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.
Tag Archive: About Warll
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
One of the key ways I am studying Japanese is by surounding myself with it. One big part of this is audio since it does not require much intertainment and is easy to setup. The problem I ran into though is that while I have tons of Japanese music I have no access Japapnese speech. I have solved this by using a FM transmitter plus my server. My server is set to constantly run LiveStation and broadcast that audio over to any FM radio.
I would preffer to use Keyhole TV since it has a much larger selection of Japanese, the problem is that there seems to be some anti leaching protection built in since whenever I leave it running over night the station goes “off air”. It jsut might be that the radio stations really are going off line either way though it goes my alarm no good if I wake up to static. This has forced me to use LiveStation and its only working station, FNN. It is better hen nothing though and I may in future do more research.
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.