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My weekend with Painter
Another wet icky day, the first seriously chilly day we've had in a while. I am wearing my new boots. Doc Martens are sturdy shoes, but they are notorious for taking a while to break in. Actually it's sort of a mutual thing; your feet alter the shape of the boots and the boots alter the shape of your feet.
I got some mail about the previous entry with the shoe pictures; a couple of locals wanted to know where I bought them so they could go peruse, and others confirmed that these are indeed Good Shoes.
I also got some mail on the actress rant, mostly along the lines of, "It took you all this time to figure that out?" Patrick did point out, though, that in Double Indemnity - oh, no, wait, that's a much better movie, with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck - I mean Double Jeopardy - Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones are not romantically involved. So I withdraw that particular part of the rant.
Note that I have not actually answered any of this email yet. Nor have I read journals, done non-critical Nibelung housecleaning (I must automate that one day), or a number of other electronic tasks waiting for me. Shucks, I didn't get around to updating poor Jette's design until today - four days late - so go make ooohing and ahhing noises at her pages, please, she could use the consolation.
Instead of doing all these things, I have been hard at work on a program I first wrote in 1994 - completed, but not very snazzily designed. It was a Windows game. Since I wasn't happy with my graphics skills at the time, I let it drop.
On Friday I unearthed this file while fetching something else and I realized two things:
1. This game would play pretty well as a web pixie. You wouldn't be able to actually see the events in progress, but since it's a puzzle-type game, that actually makes the puzzles more interesting.
2. I knew I wasn't going to be able to focus on much else until I had taken a stab at it.
Well, by late Friday night I had reached the point where I couldn't work any more on the code unless I had a set of tiles (the squares that make up the play surface of the game) to work with - otherwise it would be nearly impossible to proceed.
So work stopped on the code while I made tiles. A full set of tiles. Right now that's 256 tiles, and I may change the way tiles are designated so I can have more than that.
I finished making the set of tiles late Sunday night. I did almost nothing else this weekend. I thought I knew my way around Painter before, but I went heavily into areas of the program I'd never used. I had to make some tiles three or four times before I got something I was reasonably satisfied with.
The sad thing is, I have at least two other complete sets of tiles in mind to make. I've put in code that allows for "variant" sets of tiles. The set of tiles I did this weekend was meant to be a basic set, a default to fall back on when the fancier sets were unavailable.
Once again the same problem rears its head - this is a game with graphics, and when it comes to graphics I am A.lousy and B.a perfectionist - mutually incompatible goals.
I cannot tell you the number of visual ideas I've come up with over the years that I've tossed away because I know that I will never be able to make pictures well enough to satisfy the way I perceive the idea inside my head. It's very frustrating.
Memo to self: Get the code working first, before making another tile set. This way lies madness.
© Columbine
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Where were we? Hmm. I already said that Wednesday and Thursday were boy days, right? Friday was a girl day. Saturday was an extremely girly day - we went to dinner with some people we hadn't seen in ages, and I got really nuts about my appearance without warning. Sunday was a boy day and today is a boy day as well.
On both Friday and Saturday I wore concealer out of the house at some point or another. No one noticed, so I must be doing it right.
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