The little Inn by the wayside

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Chroelle
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Chroelle »

Still fallen off of the planet, I send you greetings.

I have decided to take the tempo off of my current everyday life, and thus hope to find some time to drop by here. I got a lot of work done in the last week, but still there is plenty more where that came from. But there is no need to get it all done at once, when some of it can wait I decided.
ATM I am focusing on the family with a couple of days off from work with them, and of course X-mas coming up.

I like the X-mas theme Jay. If it wasn't because I use my laptop as a worktool too for meetings with clients I would change into it too. I feel I present myself better with my logo and such on my desktop.

On a completely different note. I got to see some of my kids (at work) play a game in development, which inspires mathematical learning. Its calle Gozoa and is being made by a company called COMEplot. Its pretty neat, and so far only in Danish. http://www.gozoa.com/
It was pretty interesting hearing firsthand about their thoughts on making Ipad games. All of a sudden you need to figure new ways to do controls as an example. You cannot just rely on directional keys or space and ctrl or similar. You have to convince the players that there was a reason this was a game for tablets and not for laptops.
Interesting stuff. Made me think about getting more into this line of work at some point - but then again - dont I always think of different lines of work that I would like to get into at some point. A lifetime simply doesn't have enough years!
Currently testing Life version 2.9 (With added second child)
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Pager »

I really like to hear about when educators use gaming as a tool for learning. I would say Curly, you are in the best situation to bring that aspect to light. I find a lot of times in our news gamers are treated like criminals waiting to happen in that BS "life-imitiating-art" fashion.

I'm still waiting to hear about someone running around smashing blocks with their head while chewing on magic mushrooms then blaming it on SMB.
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Scythe »

On the other hand, we do have kids running around in dark corridors with repetitive electronic music, chewing pills.
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

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Gah, it's already happened, save the princess!
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by jayenkai »

^ congrats on your 1000th post!!! Woot!!!
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Railwaymodeler »

December second, and right now, it is 60 degrees Fahrenheit out. Feels like somehow last night I slept through all of winter and awoke in Springtime.

If only it could stay this way all Winter!
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by eMTe »

"As you have noticed over the years, we are not angry people." (itebygur)
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Pater Alf »

jayenkai wrote:^ congrats on your 1000th post!!! Woot!!!
Don't forget to sign up for our yearly Christmas avatar contest.

http://forum.curlysworldoffreeware.com/ ... =28&t=3880
[quote="eMTe"]I dont think trying to pass the screen in computer game once per 500 tries makes you a geek. Rather a dangerous psychopath.[/quote]
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Pager »

jayenkai wrote:^ congrats on your 1000th post!!! Woot!!!
Thanks!
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by jayenkai »

About a week ago, I finally bought Monkey. Monkey is a programming language developed by the guys who created Blitz, which has been my language of choice for oh so many years. I've loved that I can easily write a game, compile it, zip it up, and then have it actually work on everyone's PCs without having to keep going back and fixing stupid little quirks.
So, call me dumb, but I'm sticking with those guys!
Monkey has a lot of changes in its structure, compared to Blitz, though, and it'll take me a bit of relearning, before I'm ready to start pushing out some lovely games.
The plus side, though, is that Monkey will allow me to compile games for not just Windows and Mac, but also iOS, Android and HTML5, (and more!) all from a hopefully single source.
God only knows if I could wrangle all of that together into a neat one-for-all framework, but if I can, I oughta be sorted for one heck of a good 2013!
That's my task for this month.
Learn Monkey, build a nice new framework, and keep opening up my Lego Star Wars Advent calendar each day, even though I'm not really a Star Wars fan, and haven't the foggiest what half of these smegging things are supposed to be!
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Pager »

I know where you're coming from...I have a friend that collects Star Wars figures, and everytime I see him he has some new one that was only in a single frame of some far away shot...half the time I have no clue what he is talking about but he brags about it like it is the most amazing thing ever. So I just tweet and whistle like R2 and motor on my way.
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by jayenkai »

Properly started to learn how to work Monkey, yesterday, and spent a good couple of hours getting some simple looking sprite routines working. Took longer than expected, but I now have the ability to fling about 250 sprites around the screen at once, although I've yet to properly stress test it, or even try it on different "targets".. Still, runs nicely in the browser, so I imagine it works nicely elsewhere. Hopefully. Maybe.. :/

After so much work, though, comes a good nights sleep, and it's usually then that you realise the major flaw in your plan.
My intricate working of Retina based functions will be completely wasted on actual iOS devices, because iOS actually rescaled all your sprite locations for you. Bummer.. I know this probably means bugger all to any of you, but I felt like prattling on about it, and this seemed the best place for it.

Today I'll rework a bunch of stuff, get it to ignore half my code when on iOS, and hopefully get everything back up to speed.

Long story short, each of my games will now come with regular and High Definition sprites (which will usually look about the same, since they're nearly all retro pixel sprites), so games should be slightly more crisp and clear when played in high resolutions.
Yummy!
And big and chunky on iPads!
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Chroelle »

Once again I drop by for a quick fix of CWF.
As I told you last time I wanted to slow down my life a little. And of course as soon as youve been stressed out over longer period of time, and then slow down, your body catches up with you. I've been sick for the last week, and so has my wife and my oldest (Anna). Tried going to work wednesday only to find that that was a horrible idea. I called in sick again the next day. Thankfully we both have monday off, so we can go buy x-mas presents that we were supposed to buy this week.

It seems X-mas hit CWF again this year, so I hope I can participate in voting in the avatar contest. I tried to find a x-mas av too that kept in line with my original avatar.

I hope everyone is doing well, and I have to say that I cannot seem to find much time for gaming or writing in here. The whole water-damage thing with our roof is taking up the last energy that I might have gotten from slwoing down my workpace.
I wanted to dive into at least a couple of the games when I found time, but now they just seem to be piling up unplayed on me. Hopefully the x-mas vacation will offer a few hours here and there. :)
Currently testing Life version 2.9 (With added second child)
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

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Chroelle wrote:The whole water-damage thing with our roof is taking up the last energy that I might have gotten from slwoing down my workpace.
Isn't it funny how home repairs just seem to know when to twist the screws just right? In the summer we were getting our parging redone so we scheduled a Mason to come in and do it...they started at 7:00am, and at about 8am he came to the door to take us outside to show us what they had found...essentially there was a crack in the parging below one of the windows, but since the previous owner hadn't fixed it and just left it, the water, ice and bugs all decided to do what they wanted behind the parging. So in turn our foundation was pretty much turned to sand directly under the window, it was essentially a hole into our basement the size of a rugby ball. I almost had a heart attack. But I think the guy took pity on us and managed to fix that entire wall for the price we had agreed upon for the whole thing.

Here's a pic of the hole...
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by jayenkai »

Yikes! That's a crack and a half!
Good thing you had a decent workman, who didn't try to rip you off. That's a bit of a rarity, these days!

We've* recently finished paying off our mortgage \o/yeay\o/ so now have to bugger about with insurance and all the other gubbins that comes along with no longer being able to rely on having a mortgage!!
Crazy times, and a lot of fun reading through all the paperwork that comes along with owning a house!

* We = My Mum, cos I'm still living at home! Lazy Jay!
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

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Sometimes I wish I were still living at home. Then I could spend my cash on something but my house :lol:

I was really afraid that I was going to get ripped off, but even the mason said in his 20+ years of doing this type of work, he had never seen anything so bad. It was a learning experince all around...but he got his hands on a large quantity of fast setting concrete and they built up the holes (holes, because there was more than one, but this was the worst).

A few days later one of our pillars got a crack in the new parging, and he came back and fixed it. He had to redo that pillar 3 times, but fixed it everytime without extra charge, then to top it all off he sealed the edges with tar because he felt bad that he had to keep coming back. I didn't even mind that he had to keep coming back, as long as he would without charge. It was pretty cool.
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Chroelle »

That is more than pretty cool. That calls for MASON OF THE YEAR awards or something. We had the same kind of roofguy come visit us, and also just recently a guy from a fungus-removal company who decided that our prohject was not something he could do anything about. But when he heard that we were at a loss as to who to call about this without them ripping us off, then he called me up the next day and told me that he talked to a carpenter about our situation, and he knew exactly what to do to handle our potential fungi-problem. I love people like that!

And... What a crack. :)
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Pager »

how did your roof get water damaged in the first place?

Tonight my wife and I ripped off the face plate to our fireplace in the basement. We had never used the fireplace nor do we intend to put a fire in there...but after ripping off the plate, it looks so freakin' cool! The person who put the fireplace in originally built an arc on the top of it...and there is probably about 50 years of ash in the pit...pretty neat. But the design definitely goes well with my swords and dragons and stuff...I'll post a pic once I get one...
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Railwaymodeler »

When I was a kid, we moved from Iowa, to Lake Bluff, about 20 minutes south of where I live now.

The house was built new, sat on the market for a year before my dad bought it. We were the first family to live in it.

Dad let me use half the basement for a model railroad. It's a ranch-style house, so only one story high, and as a result, has a large footprint, so a large basement.

A year after we move in, I have the table set up and trains running, with some scenery work done. Of course, my dad would help out too: On this railroad, we have four generations of family trains running. Mine, my dad's, my grandpa's and my great-grandpa (Who emigrated to the USA shortly before WWI, bringing tinplate metal trains over from Germany). My dad is a model railroader, though not as much anymore, and we still have the Lionel trains in his basement.

Anyway, a year in the new house, after a serious rainstorm, which lasted for days, and left us without electricity for nearly a week (Lineman unions keep the wires above ground, which does not work well considering the storms Northeast Illinois can get!), several cracks developed in the concrete foundation. Two of them were serious cracks, even.

The company that built the house tried to claim they developed because of "Vibration from the model trains", which was silly. Houses are designed to sustain far more serious vibration: Real trains running nearby don't even cause this damage to houses built near rail lines!

In the end, the company who came in to fix the cracks and foundation problems, were paid by the company that built the house. One of their employees did note that all it would take is another major storm, and one of the walls could give way. He said the concrete composition in some places was so poor, you could cause damage by hitting the wall wearing a heavy boxing glove!

In the end, all was fixed, with minimal need to move parts of the railroad out of the way. A couple of the crew men working would ask to run my trains on their break times. I remember one brought over some Lionel he had sitting in his attic, said I could have them if I gave them a good home!

Scary how poorly the basement foundation was built, and how the house even managed to pass city building code inspection when new.
Without trains America Stops- Support Amtrak

Old trains never die. They just sit in ruin and wait until the day they are taken in by a skilled craftsman and rebuilt to their former glory.
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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Post by Pager »

Vibrations from model trains causing cracks in the foundation? what was the foundation made from paper mache?
I just love the excuses that people come up with so they don't have to take responsibilites for their shoddy workmanship.

I baked cookies today. Anyone want me to mail them some?
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