Frognip Home: News:
17/12/05
Finished school yesterday - two weeks off :)
Lately, I've been doing a lot of composing. Maybe I'll use some of the music in games in future, but I'm short of games :p Anyway, it was fun composing.
This band (403) did some music for a Flash cartoon a friend showed me some time ago - if you have time, have a listen to Blaze of life, Southern Cross and Polar Star - good music IMO!
Tim
24/10/05
Decided to re-organise the website a bit - it will probably end up looking less good rather than better, but such are my web-design skills :\ I've still got the old pages on my hard-disk, so if it all goes too pear-shaped I can restore those.
Tim
15/10/05
First post for a while. I've done more work on the MIDIs, and I think some of it sounds pretty good now. I've also been trying out Java's networking classes - I managed to get "Test message" to appear in a console window on Rob's computer over the internet - sounds trivial, but I was pleased nonetheless.
I've recently started Sixth Form - I'm taking Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry. It's quite hard work, but a nice challenge (hope I didn't speak too soon!)
Tim
29/08/05
Over the last few days, I've been working on a program to draw pixel trees from a "seed" in the middle of the screen, by a simulation of Brownian motion. I'm not sure if it's exactly how it should be, but it seems to work, apart from a strange bug with trees larger than 170-180pixels radius. I'm working on fixing that now.
Also, a few days ago, I did a little more work on the music for Legend of Itonia.
Update: I fixed the bug in the tree program. I might put the program on the site, although I should probably tidy it up a little before that. I've just put some pictures of the trees on the website, on the Fractals page.
Tim
16/08/05
I just came back from two weeks' holiday, so I haven't done any programming recently. Before I went, I did a little more work on the four-in-a-row, but I think the one-player mode will prove difficult to program.
Not much other news at the moment, I'm afraid, other than that it's not long until I get those long-awaited GCSE results...
Actually, one more thing: I just fixed a few strange mistakes in the C++ guide on this site, sorry if anyone's been confused by those before.
Tim
21/07/05
Recently, I've been working on a little Java four-in-a-row game. I've pretty nearly, if not completely, finished the two-player mode, but I still haven't started the player-versus-computer mode (it may prove very difficult).
I'll probably put it up on the games section of this website when it's finished- that is, if it ever gets finished!
I haven't really done any work on Itonia recently, except finish off one of the pieces of music.
Tim
26/05/05
I thought I'd post this, as I've been considering a big new re-write. If I finish it:
- There will be a storyline *gasp*
- The map will be much bigger than the 100x100-square map of the old version
- Most of the story will take place overground, in towns and woods, etc.
- There will be puzzles, hopefully some hard ones :)
- Sometimes there will be more than one way of doing the same thing
- There will be more music
- There will be sounds
So far, as far as I can tell at the moment:
Storyline - half-finished
Map - more than half-finished
Puzzles - some done, not many though
Music - about a third done
Sounds - none yet recorded
Programming - not yet started :P
Tim
30/04/05
Time to slash some hopes: :P
1) Sorry, it'll have to be eight-way grid movement in Itonia, because it would take too much brainpower to make the character able to move freely... well, it's probably quite possible, but I don't think I'm going to.
2) Exams coming up over the next two-ish months, so I might not get very much done in that time.
Tim
23/04/05
I put some stuff about fractals up on this site at the beginning of April, but haven't posted about it 'til now. (The page is here). There's a program I wrote for drawing the Mandelbrot set on there too, it should work with Windows, just unzip it all into a directory and run mandel.exe - it will run fullscreen, although no guarantees that it will work on your system. The program was written in C++ using the Allegro game programming library.
As for Legend of Itonia, I've decided to re-write quite a lot of it. Realising that it had no particular storyline and it looked rather bad, I've been doing some work on improving it - no more "black-screen-after-minimise" problems, hopefully. However, it's quite difficult work, so I might end up not finishing it, as has happened before. So, don't get too hopeful.
Tim
19/09/04
My hard disk crashed last week (started behaving weirdly on Friday, made a crunching noise on Monday), so I've had to restore the game from a backup. I did copy the latest version of the source file onto a floppy disk on Friday though, after I knew the hard disk was dodgy, so that was up-to-date. I don't think the datafiles had changed much if at all since my last backup, so they're pretty much fine as far as I know. So, after putting in a new disk (80GB :D), Windows is reinstalled, and so is Dev-C++ (the C++ IDE I use), and also Allegro (the game programming library I use). I copied the game files back to my C: drive, loaded the Itonia program up, and it seems to be working fine! :D
Tim
27/07/04
I've just been doing some more work on the delays and timing, so hopefully I will have that that finished pretty soon
Update: 28/07/04 - Finished (I hope!) changing the delays so that the game doesn't run too fast on faster computers.
Update: 6/07/04 - The game speed option does now actually affect game speed again. I took that out when I was changing the delays and timing, but it's back again now.
Tim
13/06/04
Hi,
I haven't really done much programming recently (for quite a while actually), but I just thought I'd let you know that I've done a bit of work on the timings of movements, etc., to try to make the game run better on different speed computers. Hopefully there won't be a repeat of the problem where the game ran so fast on XP that you couldn't select anything!
Time to do some more programming, bye!
Tim
15/04/04
Hi again,
Originally, this site used bitmaps for the images. These were huge in filesize, and were probably what made the site load so slowly! Now, they've been replaced by nice .jpg versions, which are a lot smaller, and still look OK.
Thanks to those who've been checking this site every so often, hopefully there'll be more to read soon.
I haven't done much coding recently, but hopefully Legend of Itonia will be finished one day! I'd better finish typing this and then do some more work on it.
Bye! :-)
Tim
7/02/04
Hi there,
Just thought I'd let you know how the programming's going:
I've just finished the walking animation! No more of the old graphic which I drew for the main character: now we're using Andy's nice new player bitmaps (well, I say 'new' - they have been lying around on my hard drive for about 6 months!) About a week ago, I decided to do some more programming, and I'm glad I did - I've been wanting to finish the walking animation for ages, and Andy should be pleased that it's done :)
I wonder if anyone's actually reading this..
Tim
29/09/03
Hey, people
I never got round to posting on here, but we are getting there with the game now. I would say we are about 60% through now, but I don't know for sure, because something always seems to creep up... Oh well.
I hadnt done much on Itonia for a while, but yesterday I felt a sudden inspiration to program... so I did... and I'll try to do some more in the next few days. No promises, but I think it should be ready soon :)
For all those people who are dying to see the game, (there must be someone, somewhere...) there's a screenshot here
Tim
7/4/03
Hey guys Rob here,just checked out the website for the first time! Congrats on a great job Andy! Im still coming up with the beginning and ending story line for Tim, but as Andy said it should be finished early! YAY! and...Hey!? wait a minute, how come my characature looks so grumpy?! Are you trying to get a point across?!
Rob
7/4/03
I have now drawn most of the graphics and just waiting for Tim to do some programming. Legend of Itonia is going to be finished earlier than we expected so you won't have to wait
so long until you can play. The suspense is killing me but i dont know about u guys!
Andy
