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!

somehow still alive after the weekend heat wave. was actually a pretty pleasant weekend, all considered (being 3 days long did help in making it so). highlights include visiting people with airconditioning, eating dimsums in an air-conditioned restaurant, drinking bubble tea in an ai… yeah you get the idea.

this week on upppy!

it’d be great if i could do a segment like that on my blog :p. anyway there’s quite a bit of impressive content up there this week – so why not. as i can’t yet link to threads directly, you will have to navigate from the main site if you want to see the originating threads. i have to say thanks to alll those people out there with the constantly flowing suggestions and bug reports . development is quite steady, considering how many hours i actually have to throw at it D:.

first up is karl, who took an initially horrible quality panoramic image taken on my phone (by phill) and turned it into something very psychadellic. i remember a point where lens flares were overused and went out of fashion, but this has a nice balance to it.

next lets enter the world of HDR – a style of photo manipulation where many individual photos are combined to increase the intensity of lighting and overall quality of the photo without requiring the camera exposure to be on some exponentially long setting (although this still helps :p). we found out that cameras with small lens aren’t improved too much using this technique in low-light situations, but it makes quite a difference in normally lit photos nevertheless.

lastly, a photo taken by karl on saturday night amidst the lightning storm on saturday night. pretty uber!

if you haven’t been to upppy yet, knock out your up-to-date *cough* not ff1.5 or ie or anything *cough* and take a look around. just a note that if you get offended by not such.. mainstream content easily then you may want to refrain from doing so before i implement the categorical separation of images. and yes, that is a disclaimer. anything posted by “peppy” on the board is actually some other guy using my name, as well. at least that might keep people off my back until i have left the country. :d