"Designers are fags"

This month’s horoscope: “You will be facing something that you fear the most for a long time. It could be a person, a situation or both. However, many people will help you in this time. After this incident, some of your close ones will leave your side, but would remain good friends.”

It’s incredible how accurrate this is…

Monday makes the start of our 3 week project. We will be working with DMD students on Flash to produce a game for Radiocorp. Well, guess what, I got Andy and Jian Wei again! AND we are the only team that is one man short (every other group has 4 people).

Anyway, we had 3 hours of crash course on ActionScript…a scripting language for Flash. Some of us are flipping out on it. Afterwards, we met our designers…well, I can’t say much for them. From a first impression, they seemed pretty decent. I didn’t know how bad working with them could be. Oh, 2 DET groups (seperate project) are assigned to 1 DMD group.

Then they showed the demo of the game we are making. It’s a BeatMania-type simulation game…a music sim, in fact, a DJ sim. The concept is simple, but the gameplay looks hard. It’s probably the closest simulation to a DJ game. 7 Keys, Pitch Control, Volume Control, Scratch Disc…holy shit. That’s not the hard part, the hard part is that instead of using bars, they are going to use wavelengths. The first thing we thought was “how the fuck are we going to dynamically detect those amplitudes?”. The other group leader told me today that he already gave up dynamic allocation and is trying to find out how to hard code. For me, I’m still staying hopeful.

We research quite a bit. The other group memeber (we are not suppose to contact each other, but this game is much much hard than it looks) showed me a .gda file (some game emulator file containing some data) so check and see how they do it. Well, they hard coded it. It looked something like:

0001 CY101010
where “0001″ is the first second, “CY” is “Cymbal (drums)”, 101010 means to hit.

Goddammit, even professionals are against dynamic allocation. I was thinking that if we are going to hard code, we are going to spend a hell of a time doing grunt work—not fun. The thing I do best is in my head, not my fingers. I’m a lazy bastard when it comes to penmanship-like work that even people with hollow skulls can easily accomplish.

The DMDs are not helping. First of all, they blew us away with 2 words: “PHP” and “SQL”. The last thing we want to touch is PHP and SQL. Okay, PHP is okay with me, but SQL spells death. I could not understand, in fact 90% of the module don’t understand, how SQL works and how to get it working. The 90% of us did not hand up the SQL assignment…

anyway, time is short and I gotta sleep for tmr’s day.

Happy Valentines Day!

For all of you out there, happy valentines!
For those still surviving in DET, please visit the rest of us in hell

Back to WoW!

My CVS2 skillz are taking a nosedive…badly. After last week and this week’s observation, I cannot Just Defend on instinct anymore and endly up being guard breaked like mad. I cannot defeat Kim-guy and Guile-guy on their 2nd best team at a consistent rate…heck, I should be able to take them down without much of a problem…if only I can JD. So I switched back to N-groove temporarily and managed to pull of the 3 point Hibiki deadly rave. Also managed to get off a counterxxblackout super, but that’s not enough. I need my joypad back…

Melty Blood is pretty good however. I fought lots of pretty good players, winning some and losing some. There is a good Lens player who can pull off all sorts of Lens combo in those videos. There’s also a very well-played Kohaku (not mine). I didn’t play Kohaku, instead I alternate between the two shikis and after getting beaten by a nanaYa player once, I switched to nanaYa for now. Today I also learnt why Hisui is top tier. I can’t explain why, because I didn’t take note of anything big, but he 4B lifter cannot be teched-out. Pretty lame shit. Also learned that nanaya’s qcb+A hits high. Coolness, Nanaya is much better than I used to think he is!

Finally, about my return to WoW. I’m playing with a couple of my friends in this new Oceania server called “Jubei’thos (sp?)”. This time I’m playing a warlock, a class I’ve always wanted to play until john dissuaded me from it (that’s a good thing btw, locks used to suck). I went back Gorgannash to try to my shaman in BGs. Almost every 60 there have purples all over them. First guy I recognized (and noticed me) was Moomoocow. He haven’t changed as far as his ‘roleplaying accent’ goes. Matt was there too, with Iori. Moomoo fired me a barrage of questions like “What does TDS stand for?” etc…

Okay on to BG, this is taken from a 60 shaman’s point of view:
Warsong Gulch :
Probably the worst BG ever in 60. A druid is crazy armor and that rage->hp convertion guarded by a paladin with Blessing of Freedom makes the duo unstoppable. It’s extremely retarded that Horde flag bearers are getting slowed and ganked like hell, while Alliance’s flag bearers (the druids) are running like the wind. Impossible for Horde to win imo.

Alterac Valley:
If you like old Tarren Mill, and like STAYING in old Tarren Mill FOREVER, yes, this is the right instance for you. It’s Tarren Mill vs Southshore, size and duration amplified by 100. i didn’t really enjoy it, esp when both sides are imbalanced

Arathi Basin:
Probably the best BG out there. It’s the good ole BF2 game. Nothing to complain here, just maybe the imbalanced teams.