Site’s Moved

Well, this is the end for this blog. I’ve imported everything (your comments have not been dropped) and it’s all over at the new kidkonia blog: blog.kidkonia.com. I won’t be updating here much longer, but I’ll keep it up for linking.

PSA

So, I finally got around to actually buying a domain name and hosting plan. Here’s the deal: this blog is moving. Where to? http://blog.kidkonia.com/ (not up as of writing). Still will be running WordPress, and I’ll import all of the posts so nothing will be lost. But there’ll be one major change: ads. Yes, I will be running Google AdSense on kidkonia.com. Why? Well, I’d like to take some of the burden of payment off of my shoulders. That’s it. I don’t really expect to make money from it or anything, but they’ll be there.

Project Cheddar

I don’t quite remember how, but I ended up checking out procedural generation, the process where a computer makes content instead of artists/others. And I started thinking… why not let it make the entire game? So I expanded on that in the hour or so I had before finals this morning, and I ended up with Project Cheddar (yes, as in the cheese). There are only a few constants:

• It’s a third-person shooter
• It has at least 2 weapons
• It has at least 2 enemies who shoot back

Other than that, the weapons themselves are all computer-generated (including their names… who wouldn’t want to fire the Yocuhuo?), as will be them map (when I get that far) and the computer AI. It will be pretty sick.

In order to facilitate rapid prototyping and deployment, I’ve decided to write it in JavaScript. No, you didn’t misread… JavaScript. Graphics are made in GIMP and published as PNG files, which are moved around using position:absolute and DOM.

Link will be up to a download… eventually.

Beware! nVidia GeForce4 MX 440

Finally went out and got Portal today (individual, not Orange Box version). Took about half an hour to install Steam and Portal together. And then what happens? It crashes. But it’s not one of those “error: xyz malfunctioned \n traceback: …” errors… it was the one telling me my computer sucks.

I have a DELL Dimension 4800, which we bought in late 2004. It’s stock to this day; nobody’s upgraded it to any degree. And it shipped with the best graphics card I’d ever had (the first belonging to a Win98 machine…): an nVidia GeForce4. It would run anything I threw at it. But today, it finally threw in the towel. It’s not broken or anything… but age has caught up with it.