May Contain Nuts

So I’ve finally gotten around to allowing the Windows computers in the room to access the eMac I currently have on loan to me for web development (PowerMac Coming Soon!). Not like it took me this log to figure it out, I just never had a need to really want to enable the connection going the other way (I’ve been able to access Anubis [my desktop] from the eMac - which I’ve lovingly named “eMac” [I'll get more creative with naming the PowerMac] - for some time now, and in fact all of the files I’m working on for this project are stored on Anubis… they very rarely if ever actually physically exist on the eMac hard drive). However, I was getting tired of staring at HTML and PHP code all night, so I went ahead and set up Windows File Sharing. The first thing I noticed was that I was not asked to re-start the computer to apply the changes (something I’ve gotten far too used to doing in Windows… change the network settings, reboot the computer). The second thing I noticed was that the eMac wasn’t showing up in the network neighborhood on Anubis. So, I added it manually via the “add network place” wizard by entering its IP address. What struck me as amusing is that Windows thinks that the Mac is on the Internet, because that’s where it put the new network place.

I did finally manage to get Windows to pick up on the fact that the Mac existed on the local network, but it’s currently in the wrong workgroup. The computers in my room are in their own workgroup (because I’m an isolationist and don’t like Windows-default names for much of anything) called “Pantheon”, whch makes enough sense to me seeing as how all of my equipment named after ancient deities… desktop is Anubis, laptop is Themis, printer is Thoth (a bit of cleverness in that name, him being the scribe and all…), iPod mini is Benton, a sort of take on Benten, the Japanese goddess of music (see? more cleverness…). I guess it’s just a matter of the eMac not being properly named that’s keeping it out of the Pantheon… even after setting the workgroup name in the Directory Services utility I still can’t get the Mac out of Workgroup. Maybe I actually have to restart this thing. We’ll see. It’s not that it really bugs me that much at the moment, I’m just practicing for when I get the PowerMac.

On a side note, I still have yet to completely get used to the different way in which Apple computers treat the “home” and “end” keys. Windows uses home and end to go to the start or end of a line (a behavior which BBEdit thankfully accomodates). OSX, however, uses home and end to go to the very beginning or very end of a document. The behavior for going to the beginning or end of a line in OSX is to hold down either Control or Command and hit the left or right arrow keys. This has a tendency to confuse me because in Windows, Control+arrowkey moves you left or right one word at a time, something I’ve gotten very used to doing (and just to be even more confusing, the alt/option key plus an arrow key will move you left/right one word at a time on the Mac). I’m sure if I could actually manage to spend a considerable amount of time on the Mac without having to keep swapping UIs, I’d get the hang of it pretty quickly… it’s just all this swapping back and forth that’s starting to confuse me. As an example going the other way, to save a document in OSX, you hit Command+S. Now, the Command button (aka the Apple Button… read into that what you will) is in the same place as the Alt button is on a Windows keyboard, and I’ve found myself on several occasions trying to Alt+S a document in Windows to save it, instead of Ctrl+S. Being a keyboard shortcut junkie of sorts, switching to a new keyboard layout is hard enough… but having to bounce back and forth between them is eventually gonna drive me nuts (to say nothing of the total chaos that is my laptop’s keyboard layout…damn Dell computers).

This isn’t so much a complaint against Macs or PCs, just a rather befuddled and slightly bemused observation of the slight differences in UI design that will eventually cause my brain to snap like a balsa twig. I’m also contemplating asking Apple to let me create new tabs in Safari by double-clicking the tab bar (another habit borne of Firefox usage), but I think I’ll hold off on that until I get the PowerMac with Tiger just in case they’ve already done that with Safari 2.0.

And now, I must run out and buy some milk, because nobody else in the family seems to have noticed that we ran out last night, and I’m hard-up for something to drink that isn’t ginger ale (and believe me, ginger ale isn’t something I wish to consume as a breakfast beverage…).

So, assuming I ever get through this Milestone That Will Not End, I’ll be able to fully pay off the Cinema Display that I picked up last month and clear out the Apple Credit Account that I have, at which point the very first thing I’m going to do is go buy a PowerMac for a little over $2,800 :P. This is wild and crazy, as it means that, assuming the check for my long-overdue services gets here next week, I could have a Mac by next Friday.

This excites me, and knowing that I’ll have Tiger just a week after it’s released does little to uell my enthusiasm ;).

Now, back to work!

Okay, either I exude some kind of little-boy chemical into the air that causes people to be really, really nice to me or the career services director is completely taken with me (that, or she’s far nicer and supportive than anybody in the natural world… which means she’s either a clone, or a robot… or Canadian… ;))

*ahem*

Anyway, I went to Career Services yesterday like I said I would and was pretty much fawned over for the 20 minutes I was there talking to Jessica (the career services director). She said a lot of really nice things and gave me a few pointers on how to tweak Revision1.com to provide more ready access to my relevant portfolio work in MAX and Photoshop. After that, I spent another 5 hours working on the Levee scene, which is really starting to take shape and only has some final texturing and a couple of little modeling tasks left (realized I didn’t quite build everything I wanted to include, and still have a little bit of tweaking to do on the ground planes and background “set”). I should be able to finish the scene and get it rendering tonight, which will leave the rest of the weekend open to getting the actual demo reel compiled, and send it off before Monday rolls around. That will leave me the rest of the week to get the current milestone done for my web development contract, and hopefully I’ll be able to wrap that up on time… if I go over by a couple of days I should easilly be able to make that up in the next milestone, because this one, contrary to what I thought while I was doing my preliminary planning around which I based my milestone targets, this one is going to be the heavy-hitter on the backend where I get all of the code necessary to drive the website’s front-end tools needs to be written or at least put in place for later fleshing-out. Future milestones will largely just build on this basic framework, so I need to take some time to really plot out how things are going to be broken up.

I’m still working on that “other” entry, and should have it finished by the end of the night as well. I’ll post it tomorrow before my family heads to Paramount’s King’s Island for a day of fun and roller-coaster-driven adrenaline rushes.

More build notes…

Build 20-7-2004b

- Armor adding, editing, equipping, unequipping, and removing implemented
- Weapon adding, editing, equipping, unequipping, and removing implemented
- Added tooltips to the control buttons in the Weapons & Armor tab

Wow, blogger’s gone WYSIWYG… not sure if I like that or not. Ah well, at least I still have my HTML editing screen :).

Anyway, point. HBI is still down… need to get that back up but it may be in a different form than it used to be.

Biggest reason for this post, though, is that I’ve been working on the D&D Character Manager again. I never did manage to get the build notes from the last revision included, so here’s a bunch of notes on the development status, most of which are from March…

Build 3-7-2004

- Performed additional organization to the interface. Application now has a much smaller desktop footprint, and will work on resolutions 1024×768 and above.
- Revised the manner in which items are equipped and unequipped from weapons and armor. Weapons and armor also now have their own tab in the application between Character Sheet (to be re-named “Basic Stats”) and Inventory.
- Notepad is now considerably larger on-screen, allowing for the storage of more information at a single glance.
- Added some tooltips to a few of the more cryptic function buttons (i.e. the “+” and “E”, as well as the new “< -" and "->” buttons).
- Minor editing to the code driving the tab strip to ensure that the stats tab is always shown first, and that other tabs properly display when selected.

Build 8-3-2004:

- Skill Points now almost completely implemented
- Removed additional hard-coded class information from the character creation screen.
- Gold count added to the character creation screen with class-specific die-rolling for a new character’s gold.
- Gold, Silver, and Platinum Pieces can now be added to your total gold count.
- Gold can be subtracted from your total count.

Build 20-7-2004

- Re-built inventory database structure
- Implemented all inventory management tools. Wands, potions, scrolls, and other items can be added, removed, used, and sold. Tab order on the item adding screen needs to be revised.

Go me :D. I was inspired to complete the inventory system after going through our mess of papers with items scribbled all over three separate pages. I still have a few things to work on, like updating the table structure for some of the other editable lists (like skills, weapons, and armor) so that they query better and delete the correct item… plus I have the weapons and armor equipment screen to finish, the spells page to add *shudder*, the rest of the classes to implement (barbarian is the only complete one), the animals page to work out and integrate… in other words, LOTS of work left to do here.

I am teh rockingest! Just managed to hack IPB 2.0 to give me back the IPB 1.x way of handling upload caps… per post, the way it ought to be.

Kick ASS.

So, that just leaves hiding forums while leaving their sub-fora accessible through a URL, and all of my major gripes with 2.0 will be gone. I’ll wait until things progress a little farther first though, so as not to fix something what’s already being fixed.

Now I can go to bed immensely pleased with myself…

w00t, we’re back!

Did some more work on the D&D program… changelog and updates will be detailed in a future post… suffice it to say, though, that we’re now on alpha 4 because of another design overhaul and a general desire to move up another number ;).

Still dog-sitting for the time being, and working on a dungeon for my little brother’s own D&D campaign.

A fun fact about Tim’s party: we’ve got a kid with a devout Catholic dad… y’know, the kind who think D&D will turn their children into Satanic monsters who eat the livers of their pets for dinner and commit suicide on the full moon. Ah, humans…

Lots to update on tonight…

• Feat adding and deleting works
• Skill adding and deleting works. Editing does not.
• Adding experience which causes level increments now generates a prompt to add HP by rolling your hit die. The prompt indicates what your hit die is, and how many times you have to roll it. After entering the value, your max HP and current HP are both incremented to the new value.
• The experience adder now generates a prompt every 4 levels asking you to select an ability score to add a point to and adds it.
• Altered the function that populates all of the listboxes and labels to refresh the information each time the main screen is activated (in other words, every time you do something that puts you back to the main screen).
• Changing your name works
• Changing your class works, and all related information (hit die, class features…) update with the change.
• Changing your alignment works.
• added error checking on some functions. Eventually all functions will have error checking, even if it’s just “An unknown error has occured. Please contact the programmer for assistance.”
• Skill points are subtracted/added when a skill is added/deleted to/from the list. However, skill points are not updated or assigned when a character is created, or when a player’s level is incremented.
• Everything on the Inventory tab is still dead.
• The notepad located above the Languages box works. Please please PLEASE remember to save what you type in the box by clicking the “+” button underneath. This functionality may change in future builds.

Yeah, I was bored. Can you tell?

Okay, so this is much more of an aesthetic update… I decided that in order to improve form management and end-user usability while at the same time decreasing the screen real-estate this thing takes up (which is already considerable, regretably), I would put all of the primary screens into the main form and use a tabbed interface to switch between them. This merrited not only a build increment because of the date change, but also an alpha version increment, so this is now alpha 3. As it stands right now, the only two pages in the main screen are the character sheet and the inventory, and only the character sheet actually does anything (and even there, functionality is limited to a small number of buttons in the “Character Info” frame). As time goes on, I’ll be adding additional tabs for spells (if the user can cast them), animal companions (if the user can have them), an allies and enemies page, and, um… a few other things that will no doubt crop up as things progress. I also re-arranged the character sheet to be a bit less bunched up.

On the functionality side of things, I did add a small textbox for writing small notes about your character, the adventure you’re on, or anything else of import that you want to write down. Right now, it doesn’t do anything, but it’s there, and it’s something else I intend to work on implementing.

New screenshots today too. One is on the right. The other is here (this is the currently dead inventory screen).

Small update today…

Experience adding (and subtracting) now alters your level and stats according to the rules. What has NOT been implemented yet is adding any points to your abilities at certain levels. Skill points are also not yet implemented. The HP editor control now works for adding/subtracting HP from your current amount. You cannot yet edit your max HP. AC and Initiative scores are also not yet editable.

I have also re-designed the way in which class data is stored in the system. New classes should be fairly easy to add, provided the proper controls are provided for the end user. My goal is to abstract ALL class data into the database system and remove any hard-coding of the information into the program itself. So far my efforts in this regard have proven rather successful, and assuming it’s something that I do decide to implement, players will be able to launch a “Create Class” window and enter in all of the relevant data.

Something I may have difficulty with, however, is D&D’s unlimited level increases. Right now I’m sticking with the initial 20 levels for several reasons (such as typing, and no access to an Epic Level Handbook…), but even with the Epic Levels, there’s undoubtedly more beyond that… and the problem is how to properly implement that into the program. I’ll work on that, but right now it’s not a huge concern of mine. Probably will delay that (and the create class function) until after 1.0 is finished. Right now I just need to focus on how to get the basics working.