Category: About Warll


New theme, plus how not to complement in Japanese

Filed Under: About Warll, Japanese
Dec.11, 2009

[update] They responded, extra kind too.

[/update]

Of out of all the websites that qualify as Works of Art I can think of few that were not Japanese in origin. Perhaps it is the writing system and the subsequent dexterity? Could it be their religious dirty-phobia that keeps their designs minimal? Or could it be their suicidal work ethic? If these reasoning sound weak it is because they are. The Japanese just happen to produce some very beautiful websites.  One such produces of beauty are at mono-lab. They produced monochrome, the free wordpress theme I have now started using here, and I simply love it.

I love it so much I wanted to thank them. Now first I should explain the beginning of the story. Imagine me, bored, perhaps I’ll reskin the blog. Normally I skip the absolutely most popular themes, the internet does not need yet another aero themed blog. I’ve often fared well searching in the, popular, yet not near first page popular range. This time I found monochrome, I want to fill the blog if only to do the theme justice.

Now as an amateur programmer the first thing I did was inspect the template’s source files.  I noticed to odd things, first there is no license, and there is a file called “japanese.css”.  So now that I am curious what is it I see when I view the author’s site? They are giving out the psd, and no sight of a license. This solidly puts them in my FOSS section of gratitude. Due to these facts plus the large presence of beautify Japanese typography  I am now very excited.  So I had the perfect idea, I’ll thank them, in japanese.  A simple task I think, I can watch whole TV shows what is a little complement compared to that?

ありがとう、これはさいこTheme!

Thank you, this is the oldest theme!

Wait? “The oldest”? Yup, thats not what I intended to say.  In fact it is closer to a word for ‘Last, end, conclusion’ than the word “best” I was trying to say. So I can at least edit it right? Oh no, all the buttons are in japanese! Ok don’t panic, look at the target URL, ok so one of the links leads to a URL containing “reply” in it, it must be the other one. Ah, it appears to work. Fix my mistake and submitted. Wait! Now there are two comments! A dictionary look up later and I find that the button I had pressed meant “quote”.  So I’ll make one more post, maybe they will not ban me.

I’m so sorry, I thought that was the edit button, I didn’t mean to say that the theme was “さいご” I meant “セっこう. ORZ

So in the end I, insulted them, and spammed them. No regrets though, I’m sure they’ll understand and I still came out plus one awesome theme.

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Adventures in flash, a post mortem

Filed Under: About Warll, Video Games
Dec.06, 2009

A few months ago I started on a new project, learning to program in flash. The important point being the fact that at the time I couldn’t program in any language. Thus leaning to program in flash as really more about learning to program in general. The adventure lasted for about two and a half months, of which time little was actually spent programming, which is really my fault, silly internet forums. In the end I did learn to do a whole lot with code than I could before but it also opened my eyes, learning to truly program is a very deep field. As such I will defiantly have to attend some CS courses in university.

I ended up making three point one games. Of which the point one game was the most successful.

icon100#1: outintherainwithabucket

Note that it actually works! Oh sure, “works” is a bit realitive, but the flash player does not crash, so it works.  It got ~300 plays. It got some complements about the art style.

warningred#1.1: boring

My justification for this was it is “art”, a psychological test if you will. But you of course say, “Wait, didn’t you say this was the most successful one?” Well it turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought that it was interesting, a large Finnish flash site homepaged the game, and soon one of its competitors also hosted it. In total it got 25K plays, pretty good for half a mornings work.  Sadly I think this gave me an inaccurate impression of what people will play, after all if a really bad game gets 300 plays and a slightly better bad game gets 25K then imagine a slightly good game?

kuroinonakalogo#2: kuroiNoNaka

By the end of making this one I was really enjoying playing it. Sadly it was either not a slightly good game or I had miss estimated. ~500 plays, although it was fun to learn blitting.

shiroisora100#3: whitesky

This one was actually developed at the same time as Kuroi, it too meet the same result ~1000 plays. Many commented that it was too short, which does leave me the option of expanding it in the future, I don’t think I will.

Anyway I had fun and I learned a lot, with that said I likely would have been better off learning the traditional method.  It was also nice to experiment with design, something that classes or books would not have taught me.

On a final note I did “earn” about 12 dollars, spread across about 3 sites, which means I’ll never actually get the money due to being far below payout. But eh, that’s more than I’ve ever earned on the internet before, of course if I did this to earn money, I would have been disappointed.

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The dark cloud of not knowing

Filed Under: About Warll, Computing, Video Games
Sep.11, 2009

Man it has been a while since I felt like this, when you don’t really know what you are doing, following tutorials word for word yet it is just not working. I think I am just about over it for now but it has put me in a reflective mood, in the past I would have struggled and given up.  And maybe later coming back and getting it right.  Lately though I seem to be struggling and then achieving, maybe I am just trying harder, or my skill set has reached a special level where it is semi-transferable.  I must say though, programing, or at least flash programing, is very rewarding, one can see playable progress at nearly every stage.

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Sumer is over, what have I done?

Filed Under: About Warll, Japanese
Sep.02, 2009

Today is my last day before my school starts up full time. Its always a balancing act to keep up with school work while still enjoying my hobbies, this is what is so awesome about summer break, I can work on my projects as much as I want. Most of what I worked on this year, like my fallout 3 mods and smrsimple, have already been mentioned here. Those were only my earlier projects though and during the later half of summer I got quite a bit done as well.

In websites I got two more done, Cameroncreekmining.ca and Japanesesimple.com. Cameroncreekmining is my father’s hobby company’s website and was a fun project. Not only did I get to impress my father but I also got to try out a new CMS, Concrete5, all while getting him away from his old website which had been built using some shovelware website builder. The neat thing about concrete5 is that it uses a in browser editor so that he can now edit the site anywhere he is without touching any html. Hopefully this will acutally get him to do so every so often. Japanesesimple.com is my personal project, I’m learning japanese and finding interesting things along the way so I thought I might as well share with others. In truth though I just really wanted to make another website and do so in a field I am interested in.My thought is to keep the subject matter simple and basic, allowing me an actual finish date.

Another area I have spent some time playing in is adwords, since my father has products to sell it would be silly for him not to advertise them. Another excellent excuse to do something fun and interesting.

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The Hidden Document, a Fallout 3 Mod.

Filed Under: About Warll, Video Games
Jul.11, 2009

ohhello

After playing the awesome series of story mods by Puce Moose http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4730 I decided to take a swing at it. I kept the story small so that I could focus on polish without getting getting sidetracked with making it grand.

Update, now version 1.0:
This new file fixes a major bug and greatly improves the story telling.
Some how I had included every single script from Fallout3 in my esp. I am sorry to anyone who has lost game play due to my mistake. I have now deleted the old bugged file.

Finding the story:
Since this is a small mod I did not want to bother the player with a note such as is used in the DLC and Puce Moose’s stories. To access the new area you must go to Canterbury commons, it is the first door to your right when you enter Uncle Roe’s house.

Possibility of mod conflict:
This mod uses a prefix for everything redefined so there should be no conflicts. The only problem that might be encountered is if another mod changes Uncle Roe’s house in which case depending on load order the player might not be able to access the quest.

Credit:
Credit goes to Puce Moose for his inspirational mods and these websites for fortran source code, all snippets used under fair use as well as their respective licenses.

http://orion.math.iastate.edu/burkardt/f_src/f_src.html

http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/fortransrc.html

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/lib.stat.cmu.edu/jasasoftware/llca.txt

Copyright for this mod:
While this is my first mod I would like to this that it is well polished and enjoyable and I would like it to be used with no restrictions. To that end I release any copyright of mine relating to this work under the CC0 license. In plain English this means that you may do what ever you want with my work, with some restrictions that I am not allowed to release in certain nations. If you do live in a nation to stops copyright creators from releasing such rights as attribution I promise not to prosecute if you were to “accidentally” to not comply fully. With that said I do not expect anyone to actually reuse these files, one can dream though. If you do end up using any of this I would love an email: daniel.mark.dressler@gmail.com .

Thehiddendocumentv09 | 10 KB

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My new site project: Cities XL

Filed Under: About Warll, Cities XL
Jun.21, 2009

So while SMRsimple.com is not even feature complete yet I have gotten myself addicted to another game, Cities XL. The new fansite is not surprisingly citiesxlsimple.com Right now the game is still in closed bata and as a tester I’m under a NDA so there really isn’t much to do for the site. I may write up some things and then set it to release after the NDA lapses. I may also add a passworded section so that me and some other beta players can have some place of our own.

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Hardware Faliure!

Filed Under: About Warll, Computing
Jun.20, 2009

Just only about a week ago I had my third Seagate 1.5TB fail,  instead of exchanging it yet again I have ordered a 1TB Hitachi to use as my primary backup. I will then use the Seagate as a archive, or shortstroke it so that it does not run into the problem areas.

Which brings me to my next failure, I just woke up today to find that my computer would not turn on.  Turns out my Silver Stone strider is striding on its last legs and that it sometimes makes a “pop” then it has to be turned off at the back for a minute or so. I’m going to take a risk with this and use it until the Earthwatts I ordered arrives, I can only pray that it does not blow up and take other hardware with it.  Especially now that I do not have a backup. What I think I will do is turn it off at the back when it is not in use.

My speakers and keyboard also have seen better days, I’ve leave them.  Really all this can be attributed to the fact that I got off the upgrade wagon, I like my new found frugality.

PS: I see that the foam on my secondary chair’s arm rest is splitting, I’ll leave it until I can justify buying a really nice chair.

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Smooth sailing so far

Filed Under: About Warll, Sid Meier's Railroads!
Jun.13, 2009

Everything is going along well so far, with both myself and the new site.

  • I’ve started adding descriptions from the map’s orignal topic if there is a useful one there.
  • I’ve got some more Japanese studying done.
  • Did well, I think, on my last Social Test hope I also do well on the finals.

PS: Is there really no one that wants to help me get maps up?

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My plans.

Filed Under: About Warll, Sid Meier's Railroads!
Jun.10, 2009

So I want to do something big. My I idea is for yet another website! Yeah I hear what your saying, “but Warll that is the last thing the SMR community needs”. Well you’re right, I myself don’t think the SMR community is large enough to support even two sites, although in this case it likely would fall apart if it was forced into the same one. What I would like to do is make a one stop destination for new users. Heres what I have so far after very brief brainstorming:

  • It would be a related URL so that if we play the cards right we might just be able to get it to show up on google searches.
  • It would be wordpress based, include a directory of maps and host maps.
  • There should be a easy  to use GUI tool for changing maps, the SAMs are so simple it is a shame that nothing automated has been made.
  • It would be a platform for both sides of the community, if new users want to go deeper they may.  As I see it now the amount of drama will simply stare new users away.
  • It can be hosted on my dreamhost account although if it gets big as I hope it does ads can be added.  Thats neither here nor there though.

The entire point of this would be to get new players to SMR and get the content that is already out there to people.  There is a need for this as can be seen from the fact that people are still downlaoding SMRI.

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Uh oh.

Filed Under: About Warll, Sid Meier's Railroads!
Jun.10, 2009

Reading about and seeing what all has happened it looks like the SMR community is not as dead as I thought it was. I think I will have to reinstall SMR, wonder where I can find a Japanese copy. Really have to force myself from doing it right now, my finals are coming up.

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Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental, it’s done.

Filed Under: About Warll, Sid Meier's Railroads!
Jun.08, 2009

About two years ago I was an active member of the Sid Meier’s Railroads!(SMR) modding community.   I have never been much of a programmer, or any programmer at that.  My one attempt at a map failed hard.  The thing is though we had no shortage of maps. What we did have though was a mess and an initiative lead by snoopy to get multiple maps working at a time.

This mess was, in my opinion a result of out first attempts at maps.   You see when Sid Meier’s Railroads was first released there was no SDK, that didn’t stop us and as such Dwax was the first to made a map based soley off of reverse enginering the games files.  Ok so saying that makes it sound harder then it was, after all the game used primarly XML and hightmaps.  The fact that the game shared an engine with Sid Meier’s cizilization and Oblivion also meant that there were a number of tools we could use for the models.

The problems mostly came from the conflicts between the XMLs. This was only compounded by the fact that Sid Meier’s Railroads istelf before the patches was bugy and had a nasty tendency to crash to desktop(CTD).   Making it very hard to tell apart a mappers error or “normal” gmae crash.  With that said thanks to efforts to standardize our use of the XMLs we were able to make maps work together some of the time.

By this point we had a wealth of maps but many of them would not work together, a big stumbling block for new users.  This lead me to suggest Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental(SMRI) with the goal of making a all in one map pack.  All a user would need to do was install and play.  I am actually surprised that Sid Meier’s Railroads Intercontinental got off the ground, really all the thanks goes to Atani and Snoopy who put work into the installer and maps and managed to get ~20 maps together.   In the end we got it out in time for Sid Meier’s Railroads one year anniversary.

After that we got one minor patch out before we left it all alone.  At the time it was my intenention to make a sequel.  That just never happened though and now its nearly two years later and I say for sure that it will not, well atleast not by my hands anyway.

I guess I should these two bits of knowledge, there are two known bugs from what I can rememeber.

  1. Sid Meier’s Railroads must have been luanched at least once before you go to install Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental. It works this way because Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental must be installed to the “my games” Sid Meier’s Railroads directory which is only created once the game is luanched.  This might create some conflict for users with none defualt home directories.  To get around this simply copy the Sid Meier’s Railroads “my games” folder to where it would be in a defualt configuration, you should then be able to copy and overwrite the folder back to where Sid Meier’s Railroads expects it.
  2. The Egypt map has a bug that will cause you to crash to desktop. If I remember right and I likely don’t, this has to do with the XML for one of the goods.

So in closing I will make these points.  That Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental is still the easyiest way for a new player to get new maps that I know of.  As well if anyone is interested in reusing the Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental name for anything Sid Meier’s Railroads related they are welcome to it, just contact me for the Moddb profile and Atani for the website. You must though be serious about this, I still do have an afinity for SMRI.

Anyway thank you everyone who has played Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental, thank you all the mappers who made this possible and thank you Atani and Snoopy.  I really love the time I spent with you all on the forums, maybe I’ll see you guys again.

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The name Warll

Filed Under: About Warll
Jun.06, 2009

Believe it or not Warll isn’t just some weird spelling of war2, at least not now anyway. Its origin goes back to my first real experience with the internet, Runescape. Some friends were playing it at the time and got me addicted, well the first thing one needs would of course be a name. At the time I had been watching a lot of the History channel so the first name I tried was World War 2. Looking back it was likely a good thing the name was taken; of course I didn’t know this at the time so I tried many variations of it till I came up with Warll. I have been using it since, in truth it’s a great name, none else uses it so my only fears of it being taken are when I forgot a password. When I do forget a password I usually just append a 2 at the end, for instance my Youtube account is Warll2.

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