Salad Sammich

Today’s “public exhibition” didn’t have much of a turnout, must have been the heavy rain. Nobody goes out on a rainy day. So since it was just us students the whole day turned into an impromptu pizza party and DS game session. We played a lot of 4-way Tetris and Mario Kart, it was fun :P Didn’t eat much in the way of healthy food today though XD Also, I have a loud and looping background music from the exhibition stuck in my head, I’ve been around it so long it’s stuck in my head :o

Now that university is almost over I feel a bit of anxiety about what the heck I’m going to be doing now. Both in the short term of organizing how to finalize things and also about planning for my future career :S Final marks, graduation, tying off loose ends.

So today all the groups started installing their project setups in the Block (the display room). I spent a lot of time going back and forth between the physical box to help set it up and the labs to do more Flash work. Let me tell you, 4 monitors = nightmare. Because of how they fit in the box, each pair of two is upsidedown compared to the other pair. I can fix that through the display driver, but then for some stupid reason I can’t keep that rotation when I try to knit the 4 into one 2560×2048 desktop, to run a single Flash Player window. So I go to great lengths to reprogram my Flash engine to “pretend” to be on a 2×2 when on a 4×1 setup. Apparently there’s some self-imposed limit of 2880×2880 size on the dimentions in Flash, so I can’t make a 5120×1024 canvas size. I think I may have managed to find a way to hack around this. It still sucks, especially since this stupid limit is on dimensions rather than memory use, which was the whole bloody point of the limit in the first place, invented back when floppy disks were still around.

Long story short: ATI drivers suck, Flash sucks at making anything outside of fiddly webgame crap.

Spent all day working on our exhibition project, apart from some few mysterious crashes (that will hopefully be averted by switching to Flash Player 10) it’s more or less working great :) Here’s a small screenshot image just for kicks :P

a view of (most of) the elemental effects

Me and my friend Tom had just finished working on our project thing for the day, and as we were leaving I found a rather large gold coin in the hallway. Upon inspection it was a novelty chocolate coin, not smushed or bent or anything. This was a university campus, by the way, not the place you’d expect to find lost chocolate coins, and I said as such:

“Who would drop a chocolate coin here?”

“Chocolate Pirates?”

Needless to say I ate it

Cakes that are lied about...

I replayed Portal again, just as fun as the first time (only a bit stale after the umpteenth time). I’ve already played a bunch of bonus maps, including the We Create Stuff map pack. I crave more maps, if I had the time to spare I’d try my hand at making my own. Then again if I had more of this theoretical “spare time” I’d just as easily be playing more TF2. Heck, I’d settle for enough spare time to goof off at Kongretate.

As for what I’m busy with, just mostly tooling around with communicating with Flash via XML Sockets (not fun) and messing around with the ARToolKit. It’s fun to mess with, I wouldn’t mind making something out of it outside of assessment. For our project we’re actually just going to be stripping it down to some 2D co-ordinates, no 3D involved.