Moore Musings

A Mish-Mash

Sharon and I had quite an exciting weekend. Among the generous wedding presents received, probably the most unexpected and appreciated one I encountered was from Pavlov. He gave me the zombie Magic deck I built so many years ago. I am very pleased. Woot!

Sharon and I went to see Iron Man, myself for the 3rd time, her for the first. I'm happy to say I have a wife who enjoys superhero movies almost as much as I do (particularly when the protagonist is an M.E.).

Finally, I have decided I should unearth a few more quotes from my quote-book. As a warning, these are all grossly out of context.

As they should be. Enjoy!

"I don't want my stole solen!" - Gallagher [not a typo]

"Alright, there it is. Whore!" - Gallagher

"It would have been even funnier if he threw up." - [A Professor]

"We don't need all the fuzzy liberal arts." - [A Professor]

"My punching tool is plenty big, thank-you-very-much." - [I'm sure you can all guess]

"What is it with me and 69's?" - [Not who you think]

"You jump from A to hamsters." - Wheeler

"Are you trying to lure my mouth in that direction?" - Wheeler [to Rachel]

"Actually, I've already done my Jewing for the night, in the VC." - Wheeler

"Yep, no, deeet! No its not!" [shrill ending] - [Some Girl we all know]

"Flirting is breeding!" - [Some Girl we all know]

"Wheeler, you need thinner skin so that you pop out." - [Some Girl we all know]

Don't try to explain these, just shudder, be glad its in the past, and move on.

Cheesecake!

The honeymoon is (as they say), over, and Sharon and I are back to (mostly) normal life.

Of course, normal life is definitely improved with the addition of a beautiful wife, but Sharon and I both agree that having breakfast delivered in a basket on our door (official notice to all couples, this place rocks incredibly), is an addition to everyday life we would appreciate.

Our adventures this week included biking along a great bike trail that runs right by our apartment, going to the Cheesecake Factory, lazing on our nearby beach, and clearing Underbog.

It seems the area near our apartment is especially blessed with bikableness. I was aware previously of a long river park just a block away, and its trails. I was also aware of the beautiful old neighborhood behind us with many stone houses and wonderful gardens. I even knew about the beach just two miles away. I did not realize that one could bike to the grocery store in 3 minutes, Blockbuster in 4, and Einstein's Bagels in 6. The library weighs in at about 10 minutes. Not only that, but an old train line very close by has been removed, and replaced with a biking trail that runs over 10 miles, snaking along the river through dense woods, even as it goes from the suburbs right in to downtown. It is also almost entirely on a slight incline, so you can choose to divide your trip into minor uphill and minor downhill portions, depending on your original direction of travel.

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not elaborate on our blessed Cheesecake Factory. It sits about 10 minutes away (by car), in a nice outdoor shopping mall (which also houses a board games store). It is large and airy, has outdoor seating if desired, and best of all, on July 30th (next Wednesday), all cheesecake's will be $1.50 a slice. That's right folks, check your local cheesecake factory for $1.50 a slice cheesecake on July 30th.

I was going to discourse at length on our great lake beach, and maybe even talk about Underbog, but I should probably wrap things up. How can I outdoo $1.50 cheesecake?

My question for you, dear reader, is this. Where will you be on July 30th?

More Moores

I am proud and oh-so-happy to announce that there is now another Moore: my beautiful wife Sharon.
We are back from our adventuring in the Dells, but I'm not going back to work until Monday.

Thanks so very much to everyone who was able to come to the wedding. We enjoyed seeing and being with nearly all our friends as much as we did getting married... well almost.

Special thanks to Ziggy, Rachel, Toad, and Scholl who made so many things happen when we were so loaded. Our appreciation and joy for seeing all of you is frankly overwhelming, it was officially the Best Time Ever.

We plan to have wedding photos up on a Google Images gallery once I get the DVD in, and will share it around with all you great folks. We do have all rights to pictures.

We are now chilling in our new apartment in Milwaukee, for those curious let me know and I'll get you our address.

While things are still in a tumble (merging two lives and lifestyles will take some time), we would love to see folks, and anyone in traveling near or in the Milwaukee area is encouraged to let us know, and we'd love to have you around (might even dig up some air mattresses!). Ok, give us two weeks on that actually ^^

Anywho, we love you all, thanks so much for being part of the best day of our lives.

New build with Asteroids Minigame

The 0.95 build has an asteroids mini-game in it.

Check it out here

Windows Build

Windows build is now available, try it out from here

Just unzip it and run Galaxy2.

Galaxy-Engine Beta Release!

So I have a release of my Galaxy-Engine project. Its on sourceforge!

Download it here.

The linux binary is up to date, the windows one lags a bit. This is because I can only do linux builds on one machine, and only do windows builds on a second. Sorry windows folks, you'll have to wait or recompile it yourself (with Dev C++) to get a working build.

Enjoy!

Busy Busy

Its been pretty crazy with wedding stuff and all, but soon it will all be past!
My fun program has become more advanced, I'm currently rewriting the ai script processing to make it smoother and more user-friendly. I'm not sure I'll have a distro available by the time I head off for wedding-ness, but I just might.

I look forward to seeing most of you soon, be safe on those roads/clouds/tracks!

Galaxy (My New Toy)

Although its not quite ready for a release, my Galaxy program is doing fun and amazing things. What is so special about it? It is very high 'extensible'.

Basically, I mean that everything about it: from how the objects look to what they do, is easily modified by any without programming knowledge.

Each object on-screen is a pair of files: one which tells the program what picture to use, and one which is a series of commands for that object to process.

The commands vary from simple (go forward 5 units, turn left), to the more complex (home on enemy missile targets, explode with a given force).

Additionally, objects can spawn other objects, which in turn can spawn other objects, and so on. This makes it a dynamic and growing system, easily expanded to do new and interesting things.

You can see in the picture below a brief shot of the action. The Millenium Falcon ship in the upper left is launching mobile missile turrets.
Each missile turret is launching 4 missiles, waiting a few seconds, and doing so again.
Each missile is homing in on the player (the Falcon in the lower right), and exploding when it dies.
You can see the player has fired lasers, destroying some incoming missiles. On the left, you can see a chain of explosions: one missile hit the player ship, blew up, and that in turn detonated the missile behind it. These explosions chained up a long column of inbound missiles.

While this seems complex, its just a bunch of relatively simple objects interacting. And changing one line in a text file could quickly add new and dynamic effects.

I've gotten the program able to run in Linux and in Windows. Soon I'll have it ready for folks to play with, and will post it then.

Also, as is incredibly obvious, I could use the help of someone with artistic talent: my missiles shouldn't have to look like bulimic red giraffes.

What has Moore been Doing?

If you really must know, I've been working on a top-secret game engine.

Basically, the idea is to make a program with which anyone can create fun 2D action game stuff, like Galaxian or Asteroids.

It has user-defined AI scripts, collision detection, homing, force weapons, physics, powerups, and even particle effect explosions.

Tonight I ported it from Linux to Windows, which wasn't too hard thanks to its use of GTK, a graphics library.

Soon I'll have it uploaded to the internets for all to enjoy. That, and screenshots, coming soon.