LARPing

This was a write-up to a session from slightly over a year back. I hadn’t gotten around publishing it until now. Enjoy.

There I stood, at the top of a snowy hill with the gloomy, overcast clouds that often plagues the British weather filling the sky. I was wearing a not-so matching elven ear prosthetics and a plain green shirt and wielding a foam covered stick made to resemble a sword, but it was as close as I could get in looking like an elven ranger on a shoe-string budget. I’m not so sure why, but just love imagining myself as an elven ranger, archer, or variations of that. It could possibly be because my scrawny appearance is a close fit.

Down below, the scene isn’t pretty. I can hear people calling out numbers. Big numbers. More often than not I see it as an incoherent jumble of mess that I can only vaguely decipher. My way of getting by is to imagine those numbers to be the momentum behind those swings, and by fudging numbers until things felt right I knew I would lose a limb in a hit or two. At the end of the day, that’s the only thing I really need to keep note of.

When LARPing the logical part of my brain takes a vacation, and the imaginative part sees this as an epic adventure. For the hours that I am here, I can forget about the toils of everyday life and worry about those pesky zombies, skeletons and ghouls. Even better is that I have friends to fight alongside. And with the battle taking place, involving characters much, much more powerful than I am, I did the only thing a heroic adventurer would do. With one of my legs extended, I slid down the snow covered slopes, ran towards the closest enemy, swung my foam sword and shouted “FOUR!”.

And then I scampered away, because elves are squishy folk.

RC Models

A few months ago I wandered into my university’s R/C model club, looking for some model car racing I missed doing back home. I was somewhat disappointed when I found out that they mostly focused on model helicopters and aeroplanes, mostly because my only experience in piloting were on flight simulators – and crashes were always involved.

However I stayed on because it was still interesting watching them build and repair their models, with the miniature electronics and servos and all.

Then one day, one of my friends in the club turned to me and asked me to have a go at the flight simulator. I was a little reluctant but in the end I braved the embarrassment. The first few flights didn’t end well, as expected, but after some guidance I wasn’t dropping like rocks.

Fast forward a few days later and I could keep a helicopter afloat reasonably well. Feeling confident I bought myself a nice model helicopter for £30. It was an indoor coaxial that my friends suggested and it didn’t take long to get it to fly.

And then I broke the landing gear from landing too hard.

I fixed it with super glue, and then I broke it again by landing too hard. It can still fly, just that it’s unbalanced with a smashed canopy and is at risk of tipping over while landing without the landing gears. Turns out buying a model helicopter isn’t terribly expensive, it’s the combined cost of replacement parts, which add up to somewhere around half the original price.

So I’m laying off flying for now until my savings recovers, but it was a pretty fun experience.

Adventure Recap

Since it was time to renew my web hosting fees, I felt that the blog should start anew with a clean slate, especially since the lack of good content in the past few months let the blog slide into disrepair. It has been quite a while since my last update, but essentially I’m now studying Mechanical Engineering in the UK. I’ve finally managed to find my inner self here, playing all sorts of things I always wanted to play like D&D and LARP. Back in Malaysia those sorts of things were hardly ever heard of and so I couldn’t find enough interested people. Simply put, I love it here.

My work on The Flying Penguin was halted mostly due to the difficulties I have in the game. The biggest problem is that the code itself isn’t that great and after two re-writes I’ve lost the willpower to do another. I feel like I should leave the game as it is and move on to something else more interesting. I might take up interest eventually but that’s unlikely because of the second biggest problem, its similarity to Penguin Learns To Fly. The whole similarity thing was an unfortunate coincidence, but since that flash game is better known, my game would forever be overshadowed by it.

Summer Updates

I have been pretty busy the last few weeks sorting things out for my further studies. I got accepted for mechanical engineering in the UK and would be heading there in September. For those who are wondering, this is the field where my true passion lies (especially Formula 1 and rocketry), programming is just something I do as a hobby.

I would be holding off any further development on the flying-penguin until SFML-2.0 is out. I’ve been thinking about doing an overhaul in the project, using more of SFML’s features than currently used. However, with the latest API in SFML-git being quite different from the current one, I think it would be better to wait for a stable release, as patching for API changes constantly is certainly not fun.

The Quake 3 BSP Viewer is finally working and uploaded to GitHub. The program uses Qt and C++ and is available here. Unfortunately, due to licensing concerns, you’ll need to find your own map files to try out the program.

The Flying Penguin 0.2 Released

After months of extensive work including a few rewrites for large portions of the code, I am proud to announce that The Flying Penguin 0.2 is ready. All the promised features such as audio, cartoon-ish artwork, high-scores and obstructions (birds) are in. At this point I would like to give thanks to the OpenGameArt.org community for helping me out with the audio side of the game.

Unfortunately, resizeable screens have been disabled because the code to save window states is rather unwieldy, especially when handling maximised windows. If you do need to change the screen size you can always edit the save file with a text editor.

I had at one point received a question about porting it to mobile devices such as iOS and Android. My answer is no, simply because I own neither of those phones, nor have any intention in buying them. Furthermore, there are aspects in the code such as the extensive use of STL containers and SFML that makes it unsuitable for mobile devices, requiring a major code rewrite.

To download, visit the project page.