I've managed to land myself on a project that combines my two loves: games and web. Tryblithe, owner of CT Square web hosting, has signed me on to help him with a brand new type of online game... it's all done within the browser (i.e. no flash, java, etc.). That in itself may not seem much of a feat, but it's much more complex than previous browser games including some real-time elements. So that's pretty cool :-)

Nothing new on the house front. Somebody is coming to look at it tomorrow evening, but that's about all there is to report there.

Something interesting for when google indexes this page again: GreenZap is a scam. That's right. GreenZap, a supposed PayPal wannabe, is indeed a scam. I was reffered to it by somebody I know (not even that well :-P) and I thought "Hey, this looks kind of cool". But I've been more and more wary recently because all I get from them is "We're coming soon!", "Almost there...", "blah blah blah...". One of their so called "storez" was Amazon.com (one of the things that got me ineterested in the first place), but here's is Amazon's reply to my inquiry about GreenZap:

"At this time, we do not accept GreenZap as a payment method on our web site.

Also, we have no plans to accept GreenZap as a payment method in the future. We have asked GreenZap to remove the Amazon.com logo from their site."

Yeah, real legit :-P.

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now (wait, this is a blog....). Until next time :-)

P.S. You can now get DxBlog RSS feeds at http://feeds.feedburner.com/dxprog

Some interesting things happened today (we had burgers for supper, that in itself makes it interesting ;-)).

Firstly, my Empire game is coming along nicely. I spent most of the afternoon and part of this evening getting the random map generation working. That was a blast :-D. Tomorrow I will actually start building the engine framework. This is the part where I generally choke, but I feel pretty motivated :-). I've never really done anything to this degree (and this clean) in C++.

Secondly, I got to evict a wasp nest hanging up in one of the windows. It was kind of cool (and scary). Luckily, we've got some nasty spray that kills on contact. A couple of spritzes upwards and it started raining wasps. One tried to retaliate, but then it died ;-).

Thirdly, somebody is coming to see the house tomorrow morning (day 6 on the market, about day 4 for actually having the sign up). So that means more cleaning and evacuation and since school starts locally tomorrow we're going to be the odd ones out. Figures :-P. But, all in all, I don't really mind. The more people who look at the house the greater our odds of selling the thing.

It kind of bums me out that Twilight Princess isn't coming out until next year, but that gives me more time to come up with money ;-). Actually, I seem to have found a direction for me to go. Sometime this year I'll take the GED and then just spend from then until fall of next year, when I'll go to a local college to get ready for DigiPen, on a job and saving money. It's the clearest direction on where to take life I've had in a long time.

Well, that was kind of long winded for a change :-P. Before I leave, however, I'd like to give a shout out to Slazer for reading my blog. You're a cool dude, Slazer ;-). See ya!

Yeah, seems like a crazy proposition considering how much time and effort I've stuffed into it, but I may be moving on to something new. I've been seeing a lot about Ajax, some fancy JScript/XML stuff that basically eliminates page loading, and I may take a shot at basing my new engine around this. Of course, it's just an idea at the moment.

Currently, I've been starting a new game. It'll basically be a Windows version of the old strategy game, Empire. I've been messing around with D3D8 the last couple days and I finally got all the rendering stuff done this morning (yay!).

In the land of house-stuffs, somebody else is coming to see the place tomorrow. We don't know the details because Dad couldn't catch much of the call (due to noisy little kids). Something about they'll call again, they're from California, blah blah blah. So we'll have to vacate again, but if it means we get that house we've bid on, who cares :-).

The parents have signed the papers for our new house and to get our current one slapped on the market. Today, day one of house-on-the-market-dom, an investor came by to look at the place. As I write this we have no idea what his thoughts are, but the fact that it's only been a day is promising.

In programming land I downloaded every pattern from ACC and am having fun fiddling with that data. First I converted it all into pattern data (a string 1024 bytes long using hex numbers for image data) and yesterday a wrote a little compression algorithm. It's similar to BMPs RLE compression and just about halved the size of the file. I'm not sure what I'll do with the stuff now. I may lump it all into a database and build a viewer around it (it would be nice if the guy who ran ACC liked it and hired me to write the ASP version).

Well, we're going to be eating lunch so that's all I'll write for today. Heck, maybe the next entry will be written from our new house (would be nice). Cheers :-)

Well, I got my games today (after an eternity of waiting) and surprise, surprise they're pirated copies :-@. I'm hoping I can get a refund and if I can't get that I hope at least that these games won't fritz on me immediatly. But, my ALttP cart (which I learned is also pirated) hasn't gone nutzy on me yet, so maybe if I'm lucky I'll still be playing these when I'm 50 :-P.

I've finished with my changes to the parish site. I had a fun journey into RSS land and the nightmares of PHP's XML handling came back to haunt me as well :-P. I also decided to put up scanned copies of the bulletin due to the format changes it undergoes each week. It makes me look like a hypocrite because a couple weeks ago the guy who runs the Our Lady of Guadelupe site was on my case for not getting the bulletin up-to-date and was talking about how he just scanned theirs in. I stupidly answered "Nah, that's cheating. I couldn't do that." Well, I did it. However, in my defense, I have a high quality, lossless scan whereas his, well, you make the call.

This afternoon mom and I are going to look at houses (my opinion is highly valued ;-)). With any luck we'll find something spacious enough for us at a decent price. Maybe tomorrow I'll post on how all that went, but until then...