Category Archives: Programming

Dynamic CSS based on weather

Raymond Camden wrote a great tutorial on loading style sheets dynamically based on the user’s current weather. He poked fun at himself and the idea a bit at the beginning of his post, but I think it’s honestly a terrifically fun idea. As it’s beginning to get a bit colder as we enter the holiday season, it would be very… cozy… to have a site recognize the weather and respond with some cool blues and whites!

Will I get around to implementing something like this? Probably not. But I find it pretty interesting anyways!

Parsing and Tiles Structures Complete

Excuse the bad art. They’re placeholders. I’m not an artist.
I finished the parser and data structures to hold terrain (ground, walls, ceiling, etc.) tiles. Of course, they will likely be changed over time to accommodate new types of tiles, because right now I only have one – grass. The point is that it works and that at this point it can go through the entire data structure of tiles during each update without any slowdown.
I’ll probably want to add a second tile type soon just to make sure parser and data structures can handle different types. I guess I should expect error and add in some error handling for when the data file has incorrect characters in it.
And then I’ll be on to gravity and, with it, collision detection for the ground.

Level Layout Parsing

I’ve been thinking that documenting my work on Mr. Bear’s Adventure might press me to work on it a little more. It’s a basic platformer (or it hopefully will be) that I’ve been attempting to make. The idea isn’t to make some fantastic game; rather, it’s to just make a platformer at all. The only way to get practice is to churn out some simple games.
I had already created some sprites and done character movement, excluding any kind of collision detection or gravity. So, I hadn’t done much of anything yet actually. When I returned to work on it, I started on the parser to read external data files containing the level layout. Along with it, I started working on the structures used to store the levels.

World

I’m bored in class again! I’m taking two other classes that I didn’t talk about last time – Game Development and an AI project course. Both ofthese classes are project courses, and both worry me.
In my AI project course, I’m working with gem, the Kubos, and Ethan. We’re creating AI algorithms to play the game of Battleships. I feel like we’re pretty behind. We’ve yet to combine code at all. I’ve been working on the actual algorthms, but until I get the file reader/writer and main game loop, I can’t really test my algorithms.

 
Game Development is worrying me too. Here at UCI I’m working with gem, Ethan, and a person I met in class named Tony. They’re all programmers. In addition, we’re working woth a group of artists from the Paguna College of Art and Design. Our planning has gone great. We know what we want to make. Art design is coming along well. I’ve been impressed with the concept art Ive seen so far, but we haven’t finalzed by designs yet. We’re meeting this Saturday for the first one to really discuss things.
We’re just getting started on the prgramming for it though. It’s due in about five weeks, which is not very far from now. By that time it needs to be playable, but we don’t really need it to be complete. It should have one level, a small selection of enemies, etc. After the class ends, I’d like to continue working on it. I know most of the artists feel the same way; I don’t know about the other prgrammers though.