Merry Christmas To All
Thursday, December 25, 2008 - 10:37 PM - General
Posted by Ghost
So I've seemingly been gone lately, which is really just me being "busy". I had a few weeks that was mostly studying (or as much as I could) for exams, which I only actually attempted two of five. It really didn't matter though, since I failed math 100 sadly, and will be repeating it next semester. I guess I passed computer science though. I would have had to give up if I didn't pass computer science though, but for now I will just have to try to do alot better. Anyways, after that I was playing a 10-day WoW trial trying to get from level 48 to 60, but I only made it to 58. Which honestly isn't bad because I took two days from leveling to finally pick (and grind) professions. Really not sure the next time I will play at the moment. Annnnd since then I've been working on Undeadly.ca, but I havn't gotten enough done to want to release it to the public. CSS has been giving me alot of trouble so It's been slowed down but I am working as fast as I can, I only have until the 5th to play as many videogames as I can and get as much programming done as possible. (And I'm also moving as soon as I can)
So.. I'll keep working on Undeadly and try to get something visible for the main page.
Fluid Borders & Sticky Footer with CSS
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 - 12:56 PM - General
Posted by Ghost
Two CSS tricks I've found to properly make things look nicer in CSS. I'm using them on a layout I am currently working on so I've decided I will post abit about them here.
The first script is the "footerStickAlt" which is used for creating a page that always has the footer displayed at the bottom of the browser window, even if the content does not take up the entire height.
It is done by creating two div containers, one for the main content which is set to 100% and another that has it's positition set to relative and a negative top margin (you have to know the exact height of your footer for this to work) to bring it back onto the screen. The main content also has padding on the bottom so that if the content in it is 100% or more, the footer will only be overlapping on blank space.
More detail about the FooterStickAlt at www.themaninblue.com
The second script is for fluid borders, which I am using to make rounded container borders without the use of images. It looks very nice and can be styled to look however you would like with this method.
More about the Fluid Borders by Stu Nicholls at www.webreference.com
Gemcraft
Saturday, November 29, 2008 - 01:14 PM - Flash Games
Posted by Ghost
Gemcraft, is a strategy game made by gameinabottle.
A basic Strategy Guide is available on the Armor Craft website.
Havoc and corruption swarms through the land, and you are one of those few wizards who can put an end to it. Create and combine magic gems, put them into your towers and banish the monsters back to hell!
You are a wizard, capable of creating powerful gems to banish the swarms of monsters. Using your mana pool, you can create and combine gems. Each gem has it's own colour hue and set of attributes that go with it, combining gems makes them more powerful and also gives you the ability to create gems with more or stronger attributes.
The towers on the map hold the gems you have created, and allow them to fire at the swarms of monsters that make their way to your main tower. If the monsters make it to the tower before your gems are able to banish them your mana pool loses power by sending the monster to the beggining, but if you do not have enough mana to do so it's game over. As you play through the levels you will be able to use different skills to give yourself an advantage (until those epic bosses come around)
Moving Savefiles
With hidden files turned on; Windows Vista Users go to
"C:/Users/USERNAME/AppData/Roaming/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects/"
Windows XP Users go to
"C:/Documents and Settings/USERNAME/Application Data/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects/"
Making sure to change USERNAME to your current account name on your machine.
There should be a folder that consists of a few random letters and numbers, within that will be a folder called "armorgames.com" (if you played the game on armorgames.com)
Copy "giabGencraftPreferences.sol" AND "giabGemCraftSaveData.sol" from that folder to the same folder on another machine, or to a folder of another website you played the game on (if you want the savefile available when playing from a different website).
Image Uploading and Management
Thursday, November 27, 2008 - 09:05 PM - Flash General
Posted by Ghost
Ok, so I can now view, rename or delete uploaded images. And there is an image selector for making entries. I still want to be able to sort the images by name and replace text from entries when an image is renamed or deleted if it's in use.
Not sure how difficult either of those will be to do. Hopefully not at all.
I've got no energy at all lately and havn't been able to concentrate on study. I'm running out of time before semester ends. Not quite sure what is going to happen at this point.
Edit: Images are renamed in an entries they occur in when the file is renamed now. But I really am not sure how opendir() sorts files yet, from what I found I'll probably have to make a function to sort them by name properly. (As for deleting images from entries on file deletion; too much work right now)
Where Things Stand
Monday, November 24, 2008 - 11:03 PM - Flash General
Posted by Ghost
I am so very tired right now, didn't sleep at all last night or today and have to stay awake the tiniest bit longer so I am writing this as something to occupy my brain for hopefully about twenty minutes. Then I will be sleeping about 12 hours and waking up at 7am, hopefully fixing my screwed up sleep schedule finally. Last night I decided on it, and went to computer-science this morning instead of going back to sleep and continuing my horrible sleep patterns and procrastination. After that, studied some calculus and did the midterm as two-thirty. Really wasn't horrible but I could have done better if I had gone over asymptotes more.
Anyways, this post is about everything that is going on with university right now (my life currently). Basically, it started out as me in Software Engineering because I knew I had to go to university if I ever wanted to do real programming jobs, and because I was never really too interested my searching stopped when I found software engineering at the University of Victoria, as far as I was aware (which wasn't very) the program would allow me to learn to program and be able to get me a job working on videogames (or other things, because I just like programming)
So I went through everything I needed to get into Uvic, dealt with alot of registration troubles because I was being bounced between two people for my registration who apparently were not aware that another person was also dealing with my registration. I finally got in when I sent a very long email explaining all the crap that they had put me through in trying to register and that is when they realized what had happened, and admitted me for the next year.
That's pretty much the basics of how I got into university, and the software engineering program. Since then I've managed to fail horribly in many aspects of everything I am doing lately.
There is probably no good excuse for any of this, but I've got some reasons at least. When I started this semester, I really didn't know what to expect. The program requirements had me in six classes, so I had a pretty full schedule. I found out quickly though I could not read the boards in most of the classrooms, often even from the front of the class (I had no idea my eyes were that bad for reading) so I ended up skipping a few calculus classes out of my schedule to go downtown and get glasses because I couldn't read the board anyways and the class was so huge that I could never read the board like that anyways because the front would fill up so quickly (not that I can read that well from the front without glasses anyways) It ended being three weeks into the semester by the time I got glases because they apparently tried to phone to tell me they were ready but no one answered.. I didn't have any missed calls over the entire period and the only reason I got the glasses is because I showed up in person and asked if they had them yet.
So by that point I was already behind in my classes. Another thing that helped with all this failure would be the way assignments seem to be done. They are worth about 1% each and you pretty much have to work on them throughout the week because when you get the assignments, most of it won't even have been covered in class. And having 6 classes, all giving assignments either weekly or bi-weekly like this just seemed to be causing everyone to struggle for hours with the assignments that were worth such a small amount of their grade. It just seems like it would make more sense for them to suggest problems from the textbooks that we should be capable of doing after each lecture rather than have us struggle with work we can't do yet.
Anyways, I can actually go to sleep now so I'll try to get through whatever else I think should be included here.
I've had some pretty screwed up sleep schedules, obviously. But because of them I started missing more and more classes and just wasn't able to wake up when I needed to no matter how hard I tried. I hated so much about how the classes were run that I was losing interest in unversity all-together even though I know I need it. Eventually (sort of recently) I though very hard about what I wanted to do one night and the next day, went to talk to my computer-science professor, and I ended up talking to three other people that day for a few hours as I tried to figure out what to do.
It turns out that a computer science degree would pretty much get me the same jobs as far as programming goes, so why be an engineer? I never applied for the degree program in hopes of being an engineer, it was always about the programming. It's what I enjoy. So I decided I would switch. It's one less class, and for the most part just computer science and math classes, no more physics (or the horribly long labs that go with it), no mech, no chemistry, no engineering classes. I would be much happier with just math and computer-science, they are things I enjoy doing for the most part. (math only when it works, computer-science even sometimes when it doesn't)
So I did what was required to switch into Computer Science for next semester, but now I've found out I will need to pass Calculus and CSC 111, and get a GPA of 2.0 to get in. Now.. to get a GPA of 2.0, which should generally not be a problem is abit of a problem for me. Because of all the trouble I have had, pretty much failing three of my classes (I had talked to them about switching degrees about a week after the deadline for dropping classes I think) is not going to help keep my GPA up. I honestly don't know if I can even do well enough to get a D in any of those classes. If my GPA is below 1, I get kicked out of university. If I get below 2 I will be on academic probation, but still able to do the classes requried for the computer science degree, so I will just have to do well in them and apply for it again next semester. The only way my GPA is going to be below one, is if I get abit less than a C average in both CSC and Calculus I think, which isn't going to happen. But even if I was to get A's in both that is only 1.6 so the most likely thing to happen right now is I will be put on academic probation next semester, but I will be doing classes I will enjoy and with a less stressful schedule. So it could be alot worse. 
Going to sleep now. That's my life currently. (Or what I am willing to write about at least)
1 Comment
Games