It takes two to tango.

I added rudimentary body contours and such within the robes of Vral, and played around with the face shadows. The front and rear portraits are now available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (the same CC license adopted by Wikipedia), as well as the usual AGPLv3+, in case you want to use them more like art than code.

Now with less waffles!

A few minutes ago I stretched the grass tiles to cover three more x- and y-pixels (assuming a 1000×1000 play field), and the waffle issue is now fixed in most medium and large screen sizes. When the field is only ~200px wide (and high, since it's square) or less, the grid lines show up again. By then, though, that's probably going into ancient-mobile-phone or big-desktop-widget territory, and I'm really not coding the game for those.

I also reshaped Vral's feet and shoes yesterday—less sharp, a bit more realistic, and shinier.

Alternate side parking is not suspended today.

As I suspected, the Firefox weirdness was due to suspendRedraw, or my bad use of it. I'll avoid that until I know better.

While I was figuring that out, I changed Vralanea's hips to look (I think) a little more natural. I still need to make some decent eyelashes to replace those interim dotted lines.

"Buckle up—it's the law!"

I buckled and made the game's SVG grass background into a PNG grass background. I badly wanted to make the game its own source (except its sound, if any) but the FPS would have badly suffered for it. Opera still runs slow, but now Firefox is ~50 FPS (but the whole client area suddenly goes visually haywire without any corresponding console messages after a fairly short time, which is a Bad Thing) and IE9 pretty much burns rubber and other nearby objects with its speed.

Each tile is just green with a pattern of a few sporadic blades of grass, and there's still that Waffley Background Problem, at least until I level up my Vector Drawing skill.

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"Back to the rhythm of the funky jam."

After a two-week-long break, during which I got a few more medals and such in Trackmania, I played around even more with Vral's front and rear portraits. Her legs are now closed, her hat is slightly less of a Fantasia knockoff, and her hot pants have one less tassel thingy because I couldn't for the life of me explain to myself (short of magic, of course) how they could stay the same size if one was used to tighten the belt. Both are licensed as before.

Also I won't use that proprietary license I mentioned, even if charging $10k to people who used my stuff for non-free purposes while wrongly calling it HTML5 would've been so much fun.

I'm all tied up with many places to go.

I added some tassels and bands and such to Vralanea's hot pants because I only today realized they were too close to the ones on that one picture of Lindsay Lohan with Hot Tamales for my comfort. (I wasn't even looking at the picture as I drew Vral!) I'm still doing the code organization and tiles; it'll be a while.

.erif fo yruf gnillor eht htiw sthgif ohw ralohcs-hctiw A

No hitbox work today; I didn't feel like doing much with the actual game. I remember giving up about the time that I had to consider hitboxes, when I tried to make a shooter game in C++ and SDL (the fact that I also had to worry about things like cross-platform compatibility and how to draw 2D stuff in OpenGL, when SVG kinda sorta handles that, did not help)...the joys of failure.

I quickly did a rear view of Vralanea—pretty much horizontal-flipped the original, changed some z positions, tweaked a few paths (especially the shoes and the top of the hot pants...what, you've never seen women in hot pants?) and changed or removed a few gradients. I could've omitted that last step if I wanted her to have two busts, which I guess some men would've liked.

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A witch-scholar who fights with the rolling fury of fire.

I got my game's engine to start making hitboxes. They don't (yet) generate collisions, nor do they expand to specific creature sizes or such.

However, I think the witch portrait that follows is much closer to finished, so if you're a professional artist or art critic, just close the browser window now if you don't wish to hate me forever. (A more serious fair warning: an even longer post than my penultimate, complete with headings even, but one that I think is very necessary to explain the portrait's roots and jot down some of my own life so I don't forget it, follows first.)

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“Forward...”

I am still working on the game I mentioned last Early Afternoon Local Time Before Leap Day. The game (to quote another part of the FAQ I wrote so far)...

is an arcade-style, vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up implemented in SVG 1.1, XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, and ECMAScript 5 (a standardized version of JavaScript). It requires a browser (or some other agent) with support of those languages, as well as DOM Level 2 Core, HTML, and Events, to run. A pointing device (mouse, trackball, touchpad, etc.) is almost certainly needed to play, and a keyboard might be as well. It plays music and other sounds with XHTML objects, if supported by the agent, but sound is not necessary to play."

(What is perhaps my longest Blogger post ever follows. In short, the game is nowhere near complete or ready, and I haven't released any source or playable part of it.)

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Program updates! ... except not.

I've had Apple Software Update for a while to get updates to the Safari browser. I saw it pop up not too long ago:

I have neither an iPhone nor any earlier version of the Utility, nor do I have QuickTime.

There has been earlier controversy about how new programs are placed in the updater. I think the separate "New software" list was the right thing to do (they have largely stuck to it in my experience), and I can't imagine they can accomplish monopolist goals with an "iPhone Configuration Utility", but vigilance is key to keeping programs from becoming disingenuous. (For those curious, Windows Vista doesn't list e.g. Windows Live Essentials separately in its Windows Update either, and I've set to "Ignore" the two Apple updates.)

Y. Signal.

So I've been looking at the local FCC DTV reception maps, and noticed the gain/loss maps linked on the left side (just after the nav bar and search box). For WNBC and similar stations, expect bad signals north and northwest of the city when the "transition" occurs tomorrow.

In less important news, we're all gonna die!!!

(Yes, the title is a reference to a video game.)

Cut__ Honey

Update (April 28, 2010): This is at least partially obsolete. I just call them all "Cutie" now.

How does one say キューティーハニー in English? Apparently it's no easy task.

Wikipedia's article transliterates the title as Kyūtī Hanī . I've seen everything from Cutey Honny to Q-tey Honey for various works, but most use Cutey Honey, others Cutie Honey, and still others "ANIME SUCKS GB24CHAN BECAUSE INSULTING PEOPLE'S METHODS OF ENTERTAINMENT OVER INTERNET TUBES IS FUNY LULZ!!!!!" I'll leave your personal methods to you, but mine shall be:

• For the franchise in general or the 1973 series, Cutey Honey or Cutie Honey interchangeably.
• For the 1973 manga and its 1992 follow-up, I'll use The Ultimate Manga Guide's spellings.
• For the 1994 OVA and キューティーハニーF, Cutey Honey until either gets remastered to say otherwise. (Part of me wants a fully shaded HD remake of the former…)
• For the 2004 movie and the current series, Cutie Honey as they specify.
• For anything else after 2004, Cutie Honey unless it says otherwise.

As for the opening song lyrics, I've noticed some write the first lines as "Kono koro hayari no onna no ko" and "Oshiri na chiisana onna no ko". The last page of what is apparently a 1982 print* of volume 2 of the 1974 2-volume version of the original manga (that's a mouthful) suggests "Konogoro …" and "Oshiri no …", respectively.

ADV's New Cutey Honey's "Essential Anime" release corroborates that, and the original anime agrees (with respect to the second part anyway).

Feel free to comment on your own transl[iter]ation beliefs. Stupid comments get trashed accordingly.

*See also Wikipedia's article on the Showa Period, through which I finally got a clue on the date notation after lots of fruitless searching. I fail at languages.

Eden's Aegis

A game that I found via Shoot The Core. Yesterday x.x updated the game to version 0.11, correcting a few misspellings and apparently changing how many items/pellets/whatever-they-are are dropped by larger enemies.

A replay is available.

“...and BOOM!”

So I was playing Warning Forever with some rather nice custom settings to see what sorts of monstrosities I could get to.

The replay is just my ship disappearing in a poof after that, since if there's a way to set the game to take full-game replays over multiple stages, I didn't know it then (nor do I want to record a big MPEG or something every time I play a game...it's rough on the frame rate...).

“You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

Edit: Google Images (mentioned below) has returned to its old full-data layout, for me at least. Thank you, GOOG.

So I was wondering who the kinda-hot special guest judge on some singing-competition-type show I was watching was*, and instead of simply checking the official site I decided to use the Google. (Cyndi Lauper was the first name I thought of. I've no idea why either.)

NOT COOL.

I know that Google likes fiddling around with stuff to see what selected users like (2005 called, they want my comment back), but I don't like the idea of having to hover over a thumbnail to see what images are from dead sites** or dangerous sites (much worse)...or maybe I'm just lazy. The worst part: merely tabbing to the desired thumbnail won't reveal the size and location info.

This, on the other hand, is cool:

Apologies to Bill Bixby.

*By the way, if my eyes, this MSNBC story, and the great wiki that knows a lot if not quite all serve me right, it was Sager tonight.

**Google, please mark an image as "possibly dead" or something if the image comes up as "not found". I promise I won't sue you for using that idea. On the contrary, it would save you guys some bandwidth and lessen the need to scrounge up money from everyone and everything if things go downhill.

Blow MOAR sh*t up.

RAY-HOUND v0.900.91 is like v0.80 but with high score list, instant-replay, more options, new-game checkpoints every 10 stages, the apparent ability to ram and then "capture" enemies with the left mouse button—after which you can flail them around to somewhere else—and...cowbell please...SOUND!

My high score's below.

Replays (7z archive, 23 KiB)

Quantized Blaze.

I played a game of Quantized Blaze yesterday. Results of that Normal Game below.

GRADLE-UNISON.

In this weird Hello World Project game, you move and then left-click your mouse (or press the Z key) to move your whatever-you-call-that-spinning-thing across a board. The longer you move between each click, the stronger the shock wave you make after the click. The shockwave destroys enemies and gets you points.

Blow sh*t up.

I was checking the database for some shooters. It had the usual meh games. It also had two games of a BattleBlade series, which were good, and a great game called Hyperwars (I like its Gameboy-style graphics and it's even a bit funny).

When I saw Ray-hound in the list, though, I forgot about those three fast.

Hikoza.T.Ohkubo ("Hikware") made a game before Ray-hound, called Warning Forever, which I love for the gradually-tougher-bosses battles. Ray-hound is immensely different from that. There are increasingly difficult levels here, yes, but that's where the similarities end. You can't shoot, but you can use the left mouse button to slingshot dangerous rays of light back at cannons that launch them, or "flick" the mouse to boost the ship and reflect those rays. It's different from many games I've played, and while it does feel very different and weird at first, it's extremely fun, and even the deadly rays are a nice sight for sore eyes (though the other graphics are above-average at best).

No joystick is needed for the mouse-only, Windows-only game. It doesn't seem to have sound, instant-replay, or many options yet, but this also seems to be the first public version of it, and like wine, Windows, or anything else (except maybe Sony), it will certainly mature and age gracefully. I'll definitely be watching Ray-hound closely—I love it.

Superstar!

I and other YTMNDers took a survey. The "little surprise" we got (edited for a nice transparent background by me)...

...and what's a post called "Superstar!" without someone else's funny Slashdot reply?

Oh, and IE7 RC1 is up. Note the visibility of the provider's name in the search box, not unlike Opera and Firefox.

All it would really need now to match them there is the icon...and maybe some other stuff I don't care about.