Yes, it’s an unusual title for a blog post — I know. But this is something that has been remarkable to me over the years, and I decided that, since I now have a place to just pour out my thoughts, I would do just that as we enter into the holiday season.

I have always been one that really likes Thanksgiving. Besides having an incredibly long weekend, it is so refreshing to take the time to examine my life and focus on the positivity of all that is good and wholesome and those things for which I have to be thankful. Each year, the list seems to grow, and I cannot express my gratitude for my friends, family, job, home, health… and the list goes on. What is amazing to me, however, is the complete lack of attention this holiday receives every year from the media (except for the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving specials and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, of course).
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One thing we missed in our time in New York was not having friends who shared our same interest in board games and staying up until the wee hours conversing about everything and nothing. As much as we enjoy a good game, often the game seems to be only a conduit we use as an excuse to spend the time together. When we lived in South Carolina, we had a number of couples who shared our interest in games (both video and board), and many of the guys also shared my interest in miniatures: something I have yet to delve into much. We are blessed to have found another family with whom we have been able to share those mutual late night game sessions again. Our children are the same ages, so it is a very good fit when we crash at one or the other of our houses for a “quick game” that often lasts well into the night.

Most recently, we have been playing Carcassonne and The Settlers of Catan at some length. I actually purchased the Carcassonne Big Box set with a handful of expansions from a friend before we made our move away from SC, but although we had heard great things about Settlers, we had never actually played it until a couple weeks ago. We broke open a new box, and I am happy to say that so far, with the four of us playing, I have a 3/4 winning streak.
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A couple days ago, I decided I wanted to teach myself a few movement algorithms withing Flash using Actionscript 3. I started with simple Event.ENTER_FRAME event trapping to move an object across the screen, and then I decided to make it a bit more interesting. What I ended up with is this small target practice game. It isn’t very feature rich by any means, but the different things I was able to learn and apply in a relatively short amount of time — like my particle system, easing an object into a destination and MouseEvent trapping — are invaluable to learn if you are going to do anything remotely professional with AS3.

Although I don’t claim to be a professional yet (that will come with time), my intent is to share any interesting discoveries I have made in order to help someone along through the learning stages I have just completed. Just below this paragraph, you will see the target practice game displayed. Simply click the targets to destroy them, and when you need more (or if you want to overload the app), just click the green circle in the top right. You will notice that a main feature of this app is significant randomization: from the position and motion of the targets to the amount and direction of the debris that scatters when those targets are destroyed. So, to aid in your learning, I have provided the source code for this app for you to study as well. The download link will appear at the end of the post.
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Those of you who either know me or have ready my previous photography blog entries know that I have recently purchased a very nice DSLR camera. After using this camera for about three weeks, I began noticing some issues that were somewhat disconcerting. I realized that from time to time, I would fire up the camera, frame my shot, focus and listen to the camera and lens make a strange clicking and whirring sound, almost as if the gears of the body and lens weren’t focusing properly. Then, when I would shoot the picture, the camera would error out on me (yes, I mean actually blank out the user display panel with -Err- and screech at me), and I would have to shut everything down, remount the battery to get things to fully reset and fire it back up again.

After this type of treatment, things would usually go back into place and work for a while, so I didn’t think much of the issue, but when you spend this much on a tool, you don’t want to have to “make do” with it. So, when a friend informed me that another retail store had the exact same camera kit I had purchased with an added 75-200mm lens and a bag to boot for only $100 more, I saw my signal to return the one that was having a few issues and try again. Since I was still well within my 60 day return time, I simply took the kit back to the store and purchased the nicer kit from the other store, and boy, am I ever glad that I did.
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So, I’ve been struggling with getting my laptop (a custom Dell Inspiron 9400) to read my new SDHC card that I picked up for my camera. It’s nothing fancy: just a 4GB SanDisk card. During my fitful attempts and multiple reboots, I seemed to recall a friend having the same issue with her computer reading her new card as well. I thought that surely since she was using an older reader and I had a fairly new integrated reader that I wouldn’t run into the same issue. After spending a good bit of time researching and looking for firmware updates for my reader, I began to get hints that it may not be the reader itself at all, but rather it was good ol’ Microsoft Windows XP Pro rearing it’s incompatibility head again.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of MS, and I don’t know what I would do without them, but when my system doesn’t support what seems to be a common thing, I get a bit testy. Thankfully, though, this story has an ending — and a solution — that was both complete and easy. If you follow this link, you will find a Microsoft hotfix just waiting to be installed. Apparently, typical card readers simply care about the physical size of the card and rely on the OS to interpret the file structure and formatting of the data, so I suppose it makes sense that the OS has to be upgraded in order to read the larger cards.

Hope this fix will help a few others out there as well!

In this segment, we will be covering creep movement within a map, and to stay true with our original intent, everything in this tutorial will be drawn manually using the graphics package in the Sprite object within Flash. This way, we don’t have to worry about downloading images or the file size involved with such extras. Of course, were this a real TD game to be published, we would whip up some original artwork and animations to give our game a little more flair, but in this case, the simpler the better!

The code additions you can expect to find in Part II of this series include drawing our map (or “road”), creating and moving our creeps along that road and recognizing when a creep has completed the course successfully. Anyone familiar with Tower Defense games will recognize the importance of having a trigger to know when each creep finishes. Depending on the rules of your particular game, you may wish to have the creep run another circuit upon completion or simply vanish from existence, but in either case, there will be significant effects from that little guy getting away. Sometimes it costs us money to banish him back to the beginning, and in other games, we simply lose one of our lives and take one step closer to defeat.
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For the first time in a few years, I had opportunity yesterday to play a new game through from start to finish in one sitting. No, this does not mean that my ability to succeed at games has diminished over the years, but it does reflect on my lack of time to assign to the task. Whatever reasons or excuses I do cite, though, don’t change the fact that yesterday was a fulfilling day in the realm of gaming.

Having always been a fan of the Star Wars universe and games produced by Lucas Arts, I was incredibly excited to see how they would translate the lightsaber duels and use of the force into game play motions for use on the Wii. Needless to say, they did not disappoint. While playing through the intro and opening few missions, I was somewhat put off by the apparent lackluster visuals in the story scenes. The characters look amazing, and the motion, for the most part, is quite believable, but in the realm of the space battles and texturing of the imperial Star Destroyers and other large ships, there was an apparent disinterest to detail. However, I can’t let a few visuals stop me from trying to immerse myself into the game mechanics and story: after all, this is Star Wars. So, after I got over the initial awkwardness of trying to familiarize myself with the controls, I set out on the adventure. Read more