Print

Add to Reputation:  

What do you think of this post?

I agree I disagree  
Comment:

[Mark [lodle]]

Well here i am at 3 am (freezing my ass i might add) sobering up from after work drinks and posting my life story (well not really that would be boring ).

Any way for thoses who have not meet me before my name is mark (in game name lodle or johnyb depending on the game) and i come from the little place you yanks like to call down under (not that any of you know where it is to start with). My chosen field of occupation, as i like to call it, is the humble programmer. Im quite lucky really, with scott of having fun in data centers along the west side of USA and mario QA'ing the hell out of ea i had the title of lead and only coder slapped on me. So i thank you all for that .

Now thats enough ramble about me. Lets talk business. Recently i had the fun of recoding the health and amour bars in ges. My god was that harder than it looked. The old ones where really a freak of nature and should never of seen the light of day. Trying to align and change 10 different pictures in a nice curve is like trying to swallow a chain saw while being sprayed in the face with mace. Put it simple it looks shit and is a pain in the but to work with.

Now i stumbled along this nice little function that takes to images and a percent value and draws % of the first one with 1-% of the second one. Wow, 1 line of code to draw the health bars and it worked very well except one thing. The health bars we wanted are curved so this would mean that it would still have the last little bit of the box above showing, which in the end looked shit.

So now the challenge was to find a way to splice the images together on an angle. So i started looking through all the drawing functions and one sparked my eye, DrawTexturedPolygon. Now this little beast was exactly what i needed but i had no idea how the hell it worked. So i googled it, nothing, looked in the src code for other examples, almost nothing (the one found was so complex (radar) that i gave up learning how it worked. So i did the next best thing, trial and error. After the 10th rebuild I got a picture to render using it and i was so happy but dark times where still ahead.

I got a square to render which was the easy part and so i tried to skew it into a ... dam forget the word .. funny skewed, not so square, dovalacky (that will do) but the texture was stretching in a weird way cause i still didnt understand how it worked. Any way i left it at that and went off to work and then right in the middle of pooring my 99th pint of weinstephaner (very good German beer, and yes i am a bar tender by night) it hit me, the fact that the second set of points that DrawTexturedPolygon where unitvectors to define what part of the image was drawn.

With this knowledge i went back to the code and after 9 hours, 201 lines, 56 rebuilds, 7 sheets of scribble and 23 stupid errors they where working like a charm. I would love to show you them but sean said no. ( he is such a meany at times ).

Well thats the end of my rant for today.
When will i post next? Any ones guess. So ttul

Oh btw feel free to ask questions about what i blog as well. And a special thxs to my yr 11 math teacher Mrs Scar (yes her real name) with out her skills of teaching i would of been lost.

Mark "Lodle" Chandler
Lead Programmer

[olileauk]

oh my god, you used a UK date. you absolute bloody legend.

[Sean [Baron]]

That's outrageous, how dare you type it that way.   

[Mark [lodle]]

by uk you mean most of the world.

[Polizei]

by uk you mean most of the world.

Most of the American Empire. 

[Mike [fourtecks]]

if you think about it the most logical way to do it would be year/month/day for sorting reasons. starting with day is just bloody stupid imo because of that. but hey. no worries I suppose

[Mark [lodle]]

mike most logical way would be day/month/year as year doesnt change (except every new year), month doesnt change that often so day is the most important factor.

[Konrad Beerbaum]

Wait doesn't the US use the most logical way then? Oh wait, it does.  Booyah!

[Mark [lodle]]

Nope, usa is mm/dd/yyyy
Rest is dd/mm/yyyy

[Mike [fourtecks]]

mike most logical way would be day/month/year as year doesnt change (except every new year), month doesnt change that often so day is the most important factor.

I'm talking about numerical ordering like file 'sort by name' in operating systems and stuff

23/05/2007
23/06/2006
24/02/2007
26/05/1999
26/08/2003

now lets see how it would be ordered yyyy/mm/dd

1999/05/26
2003/08/26
2006/06/23
2007/02/24
2007/05/23

ah look at that, it's correctly ordered from past to present. :p

[Mark [lodle]]

That would be true. But for humans (who most read left to right) you want the most important / unknown info first

[Konrad Beerbaum]

Nope, usa is mm/dd/yyyy
Rest is dd/mm/yyyy

Wait, shit.  Man I need to sleep, modeling all day has fucked with my head. 

[VC]

I use 24 July 2007 style when writing by hand, serialised 70724 when putting dates in filenames or similar computer-related tasks. In theory I like the 24-VII-07 style, but it never looks right (especially when fixed width of serial and yyMMMdd formats is a boon) and confuses the balls off of anyone who doesn't understand entry-level roman numerals, which is about 70% of the U.S. population.

Noobs.

[Mike [fourtecks]]

I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII WHEELS ON A BIG RIG

[Sean [Baron]]

I like mm/dd/yyyy, it works. it's science.