"He was waiting for something to develop, and WHAP. He got developed."

I've pretty much shelved the SVG game project thing. I didn't have much time for it (or much of anything really), and I don't like the general direction Web specifications are going.

For now, I've turned toward C++11 and Qt development. To pay tribute (or a complete lack of attention) to a certain football game that's going on at the moment, I made a fantasy-game character equipment generator that makes randomly-named and enchanted equipment like so:

Here are links to Dropbox of 7-zip archives of my regular expression-based text generator library's source and my equipment generator's source. (Regex-based generators have been made before, but the one here is my own work.) Once compiled, they and applicable Qt and system libraries should be in the same directory or at least each other's PATH so you can run the generator and it can use the library to make the names.

The pieces of equipment don't do much on their own, but I have a rudimentary, unfinished framework there to apply equipment-type-based and additional enchantments and to call them in a function. I'm a bit iffy about tethering myself to any framework (let alone one that wants to turn its focus toward snazzy tablet UIs, given the sheer user-hostility of Windows 8), so I make a bunch of likely-expensive casts between the C++ Standard Library types and Qt types. (I love the ad-hoc vector–async threadpool I made in mainwindow.cpp.) It works on Qt 4.8.4 (the version on Arch Linux as of post time) and on Qt 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 on Windows. It seems to run slower and generally more strangely on 5.0.1.

Speaking of standard library types, I'm quite thankful for the enlightening pages of cppreference.com.

Enjoy the generator! Maybe I'll improve it or make it a full-blown game at some point, but for now have fun with all the strange names you draw from the vast pockets of the RNG.

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.

Mascara applied. Repeat: the mascara has been deployed and applied.

I finally gave Vral some decent dark-red eyelashes today— they'll rarely if ever be seen in gameplay but it's nice to be able to zoom in and not see those gray placeholder dotted lines. Her tummy shines from the front (along with her bust, despite her general shine-from-upper-left theme) to better show her physique, and her staff now menaces with spikes of its own metal.

I added a method to easily add "standing" creatures to stages as needed, and another to properly move all such standing creatures with the background in one go. Now my little test stage has three standing Purpleys that creep with the background toward mine.

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.