A Quiet Path

I love the mornings…

I’m in one of those fun stages (read: not fun) where I can code up effects by hand, but my effect editor is nowhere near done. But I really want effects now, so I can put them in my demo.

Like this:

Finally got myself motivated to work on my programming again - particle effects are now functional, with new features compared to the last time I’d done this sort of thing. Whee!

One problem I’ve always had with my costumes is what to do with them when I’m not in costume. Some, mostly those made of cloth, are easy enough to put away in plastic bins. Others, like Gourry and Siegfried, don’t have the foldability and squishiness required. $6 at my local hardware store created a solution…

Contents - about 15′ of 1/2″ PVC, 6 L bend connectors, 2 T bend connectors, and some lock tight glue at key locations (hips, mostly).

Works a lot better than trying to fit it all into a box and shoving it into my closet, that’s for sure.

Or, as I prefer to think of it, a small break from work. I’m now starting on week two, and since I no longer have a Halloween costume that I’m working furiously on, I can get back to work on my own game engine and the small sample shoot-’em-up that I’d started a few weeks back. I don’t really expect it to become a full game, I’m just using it to teach myself new techniques (stencil techniques, motion blur!) and refine my understanding of what is needed for creating a game engine.

That, and watch some movies, read some books, and generally relax. If I’m going to be unemployed, I’m going to at least try to enjoy it…

Happy Halloween!

As of tonight, I have completed Siegfried’s armor pattern. Last part was the elbow, and it’s now in foam. Tomorrow I should be able to coat all remaining parts with plastic, and I’ll be painting over the coming week.

I just got a call from eNasco. Recently, I placed an order for 8 more rolls of craft foam, to prepare for future costumes, but it turns out that those rolls are now discontinued. I’m not sure if this means the flat sheets of craft foam are also going away, but I didn’t like them much in any case. They were too small for large armor plates, and too expensive for doing much with compared with these rolls.

They still have red in stock. Buy now, if you can. I have a feeling they won’t be up there for long. White, black, and yellow are already listed as no longer being sold by eNasco.

Otherwise, I’ll be looking into volara foam next. It can actually be cheaper than even the eNasco craft foam rolls, if you buy in bulk. I’ve heard good things about it, but haven’t tried it personally yet.

This weekend, I started sanding down parts of the armor for painting. And I have to say, the little Mouse power sander that I got for Christmas several years ago is one of my favorite tools at this point. I was unable to coat most of the armor parts in just one pass, so I have lots of lumpy areas where I overlapped the plastic in the second (and third, and fourth) areas to ensure strength and complete coverage. My Mouse is able to smooth those out in seconds.

Only downside is that it numbs my hand if I use it too long.

Progress is still fairly good. I created patterns for the knee guards this morning, which just leaves the elbows and ankle guards for pattern work. I’ve got the base coat of paint on the upper chest, upper and mid back, and inner shoulder caps. I’ll sand those down lightly in preparation for their final coats of paint shortly. I’ve started sanding down the thigh guards, and the arm guards are also almost ready to get painted. Still need to plastic the new knee guards and a couple of parts for the foot armor, but that won’t take long. Which is good - just 10 days left…

Tonight I didn’t really feel like costuming much. So, I booted up the PC and started doing some coding on a small sample program I’ve been playing with. Too bad for me it turned into a wild bug hunt when I changed from running in Debug mode to Release.

For some odd reason, my input mapping system doesn’t work in Release mode. I ask if the player’s “move left” command is currently pressed, which is mapped to the left arrow on the keyboard, d-pad left on the gamepad, or left on the gamepad’s left thumbstick. For some reason, though, the system knows that left is held, but it isn’t being reported properly in my Lua update script.

It seems like Lua isn’t storing my variables properly in Release mode, or perhaps is mapping all of my variables to the same memory space, but I’m not sure why.

It’s really rather annoying. In general, I very much enjoy using Lua for scripting and quick prototypes with my code. But when bugs like this come up… seems like it costs me more time than it saves.