Blog of Ortz

So for the past few weeks, shortly after jumping into C#, I’ve been messing around with XNA. I haven’t had this much fun programming since I first discovered how to query a MySQL database with PHP.

Instead of going on some big thing about what XNA is, I’ll link you here.

After I made a simple Pong game and it was boring, I started on an Asteroids game. Then I was reminded that I didn’t like playing Asteroids clones so it wouldn’t make much sense to make one.

So now, I’m working on something else. I’m not sure if I want to tell anyone what it is yet, since certain people will fap over it and compare it to something and flame me when it doesn’t meet their expectations. I will tell you that it involves the Farseer Physics Engine. It’s pretty new and undocumented but it will end up being the core of my game. I haven’t been working on it much lately because of schoolwork. Maybe I’ll post something on it later so people can motivate me.

So I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl today… I haven’t been following it since it was first announced in 2001 like some people have, so I didn’t really have any expectations or prior knowledge to speak of.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is not “another DOOM” as was the impression I got from screenshots. It’s a first person shooter with RPG elements to it, such a trading for weapons and other items. It doesn’t have skills like most RPG’s have (you can’t earn increased accuracy) which makes sense for a FPS because you’ll get better at playing the game anyway. What you can do is upgrade certain abilities temporarily through “artifacts” that you find and equip on your belt. The biggest feature of SOC is probably the non-linear story. Grand Theft Auto is non-linear, but not like this. Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.orb.com/winamp/

Winamp Remote is a program that site in the system tray of your home PC and allows you to access your music collection from any computer with Internet access. I can’t tell if it’s built on Orb technology or it’s just the same software with Winamp’s logo on it

You used to be able to choose between Windows Media Player and a built-in Flash player (and one other, I think), but I think that option was removed. The interface is a bit slow and it’s annoying to have to wait fof buffering in-between every song, but the quality (from my experience) was as if I had the song on an mp3 player.

It’s still in beta so maybe these will improve. Here’s what the web interface looks like:

Whoops, you’re not supposed to see that picture. You’re supposed to see pictures of people jogging in New York in early January. You’re not supposed to see pictures of the ice storm that happened a week later or the huge blizzard a month later. My bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2007_North_American_ice_storm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_2007_North_America_winter_storm

I used to like Avril Lavigne. She used to be sort of a teenage crush, in fact. I sort of like how she’s maturing and moving away from her “skater girl” image and becoming more sophisticated, but I’m hating the direction her music is moving. She used to be dubbed as the “anti-Britney”, but nowadays she can be seen sporting blond hair and showing more skin. Her music is becoming more pop-like too. The video for her single, “Girlfriend”, released last week for her third album being released in April, has more skin, a rather teeny-bopper-ish subject, and choreographed dancing. I’m pretty sure she’s aware of this change since it seems her albums have more and more profanity to make up for it, along with her use of the word “mother****er” in Girlfriend. I was very disappointed when I watched the video.