Thinking Differently About Software.

What have I done this weekend that was so productive? well I did some more faffing with the site, added Amazon Books to the sidebar, and started on twitter, linked twitter to my facebook account, added a twitter feed on this site, added a twitter widget to my Google.com/ig page(also known as the hub of my life), totally gorked Robert Llewellyn(Llewtube – Car Pool – Channel Flip), in short I’ve become a capatalist wet liberal twit who hasn’t written a line of code all weekend…

Oh and I’ve started using bit.ly to do my external links

That’s right I have been doing man things today, Wife told me a few weeks back that if I didn’t sort out the shelves in the hall cupboard that I would feel her wrath, it was quite nice, so today she asked if I would sort out the shelves once and for all…

I had a brief thought that I should put my boots on before starting, I didn’t, anyway I was well into putting up the supports in the fore mentioned cupboard when I realized I had not picked up the bag of screws. So I put down the power drill and walked out into the hallway towards the stairs and turned the air blue as I kicked the door frame with my left foot not mind you with any of the major toes O no with my little toe the smallest toe in existence and I KICKED the door frame with it.

In a grump I was halfway up the stairs to go get my Boots when Wife finally shows some concern and says she had better check it before I cover it up, to my relief I had actually damaged it. I’ve taken the skin clean of the top/front of my toe, don’t ask, I don’t know either.

Only thing is I made myself look like a total girly wuss because I have the most ticklish feet in the world and everytime Wife touched them to try and mop up some of the blood, I kept squealing, the pain was the normal I just stubbed my toe pain but she almost got my foot in her mouth every time she touched my foot.

I love Wife very much. she puts up with alot, like when I’m being Mr Poopyhead. She does not deserve a kick in the head for trying to help.

later she let me use the nailgun to fix bits of wood together

I’m sure I can’t be the only person to need this so here is a function I couldn’t find :-

private Control FindControl(string strControlName)
{
    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(strControlName) || this.Controls.Find(strControlName, true).Length == 0)
        return null;
 
    return this.Controls.Find(strControlName, true)[0];
}

Usage :-

for (int p = 0; p < CurrentMap.Depth_Tiles; p++)
{
    string strOutput = String.Format("CheckBox Controle cbShowLayer{0} - ", p);
 
    if (((CheckBox)FindControl("cbShowLayer" + p.ToString())).Checked == true)
        MessageBox.Show(strOutput  + "checked");
    else
        MessageBox.Show(strOutput  + "not checked");
}

If anyone has a better solution let me know

I’ve been hard at work trying to get a new job and working on the Map Editor of Bert, screen shot right.

The thing that has proven to be tricky is that the Bert Higgins uses over 1900 blocks at 16×16 and over 1500 Sprites at 24×24 this makes for rather a large overhead in the map editor writing this as a windows forms application with the standard objects is impossible because the application slows down too much with all those objects, so I wrote a new component to view them based on this article by Marc Clifton.

As a whole I’m using the work done in Nick Gravelyn’s series “The Tile Engine Tutorials” as a bases for my editor, the problem with this is that the way I’m storing my map data and nick’s method differ massively and he is using individual sprites for his tutorial(I’m only up to part 4), there are also other things that I’m doing differently to nick and features that were outside the bounds of his tutorials, like I want to have an auto wall feature so you select your wall tile and just draw with it the connecting sprites are inserted where two or more blocks are next to each other, and I’m using a group system to insert objects larger than a single tile, and the random select to reduce the repeating effect, I’m also trying to come up with a way to add in the auto edging for grass meets water or dirt meets concrete.

All in all The Map Editor is shaping up to be far more complex than the game, but I should end up with something that can be used for far more than just Bert.

Until next time…

Well I don’t have one yet but ThinkGeek are now selling the Optimus Maximus Keyboard!!!!

a snip at $1,589.99

Dear Santa,….