, the voices of the singers that worked with Deep Forest didn't
sound too good to my American-trained ears, but the music has started to
grow on me. I'm thinking about listening to something from Enigma
next. I've heard Return to Innocence, and it's really good.
Call me a freak, but I've always liked that kind of music.
Woohoo! I have no homework
over the weekend, and I already turned in a bunch of stuff I was supposed
to later, so I got a head start on that. That means more time to
work on my Drakan level! I already have the music set up, no problem
there, but I can't seem to make it so that Arokh is unable to fly.
I kind of wanted a level where the dragon would be like a tank, but there's
no way to limit flight capabilities. Oh well, I'll save that for
where Arokh can't fly anyway - underground! I'll make a wide cave
with a low ceiling. Perhaps that could be an idea for a Master of
the Dragon level! And I could make the dragon look metallic so it
would be a tank, and it could shoot rapid-fire energy bursts. But
for now, I'll just stick to the desert level.
I was in CompUSA one day, and
they had this demo on the Macintosh G3 called Nanosaur. It was made
by a company called Pangea Software, and I decided to go to their page
to see if they had the video game for download. Sure enough, there
it was, but there's one problem - Pangea only makes Mac games. I'm
downloading Nanosaur anyway just to see if it'll do anything on my PC,
but I'm guessing it won't.
Whenever I make a program using
C++ Builder 3, I have to go to the compiler options and disable the real-time
function library and the runtime packages. That makes the file size
balloon out to over 240K. This is just for simple little games, and
it is not very efficient. I've seen programs more graphically complex
than mine that are only 15K. I really need to switch to a new compiler.
I finally have all my stuff completed
for tomorrow! That includes my physics project, and like I said,
I'll put it up on the Nalenna page tonight. Be warned: it is limited
and has a few bugs, but if you do everything right, it can be a fun diversion.
It took two days to program it, and most of that time was spent trying
to keep the sphere from wandering off the track. It's my first program
with an options screen, and at least that's something new I've learned
how to do.
Since my school finally got PCs
in addition to their Macs, I tried using one of them to download my game,
Nebula, and play it on that computer. Like I feared, it didn't work!
It was the old C++ Builder problem where if you don't set all the compiling
options right, the program won't work on any computer that doesn't have
C++ Builder installed. I think I have everything set correctly now,
because the file size is back to over 240K for each program. My physics
grade is riding on this! Now you can download the new Nebula file
from my Nalenna page, so check it out if you're interested!
Today I just rehearsed the Diversity
Drama at my house, but nobody was interested in my computer. I guess
there was too much work to do. Right now, I'm making a program that
simulates the physics of a ball rolling up and down a ramp. It's
not much, but like I said, physics programs are hard to make. I haven't
even started on the actual simulation yet. I'm still hammering the
bugs out of the vector system.
Did I mention that Deep Forest
is a really good music group? Their CDs have some great background-style
themes. That's why I'm putting some of their music in my next Drakan
level. It's a desert level, and I'm going to use a song called "Desert
Walk". Isn't that just fitting? Actually, one of their best
songs is the first track on their second CD, Boheme. The track is
called Anasthasia and it sounds really cool and eerie, like a swamp or
a jungle or something.
I've still been working on that
Diversity Drama, but we're still as disorganized as ever. At least
we got to see the stage today. I tried to convince everyone that
the real drama show will go much better than what little rehearsal we've
done, but few of us are optimistic. Well, it's only a part of our
grade anyway. I'm sure we'll do just fine.
About using the dart gun weapon
type: don't bother, unless it's on completely level ground. The dart
gun physics are just as unfinished as the boomerang physics, and you can't
consistently fire up and down. Also, the camera goes to a strange
angle where the player blocks the view of where you're firing. There's
one level that uses the dart gun well, though - it's Battle in the Heavens,
where the main playing area is flat. But I tried using a dart weapon
on my desert level, and it didn't work as well as a modified bow and arrow.
To import a texture into a database,
go to the "import textures" option and choose a bitmap. It has to
be square, and have dimensions that are a power of 2, like 64x64 or 128x128.
That's easy enough to do. The tricky part is exporting textures out
of a database, which requires clever use of a paint program. Scale
the texture view to the size of the texture so it appears unscaled, and
press the Printscreen key on your keyboard. Now open the paint program
and press Ctrl-V or go to Edit->Paste. The screen you were working
on, including the texture, will be converted to a bitmap image and displayed
in the program. Crop out everything in the image but the texture,
and save it. Make sure the entire texture has been selected, or it
will be the wrong dimensions and fail to work. Now you can edit the
existing texture and put it in your database!
I have to do a final physics
project for Friday, and I'm going to make a program using, of course, C++
Builder to demonstrate the motion of a sphere on a ramp. It'll use
all the laws of physics, and I think it will get a good grade if I can
pull it off. I don't know if I can, though. It seems like it
would be really hard to make a physics engine. The program will go
to my Nalenna section if I can get it done.
I'm doing something in school
called a Diversity Drama, where a bunch of groups put on plays about the
importance of biological and cultural diversity. I should have learned
from my pond profile project last year that we at the School of Environmental
Studies have trouble working in groups. Everything is so disorganized.
It's times like these I kind of wish I lived in Japan, where there's more
harmony between people in a team. Actually, I really don't wish I
lived there because it seems so stressful. Kids have to attend school
almost all the time to learn to take tests, and the population density
in the big cities is 10 times that of New York. It's madness, but
apparently it works. Speaking of that, I had two opportunities for
a trip to Japan offered to: one for Eastview, and one for the SES.
I just found out that the SES field study was canceled, so I guess I'll
go with Eastview. Now I don't have to worry about which school to
choose.
This page has only been up for
five months, and it already has a bunch of traditions and rules that I
made for myself. For example, there is the weekly change of quote
at the end of this page. I keep forgetting to do that! Also,
I need a new Question of the Week. I don't really know why I offer
that. I mean, nobody ever answers it. But since diligence is
the path to, well, something good, I'll continue to update everything as
necessary.
As sort of a karmic healing,
I decided to look further into the Hmong community of St. Paul and gather
cultural information from one of their organizations. I don't know
if anyone read this page during the summer of 1998, so I guess it doesn't
make any difference... anyway, I chose the Lao Family Community.
They have a pretty good summary of the history of the Hmong community in
Minnesota, and they even have a web page at www.laofamily.org.
Now my cultural investigation assignment is complete.
My Arches level is nothing special,
but it has yet to be discovered by the Surreal News page or Drakan.net.
But there is better news than that in the Drakan world: a new single player
level! Oh joy! It seems to be a desert, though - that was my
idea! Oh well, I guess it's a different kind of level than the one
I'm working on. The level is called Ancient City, and it is HUGE.
I mean, there's a lot of open space before you finally reach your destination.
Also, there are some objects that are scaled to a very large size.
Drakan lets you scale an object without limit, and some people take this
feature a bit too far. Still, Ancient City is a cool level, so you
might want to check it out. It's listed on Drakan.net and the Surreal
News page... and it looks like someone from Drakan.net just found my Arches
level, so it will be listed on there soon.
I'll clear something up that
may have confused you - my cultural center interview was originally due
Friday, but then they extended it to Monday. I still haven't done
it yet, though. I'm thinking about interviewing someone about Native
American culture, since we've been studying it so much. But I probably
won't be able to get up in the morning, again, because I stayed up so late.
I'm really addicted to the computer now. It's a sickness.
The Drakan level I've been making
such a fuss about is here! This one is a Master of the Dragon arena,
in the middle of a valley surrounded by mountains. The scenery looks
a little unnatural, but then, a lot of things look unnatural until you
get used to them. Arches has a lot of crazy rock formations plus
a neat little weapon called the Laser Rifle. I know something like
that is common for other games, but this is Drakan. There's also
the Stinger Launcher, which fires missiles at the enemy (mainly the dragon).
If you like Master of the Dragon levels, you may want to check it out.
It's on my Drakan links page.
All right! Finally, a chance
to relax... except for the fact that I still have to interview that cultural
center tomorrow. I won't know how to go about it, and I've heard
some kids have had problems. I'm sure everything will turn out okay
like it always does... well, not always, but most of the time. Sometimes
I get burned for being lazy.
Well, I said some things during
lunch today that offended a lot of the other kids and now I feel alienated
from that group. But that's okay, because alienation seems to be
the theme of the books I'm reading for AP Lit/Comp. You know, the
class taught by the infamous Ms. Daniels. I usually make a special
effort to keep from offending anyone, but this time, lack of sleep destroyed
my inhibitions. Now I feel guilty about making them mad. I
really need to get more sleep. Sorry about saying my feelings on
here, but I've been consumed with them all day.
I'm still learning how to do
a lot of things with the Drakan editor. I put in a sound file for
my desert level, but I haven't done anything with Arches yet. I'm
planning on having a bunch of objects and layers connected to the outer
mountains, now that I know I forgot to change the heights of the layers
in between.
I'm sorry, but there's not going
to be much of a page today. I'll still update this page, and Ethereal
Light, of course, but I don't really have anything to say. It's 1:45
in the morning, and I had to do some serious studying. I think my
brain will be shot for all the time I stayed awake. When will I learn
to get some sleep? Oh well... it's happened before. All I have
to do is get through tomorrow... then I'll have plenty of time, first to
sleep, then to get all my web stuff updated.
It's amazing. I think I
have all this homework and I get all stressed out, but when I get home
from school, it all just magically disappears. Then the next day,
it is back to haunt me and I have to desperately attempt to do it all at
once. I've really got to keep a schedule or something, because if
I keep up like this, my grades will drop. It's bad enough I have
to interview a cultural center here in Minnesota tomorrow. I don't
even know where to begin, but I'm not worried. Things always seem
to turn out all right for me in the end.
I just read the first part of
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. It's a story about a Native American
family, kind of like Ceremony, but this time it's about a half Native American
and half black girl, her crazy mother, and Aunt Ida who lives on the reservation.
We're comparing it to the book Ceremony because they both deal with alienation
and cultural identity. This ties into our unit this trimester, which
is how humans interact with their environment. Biodiversity is one
of the things we have to learn about.
Deep Forest is a group that goes
around the world mixing tribal chants and other ethnic songs with their
own New Age-techno music. They're actually quite good, and I listened
to two of their CDs today. We're using them in a school play, so
technically it's homework-related. One thing I noticed is it kind
of reminds me of the music to the game Unreal. I went to a few Deep
Forest web pages, and they said the group was inspired by Enigma, who had
the same technique of mixing African and European melodies. There
aren't really any chants or songs in the Unreal music, but some of it has
the same sound as Deep Forest.
Unless I'm totally swamped with
homework over the weekend, I'll have my new Drakan level ready. It's
called Arches, and it's a Master of the Dragon level set in a canyon with
a canopy of rock and arches to fly through. I wanted to make a level
reminiscent of Arches National Park in Utah, but my editing skills aren't
really there yet. I'll try to put something cool in my single-player
desert level, too. Now that ArjunAa has made some levels, and faked
music into them as looping sound effects, I could do the same. In
fact, I could have area-specific music! I really wish there was a
way to edit the game music and make our own with DirectMusic, but that
feature isn't available... yet.
I promised myself I'd get some
sleep tonight, so you won't see much of a page. Also, I have to get
my college application in, finally, and I have to read the first part of
the book A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. So basically, I don't have
time to do much about computer games. I did get in some time to work
on my next Drakan level, though. I made a few arches, but I couldn't
get them to go to the outer mountains. I think I know how to do it
now, because the ceiling layer below the one I was trying to edit didn't
go to the bottom, but you probably don't care about the specifics, so I'll
move on.
Okay, some people have been asking
questions about the editor and I'm going to give a few points of advice
on how to use the thing. First of all, you cannot make new music
or new objects. You can have a looping sound effect as music, and
that has been put into effect on a few levels, but the DirectMusic stuff
is not yet editable. Sorry, people! One tip on building layers:
you cannot have a layer intersecting another one, anywhere. That
includes null space in a layer, and layers of a different type. For
that reason, water is not so simple to make. First, you have to put
all the shore vertices at the same height (with the vertex selector), and
then you have to delete the unnecessary corners, and then you must change
the vertex type from normal to water for all the vertices of the water
layer. I'll have more tips ready tomorrow.
I freaked out today, because
I didn't do a good enough job writing a paper I was supposed to do.
I've been getting too caught up in laziness. I spent the whole day,
except for school, doing nothing, and I'm not proud. At least I got
to hear some feedback about my Drakan multiplayer level from some people
who were playing it. There seem to be a few more people on the servers
now - just a few, but enough. Anyway, they liked it and thought it
was a cool idea, and I got some suggestions for a future level like it,
perhaps with a ranged weapon. My next project is the Master of the
Dragon level, though, so people can see about that.
There wasn't much happening today,
as usual. Maybe there was, but I haven't been aware of it.
It's too late to think of much now, and I have other things to finish today,
so I'll be back to my normal (relatively speaking) self by tomorrow.
Well... that's it...
Today was my dad's birthday,
so I should make the announcement on here: Happy birthday, Dad! We
went to the Mall of America as a celebration (it's close to where I live
- how convenient!) and ate at Tucci Benucch. That's an Italian restaurant
that serves really good food. I had a pizza, as opposed to the lasagna
I usually get. Last time I had lasagna there, I had too much and
was sick the next day, so I laid off it for one day. My dad decided
to share my pizza, so we all got a large one. My mom got another
kind of pizza, and I must admit that it looked better than the one we got.
There's not really much news
in the world of computer games, at least none that has leaped up and grabbed
my attention. I'm still pondering what to do with my Drakan level,
and I'm thinking about trying to somehow cheer up Sparrowslain, because
she has been depressed. I was going to think it might have been that
e-mail I sent her that did it, but that would be a little arrogant of me
to think that I have such an impact on someone's self-esteem, don't you
think? My e-mail talked too much about Drakan, and she's tired of
hearing me blather about that game. Sometimes I don't know when to
shut up about something...
I was bored, so I decided to
search the Internet for some levels. I got into Quake levels and
didn't find much good stuff, and then I remembered how I had made some
good Doom levels and never gotten the chance to put them up during the
time when Doom was the "in" game. So I went to some sites to look
at other Doom levels to see how mine compared... well, now I find mine
to be a little amateurish, that's all. I was going to finish this
paragraph with something else, but my inhibitions kicked in. I hate
having a conscience. It gets in the way of trying to be controversial.
Right after I said the Drakan
forum was mostly free of sexism, I realized something. There were
too many posts about the heroine's animation. Everyone wanted the
main female character to look better for the next game. Did people
whine about the Quake marine not looking realistic? Of course not,
the Quake marine was male. Let's not forget that his face consisted
of a single polygon with a face texture on it, or how he didn't have a
jumping animation. I guess it was different because you weren't looking
at the character all the time, but graphics are second to gameplay in any
game. I think they should work on the slope climbing system before
the animation. The way it is now is that you can climb slopes below
a certain degree at the same speed, but when the slope reaches a certain
steepness, you just stops or slides down. You cannot run up them
at all, even if you have a running start. That breaks the law of
momentum, and it's very awkward.
My "How do you do that?" section
for the Drakan editor will be started as soon as I finish my next two levels,
so I can be more familiar with it. I'm working on a Master of the
Dragon level, with mountains and rock platforms and a laser weapon.
That can be a new way to take down the dragon, besides the Dragonstrife.
It might take some time to complete, but when it's finished, I think it'll
be pretty cool.
I've been messing around more
with Paint Shop Pro 6, and it has a lot of useless stuff but a lot of cool
stuff too. There are more deformations, which are only good for flashy
graphic effects, and there are editable freehand lines, which are a good
feature. Text can be changed as well, and it can also be wrapped
around a line. I've always used PSP 5 to make the graphics on this
page, and I'm happy to say that everything I use for it is carried over
in the next version. One limitation is the inability to use synthesized
bold and italic fonts, but you can do that in Animation Shop, which comes
with PSP 6. I haven't made many animated GIFs for the Web, and that's
probably a good thing because a lot of people find them annoying.
The Sine Wave is almost up to
500 hits! Let's forget the fact that most of them are caused by me
loading the counter whenever I edit this page to make a new entry.
I know a few people read this page regularly, but so far nobody has sent
me an answer to my Question of the Week. My dogs are upset now.
They're pacing around, growling and whimpering. Tillie cringes in
the corner right now as I write this... well, actually, she's asleep now,
but if she were awake, she would cringe and quiver. Tillie is the
small brown dog, and Tippy is the bigger tan one.
My new Drakan multiplayer level,
Hide and Seek, is now ready for download! You can get it from the
Drakan links page. It's a ground level set in a tropical valley during
the night. It's really dark, but luckily, you have a glowing sword
called the Flashblade to light the way. There's also the Scorpion
Dagger, which can send enemies into a freeze shock with the right move,
but it breaks after one hit. Overall, it's a small area, but there
are canyons and forts to explore and plenty of room to sneak around.
Yesterday I was in Best Buy when
I saw the demo for the new Playstation game Crash Team Racing, starring
the characters from Crash Bandicoot, their mascot game. I was expecting
it to be somewhat like Mario Kart 64, but I didn't expect it to be so much
like it. Crash Team Racing is practically the exact same game as
Mario Kart, right down to the information layout on the screen. Both
games feature boxes that you can go through to get a random weapon or item,
both games have 8 characters, both games have the powerslide jump, and
the list goes on and on. That's not a bad thing, however - Mario
Kart is a good game - but the CTR developers could have spent some time
making it more unique.
People have been asking me to
write some sort of tutorial for the Drakan editor, possibly unaware that
Surreal has made one of their own. Since there's already a tutorial,
I might come up with a section called "How do you do that???" which explains
some neat tricks you can do. Those tricks include using the goblin
dart gun as a weapon and giving a sword an orange streak trail, as well
as putting armor on skeletons. Tonight, I had no homework, but I
was busy with the new version of Paint Shop Pro. It has an option
for vector utilities, which come in handy for making lines and circles,
and there are some new transformations to make pictures look funny.
Netscape has been crashing on
me a lot lately. It crashes whenever it encounters a page that has
bad code or other errors. It's a notoriously buggy program, but at
least it's free. Still, it's better than Internet Explorer, especially
the editing utility. I use Composer to write this page, and aside
from a few spacing problems, it works all right.
My single player Drakan level
isn't going to be finished anytime soon, so I'm quickly making a multiplayer
ground level to practice my skill at making slopes. It's a dark level
in the mountain tropics called Hide and Seek, and everyone carries around
a shining sword that lights up the path but gives away their position.
It's a lot like that darkness arena in Unreal, and I know it's been done
before in Drakan as well, but this one has more of a closed space and more
hiding places. I know, I've been talking about Drakan way too much
again, but there's so much to do with the editor. I've always liked
changing around what weapons and enemies do in games.
It looks like this is another
time when I won't really have an update, because I had to work on a story
about one of our family elders. It's an assignment having to do with
stories, tradition, and heritage, like in the book Ceremony which took
up my time yesterday. I didn't really have any stories to write.
The only family elder I could talk to is my grandmother, and I don't want
to disturb her because she's busy taking care of my grandfather, who has
taken ill. So I used an interview of her that my brother had done
in the 8th grade, and it had most of the stuff I was looking for.
Still, I have to tell this thing in school tomorrow and make it sound natural.
I apologize to anyone who might
be waiting for my next Drakan level, because it looks like it's going to
take a while to finish. I really don't have the time to make a whole
lot of levels, but I wish I did. Someone on the forums named ArjunAa
makes a new level every day, and some days I can't even work on part of
one. Don't worry, tomorrow there'll be more stuff than this on here,
so be on the lookout. By the way, there are still no answers to my
Question of the Week. The chihuahuas are getting restless.
I tried to pet Tillie in a reassuring way, but she growled at me and curled
up in a little ball.
I did it! I finally finished
reading Ceremony, but that gives me little time to do anything else...
like update this page... sorry, everyone. I'll try to put some interesting
stuff on here, though, like news about my new Drakan level. It's
definitely going to be a desert level, and I still need to learn the intricacies
of making caves. I might even put in an oasis if I can get the water
to work right. I'll try to get it finished by the weekend.
While browsing around the Drakan
news pages, looking for new levels, I happened to see a disturbing thing
on Surreal News. It seems Drakan's main female character was featured
in, guess what, Playboy magazine. It's come down to this. It
used to be that Playboy's pictures were heavily airbrushed and altered,
but they were still based on real women. Now they're featuring women
who don't even exist in the real world. I wasn't even aware that
Playboy paid any attention to the world of computer games, but apparently
they have an entire section about them.
I realize my Ethereal Light story
may be a bit confusing because it jumps through time to different events,
but if you keep up with it for long enough, it should all come together.
It's kind of like the book Ceremony I was reading, where it switches between
3 time periods at the beginning. I'm not saying my story will be
as good as Ceremony, but you'll be able to interpret when different events
are happening. Remember that my Question of the Week is about what
people think of Ethereal Light so far. I haven't gotten a single
response yet. Now, Tippy is starting to cry.
It's a new month, and time to
start out fresh with a clean slate! But first I have to say that
I haven't gotten any answers to my Question of the Week, so I've unleashed
my chihuahuas, Tippy and Tillie. If you give me an answer to the
question, they will be very happy and jump around. If I don't get
any e-mails about it, however, they'll slink around on the floor and Tippy
will make a little whining sound. So send in those answers, for the
sake of the dogs!
The forums for Drakan have been
somewhat of a desert lately, with posts few and far between, but there's
another desert coming along for that game, and it is my new level.
I've used the sand texture from the Islands to create a huge desert, and
now I'm having Arokh fly across it. I'll add caves and other underground
areas and secrets to this one, so be on the lookout for that, when time
allows me to finish it.
There hasn't been much to talk
about lately. I haven't gotten the chance to play any new demos because
I've had a lot of school work to do, and I will for this entire week.
That's what I said last week... and the week before... but my schedule
is always packed. Just when I think I've gotten all my work done,
a new assignment rears its ugly head. Oh well, I'll try to keep on
updating this.
I said I would put up pages that
I take off if I find that people express an interest in them once more,
and it seems people are saying that my list of questionable remarks was
a good idea, so I'm putting it back up again. The reason I took it
off was because I didn't want to look like I was feeding off that stuff.
I'll only mention things on there if I'm looking at game reviews or news
pages and I find attitudes that deserve fixing - and that's more often
than one would think.