picture = 1000 words i guess? grats to those who passed, study harder next time to those who didn’t (hi jetha!).

and on another note, university starts again tomorrow. strangely enough, i only have one unit which i am enrolled in. i’ll take the liberty here to not explain why! now i have to try and figure out a schedule for which work and uni (and play) can coexist.

is it just me or is it heating up again?

the spiritual successor of Total Annihilation was… *ahem* “released” on friday. needless to say it is awesome fun, and really adds lots of new features without losing the TA feel. there’s a screenshot thread on upppy for a bit of a look into the game, but ill include a few of my favourites here for kicks.

this is one of the largest units in the game. it is armed with a powerful red laser along with artillery and anti-air guns. keep in mind those little red icons are heavy tanks, and you will have a good idea of the size of this thing.

aircrafts undocking from my submersible aircraft carrier. this thing seriously feels like its straight from full metal panic. armed with an array of weapons and has built-in repair stations for all aircraft that dock on it. the pattern in which they come out is really cool.

in other (more productive) new, i also got around to recording myself playing shirushi on piano. after watching the drama series 14sai no haha, i just couldn’t get this song out of my head. it really has enlightened me to the fact that mr children own. its quite strange – over all these years i was only familiar with one of their songs – Tomorrow Never Knows (quite an old one at that) through beatmania. i’ve spent recent times listening to more of their music, and have to say that their new single Fake is very very catchy too . makes me want to see the movie for which it is the theme song – どろろ(dororo).

please leave a comment/rating on youtube if you’re that way inclined!

after a bit of a break from the 24/7 coding lifestyle, i spent this weekend catching up on the plethora of bugs and improvements in the upppy todo list. the most obvious improvement will be the addition of channels, allowing separation of content in to a number of separate boards. i have also added combination channels, allowing for viewing more than one channel at a time. you will find the default worksafe option should make upppy a lot more viewable in those.. places where tentacles aren’t approved of (although this may include your living room, for many of you..).

also done a bit of work on the colour schemes available. they are now totally dynamic and can be added with just 6 hex codes and no direct css editing . spent a lot of time tidying up code as well – it really is amazing how much more motivation you build up to work on a well-coded piece, as opposed to some hacked together poop.

so you can’t take screenshots in TA hey? well there’s always a camera! this is one of my bertha/vulcan defense lines from one of the more laid-back games we played. speaking of which, supreme commander is coming out in just a couple of weeks. i actually took the time to play the beta tonight, and have to say i came away from it with mixed feelings. although i didn’t get too far into a game… i’ll summarise the things i found to be lacking, in hope that someone will tell me this is just beta code and will be improved for the final :/

• the interface is waaay too bulky – it takes up over half of my screen vertically, leaving a very thin and fat view window that results in very difficult control of units.
• scrolling is laggy… i hit an arrow key and nothing happens for a good 400ms. is this my system? am i missing something o.O
• the game looks.. crap. ok – i need to upgrade. but it looks about 5x more crap than TA, which is quite disappointing really.

i guess thats all, considering i didn’t actually get to far into the game.. i’m not sure if i will be up for pumping thousands of dollars into my pc just to get this game to a palyable level. time will tell, of course.

なんか、i’ve been busy over the last week and a bit. between playing Total Annihilation (and anticipating the SupCom release more and more..), creating a 30 minute presentation for the WAITTA award our uni project group got nominated for, and the occasional jdrama and piano practice… time just seems to disappear!

do i have anything to show? why yes. although it is a bit low resolution, here is a short clip we made for our presentation

if you feel the need to see a higher res version msg me :p. i was pretty happy with how it turned out!