Here is a handy illustration of gapspace that you may wish to carry with you in order to safeguard your day-to-day activity.

Meanwhile, normal posting (if anything here can be categorised as such) will resume shortly…

Unfortunately, the many constructive things I could have blogged about today seemed to fly out of my head as I actually sat down to write something. Instead, have this pointless YouTube video of some random Minecraft multiplayer action involving water, spirals and water. And spirals. Oh, did I mention it has watery spirals in it?…

…Yeah, I’ll just be going now. Tomorrow will be more informative, I promise

I just can’t even begin to think how something like this is made. Clever stuff.

Presenting the first (and possibly the last) screenshot of: EightyForty, an oldschool DOS-ish screen prototyper! Boring, nerdy and geeky, yes? Hell no! This is the cutting edge, I tell ya…

This came as a direct result of finding out how to do single-buffered graphics in BlitzMax, which isn’t as clearly documented as it should be. As it happens, such a graphics system isn’t really utilised fully in this particular app – but for a future Blitz Roguelike engine it certainly would be I must shout a big “thank you!” to Mauft for suggesting the breakthrough that got it up and running.

In other news, work is edging forward on a super-secret collaborative project that I can’t say anything about. Yet. If and when there’s anything juicy to tell you (that my good coding partner is happy for me to let slip!), you’ll almost surely be among the first to know

It does mean that I’ve put Dalyn’s Quill on the backburner for a short while, but I’ll be getting back to it soon. I was also on the verge of releasing another on-the-fly Socoder Weekly Workshop entry called Greenway’s Gauntlet… I’ll leave it as a prototype for now but I do want to upload the wonderfully hackish code when time permits.

Meh, now I’ve mentioned it, take a look at this screenshot illustrating its full rubbishness (not recommended for people who dislike the colour green):

Ohnoes! It's full of green!!

Guess when I put it up, I could shove Pick ‘n’ Mix online too, which was another really quick and dirty project I did for Socoder a while back. So much to do, yet so little time!

I love it! It’s even got authentic-looking wear and tear. Very professional indeed, and best of all it’s completely safe. Oh, and your cake is just through that doorway over there…

There’s some more pictures over on the original Shacknews post.

To make the project slightly less geeky, the capsule will also contain some of “humanity’s greatest achievements”. NCSoft are inviting everyone to put their thoughts forward on what to include, so if you want to get involved with the discussion, take a trip to the Operation Immortality homepage and start having your say.

I’m not quite sure what to think about this… it’s certainly a unique idea but somehow it smacks of “gimmick” to me

So here it is:

Mmmmm. Nice pixels But I wonder what those strange icons that have appeared on the status bar mean? And how on earth did some crazy person manage to get a highscore of 995,000 points?? No, wait, that’s just a crazy side effect of some debugging…

Perhaps it was Sergei Shmolik’s first big match and he’d had a few to calm the nerves beforehand…

Oh dear. Someone give the poor fellow another drink!

(Source: BBC News)

After three weeks of running the site hasn’t really moved forward by much – the place is still as disorganised as ever Sure, there’s been me blathering on more than usual with occasionally interesting outbursts and regular highlights of tidbits taken from the cutting edge of IndieGames and TIGSource, but I’d quite like to do more than act like a parrot, if you see what I mean. There’s no unique content here at the moment, and that’s what I would like to change.

Up til now, I’ve not really done anything resembling frequent “personal” blogging as I get very easily distracted by other things which don’t really seem worth mentioning. That’s a habit I’m trying to change – writing about any little thing, just like I’m doing right now. As far as coding progress goes, like in Millenipede’s case, I’m reluctant to spill all the juicy new feature beans as they’re added into the game because that strikes me as spoiling the surprise – but to do that, you first of all need some visitors to surprise! I sense a vicious circle going on here.

Anyway, this somewhat random post was just to say that I am trying to spend a bit more attention on the site than I did with Firestorm. In the future I’d like to think there will be some interesting articles, game reviews, personal top-10s of various things and who knows what else. Things don’t happen by themselves so I’d best start flexing the ol’ brain and keyboard a bit!

Oh, and to inject a bit of colour, today’s random picture is a marmot, because frankly, the internet simply doesn’t have enough pictures of marmots on it. Maybe I should start a marmot awareness campaign? Yes! If you’re reading this, put a marmot on your website, too, and I’ll laugh and maybe even link to you in my next post!