Infinite Dreams

Dreams are only supposed to go on for a few seconds, I believe, but sometimes it's possible to have dreams that seem to go on the entire night. And what's even stranger is that I can remember this one rather vividly despite it not making any sense at all.

It began as a trip to America - Whitney and I were in the Ford Fiesta, driving towards a harbour of some sort and parking the car on the ferry. (I didn't park in the right place, so I had to move the car about a bit by hand to get it aligned with the rest of them). Once on, we realised we didn't know if we were on the right one. The parking attendant, who was Dave Gorman for some reason, told us that this was the only ferry leaving St Andrews today, so we were definitely in the right place.

My family were coming over on a separate journey, and had to spend two hours at the police station because he didn't have the right forms to let him into the country. This is probably a spillover from real life, when on the last two plane trips we've taken, he's first been mistaken for a terrorist and possessing dangerous glasses, and the other time when the staff thought he was likely to go on a murderous rampage with a pair of blunt scissors in the medicine bag.

Once in some anonymous place in America, we were wandering around a marketplace (I think Chris Tarrant featured here somehow, but I'm not sure), but something was wrong with it and I had to go into the source code and recode it in LISP. The reason for this is that yesterday I had been watching Ian Gent write a Sudoku solver in it, complete with Tom winding him up and adding in little comments like "Tom is great, isn't he" when he wasn't looking. Once the marketplace was fixed, I tested the code by buying a can of Orangina from a Chinese man at the side.

For the journey back, we were all on a small plane instead (I can't think what happened to the car). Just before take-off, an announcement came over the speakers - "We're going to have to go through a herd of cows, and none of us have ever done this before, so hang on tight." With no further warning, the plane accelerated towards take-off, and we held on as we were buffeted about by the cows being hit by the front of the plane, bits of leather and mince flying off in all directions.

After clearing the herd, we took off and circled for a little, observing the cow-related carnage below as the passengers applauded. Then we were on our way back home.

I'm sure it's things like this that got Salvador Dali started.

Approaching the end of Solitaire

Why can no-one get the idea of Treasure Tower right? I've had a few room submissions back after I asked if anyone wanted to make some additional levels, and the rooms could best be described as "insane". , I'm counting on you. Actually, what I'll do is shove all the mad ones into an "Extra" tower, and that should solve everything.

A minor miracle happened today - Ian Gent said that my project was "quite good". Additionally, he was also surprised that I had got this far so quickly, and thought that no one else would be in a position to start writing their project report three weeks before the submission deadline. So I've celebrated by writing a pointless feature - a mode that displays rather crude-looking cards instead of the usual suit-and-value plain output. Have a look.




True, it hurts the eyes a bit, but it's something else to show at the demo. And yes, it can solve that game!

Fate's Warning

I'm most depressed. Well, I'm not actually all that depressed, but a bit melancholy all the same. Not actually at the moment, though. So it was a bit of a bad start to the post all round. But with the Spring break now upon us, my practicals getting written and the project seeming like I actually have to do something to it soon, the fact remains that soon there will be a repetition of what happened four years ago - life as I know it will split apart, and, true to Douglas Adams' word, will reform as something even more inexplicable and confusing (although this time in another country rather than a hundred miles down the road).

And I'm just beginning to enjoy university, as well. True, the fact that the lecturers are on strike and I have very little work at the moment probably helps, but I feel that I have wasted a lot of my time here. And I don't mean through normal procrastination or anything like that - I just thought that I would enjoy the whole experience more. In the early years I put myself in six-hour Chemistry labs instead of the "Maths for Idiots" and "Computing for Turnips" courses that other people are wise enough to do in first year. And outside of class, it took me two years too long to refine myself down to a group of friends that weren't characterized by high-school-like politics, rumour and general backstabbing. I thought that getting on with people at university would be far easier than in Academy, and I was happy with my first impressions. But there are events, people and things said that still anger me then I think about them even now.

The point of this post isn't to generate sympathy comments, it's to encourage everyone who isn't leaving this year to not waste their time, and to not take things as seriously as I did, not to make the same mistakes as I did, and just to make sure that you can enjoy the whole experience. Enjoy it while you have the chance!

Start of the Spring "Break"

This security policy is becoming a classic example of overdoing things. When we were handed out the task last month, the expected word count was 1000-2000 if you were doing it alone, with the word count climbing by 1500 words for every additional group member. The one that I'm typing up at the moment has now passed the 4,000-word mark and takes up 21 pages, and I haven't even written any of the main section. I hope the marker's got a lot of free time during the next fortnight. Not that there's any guarantee that it'll be marked at all, mind you, seeing as the strike's still going on.

It's not all bad, though - when I got back from the weekend I found that my monstrously ghastly harpsichord piece somehow came fourth in the One Voice Competition that was pointed out at what passes for the Modplug forums these days. The competition was more to do with melodic ability rather than sound of the file, and that's probably just as well.

If I get fed up with this I'm going to look at my online high score table again and try and improve the encryption, which should be a lot more entertaining. I think I'm one of the few people who can say that with a straight face.

No smoking

What's happened to you all? After an unbelievably traumatic trip up to Inverurie, I was looking forward to coming down again and seeing the reaction to the smoking ban introduced today - something which surprised me from the moment I first heard of it, seeing as otherwise Scotland seems immensely proud of its unhealthy reputation. But I've been unable to find a word of it on my Friends list, and the news seems a bit quiet about it as well. I even braved The Sinner, knowing that they would have had a huge argument about it by now, but there was no mention of it at all. So I'll just have to assume that everyone's died.

Not the Project

It's strange how some evenings work out. This afternoon I had planned to write up the security practical that's due in after Easter. Instead, though, I happened to open up MMF at one point and found myself writing an entire impromptu competitive online mode for Treasure Tower. This is what passes as excitement for me. It's working reasonably well now, with a record of best times being passed from the game to a PHP page and then to yet another section of my rapidly growing MySQL database, but it needs some sort of security so that people can't cheat quite so easily at it. Just now all it has is a verification field that's generated using a fairly obvious formula.

And it also turns out that , and are going to comprise about half the Melville cabinet next year. I don't think that "surreal" even begins to describe this situation.

Retro folder is now 2.35GB.

The Underdogs has just been rebought or something again (don't bother clicking that link, it isn't there). That's rather bad news. If anyone's interested, it's just the domain name that's been bought, and it can still be accessed using a plain old IP address: http://209.120.136.195/

Recently I found a decent Czech site that has a lot of old games on it - notably, the old LucasArts point and click adventures like Sam 'n' Max and Day of the Tentacle. "Játékok" leads to the downloads, if you're wondering how to get at any of them. The Czechs seem to be very into their old games, as productions related to The Daily Click can regularly be found on such sites as well.

So I've updated by Retro list, which doesn't quite have the same HTML-CSS-PHP-MySQL polish as my music site, but it does what it's meant to. I'd like to extend once again the invitation to comment if you're interested in obtaining anything listed there. Not that anyone ever does, mind you.

V

Dreams are weird. Last night, I found myself parachuting into the Middle East, then achieving peace between the Israelis and Palestinians by organizing a dance-off on ice in the Kellands School gym hall. Later on that night I had a dream. I can't remember what it was.

Anyway, Whitney and I went to see V for Vendetta yesterday. The first thing that struck me was Hugo Weaving's voice, which sounded closer to Legion from Red Dwarf than the Agent Smith-alike that I was expecting. After The Matrix you'd expect him to be even more hopelessly typecast than Alan Rickman, but it certainly isn't the case here. They must have use a hammer and chisel to unglue his teeth from each other. And I see 's point that his introductory speech is just unbelievable.

Speaking of the Wachowskis' magnum opus, I was also impressed by the way that they didn't turn this film into a bullet-time extravaganza, even though they're pretty much the only ones capable of doing so convincingly. Instead, there was only one scene near the end (which is pretty spectacular) where everything slows down.

It is also one of the last films in which I was expecting to see a Benny Hill chase (the others in that category being, I don't know, Schindler's List and Gone with the Wind). And it's rather frightening to see Britain as a totalitarian nation, especially as they kept the futuristic environment believable.

What the hell is this?

From: Sunnypatel2@***.com To: wongchungbang@hotmail.com
Subject: (no subject)

i am park now i do not know i need to do. when i find 2 bomb then they say 2 bomb remining so i find other then i can not other bomb and i got to end i see like it bank and i can not break the doors. please if u have time send mail so i know i need to do.

also i like game.

After looking past what I thought was a randomly generated string of words and numbers, I think this is probably a request for help that someone has sent me after reading the guide that I wrote four years ago for Syphon Filter, the silliest-named game in the world (apart from It's Mr. Pants).

Most people would just ignore this email and probably add the sender to their permanent block list, but I feel I have to reply somehow. Any creative suggestions?

Fury of the Grünt

I don't know what's changed about me, but when I'm out people have started to assume that I work everywhere. The problem started a couple of months ago at a cafe in Edinburgh Airport when a woman asked me where the cutlery was. I wasn't even wearing anything remotely resembling the staff uniform. The same happened a few weeks later, at Nickel 'n' Dime when I had been looking through the threads for ages trying to decide if two colours were the same or if it was just my colourblindness.

And when the Melvillites came bowling with Whitney and I today, I was wearing the T-shirt that my dad brought back from Russia and only remembered that all the staff there wear red shirts when I walked in the door. The result was that I couldn't make it from one end of the room to the other without being asked to fix a lane - a walk that I had to do quite often thanks to Whitney sending me on endless quests for chips and ketchup. And "Russia" is spelled significantly differently from "Staff", as well.

Paul and I are still on the DDR scoreboard there. I'm now going to stop updating this and just assume that we'll be on it until the end of time - it's more satisfying that way.

It's come to my attention that my posts have gradually become phenomenally boring this year, but not being one to learn from my mistakes, I bet you're dying to know how the solitaire solver is going. My project report is now over 15,000 words, and I've already started thinking up what I'm going to say in my final presentation two months away. It might be a bit wiser to actually get going on making the project do anything useful, but all in good time.

Members of my family are now among the contributors to the latest Internet trend, as my youngest brother told me when he phoned that the music video that he and some friends did to the music of Dragonforce's "Fury of the Storm" is now up on YouTube. He didn't seem best pleased that his co-star had put it up, and told me that he didn't want anyone else to see it. So here it is.

Ranma ½

My Friends page has been very slow today, so I'll fill the gap with another gigantic post that I've had saved up.

In my spare time between building and moderating websites and writing dull security policies and reports on search trees, I discovered by chance the anime Ranma ½ on the latest inexplicably-named Internet trend, YouTube. Whitney had previously told me of the general idea of it, but I hadn't seen it for myself.

Being a computer science student, I didn't feel like just watching the video like everyone else, so I tried my normal methods of grabbing video from a website. None of them worked, so I slightly embarrassedly used a script that someone else had written for copying videos specifically from that site, discovered it was in the totally useless FLV format, and pulled it through a downloaded convertor. This allowed me to store the video at only double the original disk space. But still.

Even though I knew the vague idea of the series I found the first episode hilariously strange, and I have laid out a summary of the most eventful moments for your perusal.

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00:00 The programme opens with a J-pop track that is absolutely horrendous even by my standards. Most of it is in Japanese, but is subtitled in English with lyrics that seem to be written with rhyming being a priority, pushing "making sense" down to an afterthought. It opens with the lines:

Yappa paa yappa paa don't know what to do
My heart is not a game - it's Mah Jongg to you.
Yappa paa yappa paa feel like such a shrew
Who needs boys? Don't you dare - make me wild like you.

The rest of it is a mess of nonsense and occasionally changing time signatures, accompanied by a montage of dancing characters. Like a lot of anime, you could be fooled into thinking it was a children's programme at this stage, but this mood is to be changed later on.

1:40 The episode's title, "Here's Ranma", is spoken by the woman with the high-pitched American accent that is ubiquitous to all anime.

1:50 In the opening scene, a young person of very difficult to discern gender is running down a street somewhere in Japan, pursued by a gigantic panda. As it tries to catch her she leaps into the air, floats for a while (because Japanese people can hover) and smashes it in the face. Unusually, the onlookers seem vaguely surprised by the spectacle.

2:50 The fight ends with her shouting at the panda for picking her fiance for her. "I'm going back to China now, so suck on that, old man," she concludes. The first hint that this is not a children's programme after all has been provided.

3:10 The panda hits her with a bus stop.

4:00 Meanwhile, at the Tendo School of Anything-Goes Martial Arts (that's what it says, honest), the dojo master-whateveryoucallhim is reading a postcard with a similar-looking panda on it and seems very excited that Ranma will soon be back. He gathers up his three daughters, but can't find Akane.

4:55 When Akane is eventually found, it emerges that she is immensely contemptful of the other's obsession with boys. The plot of this series is already becoming self-evident even to the terminally stupid.

5:20 The daughters are told that one of them has to marry Ranma. Only Akane seems bothered at all. One of the other anonymous ones leans over and tells her that he might be "really cute". Their father laughs, his eyes turning into crescents and forming one of the scariest faces ever.

5:50 They're told that Ranma has been in China with his father. Akane is still notably unimpressed with his hike to China, even though unless my geography is failing me, a significant portion of the hike would have had to be underwater.

6:10 Their father admits that he's never actually met Ranma. They are interrupted when the doorbell rings and the panda enters, carrying the incredibly boyish girl from before.

7:30 The father, though shocked by the panda, doesn't notice that Ranma is a girl until he hugs her. A variety of bizarre squelching noises plays and he descends into incoherency.

9:20 Ranma and Akane fight against each other, "just for fun". After calmly dodging all of Akane's blows in a very Neo-like way, she jumps up as she puches through the wall, lands behind her and taps her on the back of the head. Hilarity ensues.

10:35 The panda is shown entering the bath, and the next scene includes a now-human Ranma's father. The plot thickens!

11:45 Meanwhile, Ranma strips, fills a basin with cold water and pours it over herself, proving beyond reasonable doubt that this isn't a children's programme after all.

11:50 Akane is outside the bathroom and notices Ranma's clothes in the basket. "I guess we can both take our bath," she says to herself. Because girls always do that. Yes.

12:20 Ranma, who is now male, gets up from the bath at the same moment that Akane enters. She looks surprised for a moment, then calmly withdraws. Then screams her head off.

12:40 A brief animation showing the panda juggling leads the programme into the interlude.

---

It does go on, including a scene where a man with an outrageous Chinese accent (and a star on his cap) explains why the two of them have the inconvenient properties of morphing into girls/pandas, and a bit slightly later on when Ranma is repeatedly thrown into a pond and hit with a table, but the whole thing defies description, really. On the whole, from an objective viewpoint, it's cheesy, awkward and slightly embarrassing to watch.

I've already started downloading the first series.

Not to rub it in or anything, but this is turning out to be paradoxically the easiest semester ever. I have two classes in total, giving me Thursdays off, and because of the lecturers being on strike we've only been handed out one practical task so far. Granted, this practical involves writing a security policy and is more appalling than several other practicals put together, but it's still easy compared to last year when my life was spent in the lab. There's also the slight issue of the 20,000-word report that I've got to put together along with the rest of the project, but on the positive side, my supervisor and I got through an entire meeting last Tuesday without him saying how rubbish my program was. It's a step forward.

So alongside using all this new-found free time in some constructive manner, I've been playing loads of Command and Conquer: Red Alert. Years ago I used to be into it even though I was famously useless at realtime strategy games, and this has turned out to be because I had not yet worked out that the winner of each mission is essentially decided by how many Medium Tanks you've built.

The real attraction of the game, though, lies in the inter-mission cutscenes. It was one of the first games to use real actors (none of which had really been getting enough work recently) rather than their pixel-drawn counterparts, and while impressive back in the day, I hadn't realised how hilarious their acting was. The plot of the game involves Hitler being removed from the timeline and an alternative Second World War taking place without him, so the main nationalities are German and Russian. The provided accents are far removed from those countries, though - in particular, one of Stalin's right-hand men ends up sounding like he's from Inverness.

I've completely lost my train of thought now, so I'll have to stop.

Snow and PHP

For the first time in years, snow fell that packed well enough to build a snowman. Whitney and I walked down to the park and built our attempt in amongst the others that already stood there.

I promise I looked a lot happier when that picture was posed, but it took about five tries for Whitney's camera to work and my expression changed significantly during the wait. Howard the snowman's face, though, remained frozen in his vacant, sad expression.

At the stage when he was just three gigantic snowballs and a face, I was worried that we'd created the most terrifying snowman in the world, as he looked like something that had been dragged back from Easter Island. I think that Whitney's work on the rest of his body more than makes up for it, though. And to think that at home we'd have been satisfied with rolling a couple of balls together and sticking coal in them.

I have spent the rest of the weekend recoding my music site to run using PHP pages rather than straight HTML. With the use of PHP includes and a database in the background, this makes managing and updating the site a much easier task, and hopefully by the time Modplug comes back up I'll be keeping it updated more regularly. For now, feel free to browse around and test or break the new download counters.

Teletext

I have now achieved the debatable accolade of having been on Teletext twice. The first time it was when Digitizer still existed - someone requested a solution to Simon 2 and I sent in my guide. The trouble was that the paragraph I supplied was too long and they had to trim it, meaning my carefully crafted help came out largely as gibberish. This time, it's as part of a feature on freeware games.

For anyone outside Europe, I should explain that Teletext is a basic news/information service broadcast through the television, and is run by an old BBC Micro somewhere in Broadcasting House's attic. It's a bit like the Internet, except even more unreliable and slow.

Applying for jobs

Here's an idea - I should just go and work for monster.com. I would fix that cover letter window, for a start.

Interim Demo 2

The trouble with my project is that there seems to be a large imbalance between what I think of my program and how enthusiastic my supervisor is about it. The problem began when I wrote Freecell in a weekend, and his reaction was "Well, it's some code". Since then it's gradually got to the situation where he doesn't think it's much good as it can't solve games consistently enough, whereas I feel that getting a computer to be able to play through any card game itself is a pretty spectacular achievement.

I was surprised by an unexpected Interim Demo today. When I went to the weekly meeting with my supervisor, who was wearing a ghastly shirt decorated with misshapen cows, it happened that my second marker had some free time as well, as he was busy arguing with him about something to do with C++. We went through to his office, which is the darkest room in the world (he keeps all the lights off because he doesn't like them turning themselves off when he hasn't moved for a while), and to my surprise I was able to get it running on a Mac in only a few minutes while the two of them talked about ornithology or something.

Tom was far more impressed with the project than last time around, when it took ten minutes just to get the thing running, and watched as it went through a couple of games. At one point he asked me why there were two Tens of Diamonds on the screen just to scare me. My supervisor responded to this by going over to the whiteboard and beginning to throw a pile of about a hundred pens at him, so the rest of the demonstration had to be carried out under a hail of felt-tips.

With that demo done, I'm pretty much on the home stretch now. And it's just as well, because practicals for this year are beginning to come in. Actually, the lecturers are on action short of a strike, meaning they can't do anything to do with grading work or giving out practicals, so we've only got one to worry about for now. It seems a pretty serious situation, though, as they're talking about the possibility of it continuing until summer. And I had felt like graduating before I got married.

QUESTION

Plusnet decided to set fire to their servers or throw them about the room or something this morning, but it seems to be working again now. I'm still mystified as to why I have a static IP address even though I haven't paid for one.

A question came into my head the other day when we were talking about the Caps Lock key in the Security lecture. (Well, it beats talking about hypercube-shaped lattices.) How many people actually use it? I can't think of a time when I've needed it on my computer, or turned it on without it being accidental. It's just something annoying between Tab and Shift that messes up your typing when it's hit.

If you ask me we should take that key off along with the blatantly useless SysRq, and replace them with something useful, like "Write my essay for me" and "Kill the Microsoft paperclip". Or I'm sure there are other more feasible ones. Scroll Lock can stay - it may not have much use, but it does something in Excel and it's got an air of mystery to it.

More UT2004

From summer to winter and back to summer again, all in half a week. But the North Haugh still has snow on it - truly, it has its own climate. You know it's going to be a bad morning when you're drawing four-dimensional constructs on the whiteboard.

Enough floundering - I was rather disappointed with the final stages of UT2004. After Deck17, the clever sequel to one of my most disliked maps, the last level is a one-on-one fight on Hyperblast2. I liked the original Hyperblast - it wasn't exactly one of my favourite maps, but it was at least slightly suited to being a two-player arena. The sequel seems to have been scaled up enormously, with the result that it feels like you're running in slow motion and not getting anywhere at all. You can usually wander around getting tooled up for at least a couple of minutes before even sighting the opponent at all. First Blood shouldn't happen fourteen minutes into a match. And the result of said match shouldn't be 1 to -2. If everything was reduced in size by a factor of two it would probably be quite enjoyable.

And all that earned me about four seconds worth of end sequence, fortunately followed by some quite decent music that sounded like Kamelot might if they became even more pompous.

But after opening UnrealEd to touch a few things up and accidentally spending about six hours on it yesterday, I finished my own map. It's been named "Flying Fortress 1" in an attempt to overwrite the embarrassment of the original series, and as it happens it's available here (really, this time). It should run without any external texture packages or scripts or other impressive techy-sounding things.

The map consists of a collection of floating platforms above the void as before, with a decent "king of the castle" type area at the top which can be attacked by using the jump pad on the lowest level. I've tried to use weapons that don't have a lot of push to them, and UT2004 seems to throw players about far less than the original anyway, so falling off shouldn't be a huge problem unless you're unlucky (or just a bit rubbish).

UnrealEd 3 vs. UnrealEd 2

Despite this image from the Unreal Wiki (which highlights some all too common problems with the UnrealEd 2), since starting with UnrealEd 3 I've found that it's a major step up. That's probably to be expected as there was a gap of four years between the latest two versions of the editor, but I was still surprised to discover how easy it was to make things that look decent. This is partially due to the emphasis on static meshes - a library of premade objects that you can throw into your map and work like normal geometry. It's a much easier way of making levels, but I can't help but feel it's like cheating a little.

Nevertheless, my resolution is simple - to create a map that doesn't suck. As I have decided to reinstate my Flying Fortress series as my first project, some may argue that I'm heading in the wrong direction already, but thanks to the new system, I was able to stick together a competent-looking platform within a matter of minutes. (It's nothing spectacular, but those who have seen my earlier attempts will surely agree that it's a step in the right direction.)

I think that there's a fundamental difference in the use of the two versions of the editor - the newer one is more complex, but compensates by making things that were difficult before much easier. Some examples that I've discovered this afternoon:

	UnrealEd 2 Method	UnrealEd 3 Method
Making a Jump Pad	Set up the scenery. Insert a Kicker. Insert a Sound. Attach them to each other. Adjust the Kicker properties to get the height and distance of jump you want. Test it. Get it wrong and do it again about ten times.	Insert a handy jumppad static mesh. Set its Target to where you want it to go.
Lighting an outdoor map	Insert a huge array of lights. Make them as bright as possible to stretch over the map. Mess up your shadows. Slow down your map.	Put in a SkyBox. Whack in a Sunlight object. Sorted.
Decorating a map	Insert hundreds of little geometry brushes. Switch them from Solid to Semisolid and back. Spend hours trying to prevent BSP holes.	Throw in some static meshes.
Adding weapons	Open the Actor browser. Navigate to Pickups -> Weapons -> UTWeapons -> (94 directories deleted here) -> The weapon you want. Add it. Try to add some decoration so it doesn't look like it's been thrown in at random.	Open the Actor browser. Put in a WeaponBase. Select the weapon.

UT2004

((Pile)this.piles.get(((Integer)tableau.get(i % tableau.size())).intValue()))
   .dealCard(firstpile.removeCard());

And that's how a computer deals a hand of Solitaire. Surprisingly enough it worked first time when I typed it in.

This week I've had to begin thinking about writing cover letters and applying to companies in Boston, for the important purpose of having a job once I get there. So what have I been doing? Playing loads of Unreal Tournament 2004, naturally, after having been lent it by the over-consonanted .

I was surprised by how team-oriented the game is - rather than just a simple "play through a heap of maps" single player mode like the original, you have to pay for your team members, keep them patched up and even trade members between teams, in something that bears a resemblance to Necromunda.

It's also quite a lot harder than the original - admittedly I'm playing on Experienced rather than Novice now, but all the CTF and DOM games tend to now be 20 minutes of no progress and then a frantic rush during overtime at the end. Conversely, I find the all-against-all matches dead easy, and can safely interpret opponents listed as "Unbelievably hard" as "You might actually get hurt a bit during this match." I haven't tried it online yet, though - I'm saving that for after I complete the matches in single player.

I know I'm a couple of years behind everyone else, but I'm amazed at how good it looks - half the time I get distracted by looking at the scenery rather than concentrating on playing. I'll have to look at the editor for it and see if I can get back into mapmaking again.

KPL

KPL, or Kids' Programming Language, was pointed out on the Daily Click today. I find it interesting that someone's trying to get children into programming again - the last time I'd seen evidence of this was in the late eighties when Usbourne released a series of children's books on BASIC (which I still have in the basement). Indeed, it looks like a decently powerful language, although I'm not sure about its claimed ease of use.

The site itself is rather offputting, though - I can't help being reminded of Dead Ringers' impression of Matt Smith, as it's written by a forty year old man trying to sound like a twelve year old boy. Only joking. I think. Ace.

---

put up a meme that caught my attention a day ago - to comply with the instructions I've put every piece of music on my computer into my playlist, so there might be a few embarrassing minefields to tread on.

Do you trust my taste in music? Pick one number from 1 to 777 and I'll find the corresponding song in my playlist, and provide a link to the selected song.

If by some miracle you actually want the resulting mentioned song, I'd be happy to send it, or you could get it from my FTP server.

Treasure Tower Demo released

Recently I have spent a large amount of time on side projects that are of no real importance, rather than concentrating on the academic and job-related tasks immediately at hand. The latest of these side projects is Treasure Tower, and I recently completed a demo version.

Treasure Tower demo - 2.65MB

The objective of the game is to get to the top of the tower by going through a series of randomly selected rooms. While in the tower, the clock is constantly running - it starts at 36 seconds, and running into obstacles such as spikes or the ghosts that inhabit the towers will temporarily speed it up, making progress more difficult.

Time can be restored by finding food, which appears every three or four rooms. Treasure can also be collected for points - there are fifteen tokens in every room, though there are also nine special "treasure rooms" with more (one of which features in the demo).

The demo tower lasts for twenty rooms and has a bank of 40 possibilities to choose from, so it may be a few playthroughs before you see all of them. The full game features ten towers, and I'm aiming for 200 rooms (170 of them are complete at the moment). I'm also planning to include some bonus rooms created by members of the community. Or you, if you're interested.

Most of the soundtrack is composed of ragtimes by Scott Joplin, and they were sequenced by Warren Trachtman (although admittedly he hasn't replied to my email asking for permission to use his sequences yet). The rest of the music, the graphics and the program are by me.

The controls are the standard Click-game setup: Left and Right move, Up and Down toggle switches, Shift jumps. Game controllers are also supported if you select them from the title screen. More details of the game are explained in the tutorial that you'll get when you start the demo tower.

There's also a preview for the full game at the end of the demo. And it features the Fish Polka written by Lee Jackson. If that doesn't get you to download it, I don't know what will.