Back To School

Hey Guys,
Steve here.
Well I found out something very interesting yesterday! Apparently, it’s actually possible to carry out a Skype conversation with a… cat!
I was in a Skype call with Danny, trying to record an episode of my Podcast. However, Danny had to take a break in the middle to eat dinner. While he was gone, his cat started meowing for no apparent reason, so I meowed back at her to see if she’d answer. Guess what? She did! And since I still had the recording configuration used for my podcast set up, I was able to record a little ten second clip of it.

Maybe, just maybe, she was meowing for a totally different reason, but I’m humorous. So I say she was chatting with me. And it’s not like she can deny that… or can she?
Anyways, besides chatting with cats, life has been pretty good over the last month, even though school started back up last week. Most of my classes this year aren’t bad, well not really, although some of them are a real pain to get to, which is why I got lost twice so far.
Besides getting lost, I’m already getting homework. In fact, that started the second freaking day I attended geometry! However, the teacher seems nice and helpful, so I don’t think there will be any trouble there.
In addition to the homework, I’ve been having some technological issues in a few of my classes, and am afraid I’ll have to leave one of them for that reason. I don’t know what it is with Microsoft Office products, but they just keep going down hill in terms of accessibility. Worse still, they are practically a necessity in college and the work force these days, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do once I get to that stage of my life unless something can be done.
That said, Microsoft Office is practically the back bone of the class in which I’m struggling. So unless they manage to fix their accessibility issues, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pass that class.
On a more positive note, development with S Quad Racing, sluggish as it is, is going quite well. I had to fix some annoying bugs this evening, bugs that of course didn’t pop up until I tried to record the audio demo (figures). But rather than make sure all current bugs are patched up, I’ll just go ahead and throw together a demo recording, because in the next couple days I want to code in surfaces, but before I make such a big change to game play I really think I should get a recording of the game in its current state. Besides, that demo is pretty much 2 months over due, so yeah.
That concludes the posting for tonight. Be sure to stop by and listen to podcast episode 38, which demonstrates RS Games, and is as usual packed with mine and Danny’s twisted sense of humor. Please, listen to it. It took us 3 attempts to record that thing!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

S Quad Racing: Gears, Track Building, and A Bit of Rewriting

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Despite what the absence of an audio demo that “should’ve” been released nearly a month ago might seem to imply, I have not neglected, or in fact been lying, about the current status of S Quad Racing. While there has been days when I haven’t worked on the game, (maybe even too many), I’m happy to report that development is still underway.
First of all, I’ve begun to rewrite and organize parts of my code. While the initial reason for doing such was to make the code a bit more readable, upon further inspection of what I previously had and after a bit of brainstorming on the gears system I discovered that my code was unintentionally designed so that any major changes, I.E. the implementation of things such as vehicles, gears, surface types, and other structured objects was out of the question, due to the way I’d programmed most of the game in its early stages in an effort to create a simple environment in which I could get a little taste of what I wanted S Quad Racing to ultimately be.
Now, though, the game has become more complex, grounds for a bit of a rewrite.
The following is a list of reasons I couldn’t possibly produce that audio demo, at least not tonight and maybe not even tomorrow:

  • I ended up organizing the code into separate files, and if I compile now I am bound to get some errors due to procedures not being declared and such and will likely have to make adjustments accordingly.
  • I’ve added a lot of new code that hasn’t been tested yet due to my not having finished making adjustments to the code.
  • I found a new bug. If you add a turn, and then strengthen or weaken it by adding another turn with greater or lesser severity right after it without first having a straight section, the game will not announce the name of the turn due to a bit of code I added without thinking, again, about the future. However, this one should be easy to fix.

    With all that said, there is good news to report. The above mentioned new code deals a lot with the gearing system, and I’m happy to report that I found and coded a solution that will work for this!
    In addition, I came up with a new idea to manage speed, and have implemented it as a result. This new way is not only future proof, but way more practical in terms of balance, as it basically tells the game how to handle each and every individual speed that a car can travel, without me ever having to touch it again. While you are unlikely to notice much of a difference when the new demo is released, the gears and ability to select different vehicles are bound to catch your attention.
    That concludes tonight’s post. Once all the code is sorted out I’ll likely be releasing two audio demos; one being on the track builder only, the second demonstrating the new gears system and ability to race with different vehicles.
    Thanks for reading,
    type you later,
    Steve.