F1L

Sourdough Cherry Rolls!

2019-12-15T21:26:00.001-08:00

Sometimes you want to make cranberry rolls, but QFC doesn't have any frozen cranberries that you can find. You are busy and tired and want to go home, but you also want to bake some tangy rolls. You sigh and instead buy some frozen cherries because they are also a sour berry. Life is like that sometimes.

Stats

Makes: ~12 rolls

Time: ~8 hours

Ingredients:

400g of cherry mead and trub ( approximately 1/3 trub) or just water if you are not making cherry mead on the regular, if you use water, maybe add in some more cherries.
200g sourdough starter, but using more is probably fine
200g water
1000g flour
200g rye flour
200g pie cherries
20g Salt

Instructions

Whisk the wet stuff, starter, salt and cherries, together until it froths, yeast love oxygen. The only thing yeast likes more that oxygen is eating dead yeast.

Put all the dry stuff on top of the wet stuff.

Put it in your stand mixer with the dough hook, set it on 2 and then let the kneading begin. Have it be kneaded until it can do the window-pane thing or until you can't stand the noise anymore and want to move on with your life.

Prove it in the oven for 6 hours give or take. It should double in size. If you're me, you will find it hard to know when that is. Such is life. If you've never proved anything in the oven, set it on it's lowest (170F), put a tray of water in there, wait until it gets up to temperature, turn it off and then put your dough in.

Take it out and shape it into 12 identically sized rolls approximately ~185g each in weight. You probably don't need to be this exacting. I made my rolls ~200g grams each. This adds up to more than the total mass of the ingredients. Take that physics!

Knead each proto-roll and shape them until you are satisfied with its ball like nature. Put each of Them on a parchment paper topped baking tray. If you don't use parchment paper, you probably should. It is basically cheating.

Score the top of each roll with a knife so it has room to grow. Bake for at 450F for 40 minutes.

Review:

Girlfriend approved - I did knock on them and they seemed good

-Sami

Foxlike Tech Demo Release

2012-07-03T13:26:00.002-07:00

I did some work in an attempt to create a single coherent level. It needs a boss, but is otherwise a showcase of the games current state. It shows off the system fairly well. You may need to run it in compatibility mode.

Get It here: Foxlike4117.zip

It has been awhile since I've looked at it, but there are some cool things going on there. I added time manipulation a little while ago and everything runs really, really smoothly. The controls are probably the best in the genre, so that's neat. I worked on those a fair bit.

What is Foxlike?

Foxlike is a rail based shooter, much like Star Fox. Which is where it gets its name. It takes place in space, which is great.

Controls:

I went with a uniquely PC based approach to the control scheme. I though of other things, but decided to run with a computers strength and ignore how one might build such a control scheme on a console. I also added some unique mechanics which no one else has.

Movement: WASD moves you around like a typical third person shooter, except instead of going forward, you go up or down

Shooting: Move the mouse to aim and left click to attack. You can also select different weapons with numbers 1-4. 2-4 have limited ammo.

Time Manipulation:

Here is where my novelty is, at least within the genre. While Star Fox has a boost/brake mechanic. This game replace that with the manipulation of the force known as time. Fun stuff!

R - send you forward in time without entering the intermediate space

F - slows time, but allows you to fire at a high rate

V - Reverses time, does weird things

right-click. Allows you do dodge sideways much like when you press R.

Other Design Decisions:

Conveyance:

Foxlike does not through things at you like you've never seen, it introduces game-play elements over time. In the case of an enemy, you'll see one so you have a chance to learn how it operates. Then you'll see some more so you can get a feel for it. Then that enemy will be apart of the game and cruelly mixed with other elements in order to make a challenging and engaging experience. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Palette:
Its important to have this pop and be distinguishable. For this reason, I chose to make the main characters ship red, so its stands out against the enemy colors which so far or green, grey, blue and yellow. Objects and obstacles are grey. Ideally when you see something you can get an idea of what it's going to do.

-Liam

A Quick C# 'Game' in XNA

2012-07-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

It never really got finished, but I figured I'd post it anyway.

ArcanusValiant.zip

You may need some redistributable, I'm not particularly sure. It isn't much, but I did solidify my C# skills and give me experience with Microsoft's XNA library. I used visual studio to make it and all in all it worked pretty well for a few days of tinkering.

-Liam

I feel like the Song of Ice and Fire Novels Have been Going Down Hill

2012-05-28T19:22:00.002-07:00

The first few are awesome, but then they seem to get worse as time goes on. Not that the writing, characters or events get worse, but it seems to be cumbersome.

The scope has continually increased, and now I think the series is buckling under its own weight. Here is a graph of the number of "point of view" characters in each book.

The first book had only 8 POV characters. This really worked. It was concise and the information you didn't have made it exciting. You only had bits and pieces of the puzzle. It made things suspenseful and was really well written. Character arcs happen and things move forward. All in all awesome.

When we hit a feast for crows we had 12 and a lot of them didn't seem all that necessary. This made the book more of a slog as we followed people who weren't really moving the plot forward, or worse were moving it backwards. Sometimes you would know a lot more about a characters situation than they did and I found this made it dull. Not only where they doing something boring, but they did it for a long time.

Spending less time with each character meant we couldn't know them as well or see them develop as much. The pace slowed and often you had to follow characters you weren't invested in. That sucks.

A Dance with Dragons has 18 characters. More than double the first book. It shows. The problems I mentioned previously become worse. The series has lost its concise feel and I'm following a lot of characters that either:

I have no investment in
Have just been introduced
May not ever have another chapter
Do not forward the story

Its hard to do a critique of the books and how they're written, I'm not qualified really, but I can tell you this:

I read through the first four books at a fevered pace. Polishing off each in about a week to a week and half and moving on to the next one.

I have been reading the 5th for 6 months. Its not really grabbing me anymore. I think I've explained why.

One of the cool things about the series was that anyone could die. No plot armor. Maybe that should happen. Let's do some dead-heading, so the rest of the tree can grow roses again.

-Liam

Made an Image Filter in C

2012-02-18T23:18:00.000-08:00

It is a blur filter. It is slow, but I like the results:

I used LodePNG to load the image and then made the filter from scratch in C. It isn't very fast or really very good, but it works! I good black triangle for image manipulation!

-Liam

Intro and Menu Screen

2012-02-16T00:26:00.001-08:00

Hi Everyone, I beefed up the presentation a bit and here is what I have. A short opening bit saying I make the game and a simplistic yet nifty title screen.

I like em!

-Liam

Awesome Ribs Recipe

2012-02-14T15:28:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone, I don't want to lose this recipe, so I'm putting it up here on Blogger.

Ingredients

5 lbs of ribs (approx)
garlic salt
1 cup of ketchup
1/4 cup vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon ground mustard
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon pepper

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F.

Place ribs in a deep baking dish. You probably don't have to grease it, ribs bring their own.

Garlic salt them like nobodies business. Can you use too much. I don't know?

Put 'em in the oven for 45 minutes...uncovered.

While that is going on mix all the other ingredients together to get your awesome rib sauce. Perhaps add other things you like in - Tabasco sauce anyone?

When the ribs are done, take em out, drain the pan - you will have to.
Spread the sauce on the ribs like a champ and put it back in the oven for 45 minutes. Maybe basting a few times occasionally.

After they're done pull em out and enjoy.

-Liam

Foxlike Class Diagram

2012-02-10T23:42:00.000-08:00

This more or less how its current state in terms of objects and what is inherits what.

The white arrows detail inheritance and the black ones detail interaction. What touches what. There is a bit more interaction than is detailed, but that would have made everything a mess.

-Liam

Our Internet is in Trouble

2012-02-10T09:07:00.001-08:00

Do your part and help stop our internet from being locked down:

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;Loading...&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

-Liam

My God It's Full of Levels!

2011-11-09T16:45:00.000-08:00

None of which are more than an 3D icon. Still it was fun to fill it up. I'm kind of a fan of the ultra low poly planets. It seems to work well.

-Liam

Added A Level Select Screen

2011-11-06T23:26:00.000-08:00

I have tentatively titled the campaign Ganithracks Malice, mostly because it is what I came up with when I wanted to test the title bar and also because it doesn't contain a V, which I haven't implimented yet. I only have one level Icon right now, so I just put down Earth --which has clearly been rendered in the highest of detail-- three times.

The greyed out ones are not yet selectable as you've got to beat Earth before you can move on to Earth 2 and then you have to beat Earth 2 before you can do Earth 3. The cool thing is you can do arbitrary dependencies which should allow for fun and varied campaigns with multiple paths. With this additional menu, it seems much, much more like a game.

-Liam

Foxlike - Where is it at?

2011-08-11T03:30:00.000-07:00

I've been travelling at bit and haven't had too much time to work on it, what with currently being in Belgium and all.

The stuff I have been working on has been mostly internal. I'm currently converting everything to run at something other than 60 fps. Previously I used a very explicit timing method of basically assuming every computer could pull of 60fps and then limiting the fps to 60.

This is somewhat untrue and on some computers - my netbook - Foxlike really doesn't perform like it should, so I'm currently revamping everything to update based on time elapsed. This means that pretty much any computer will be able to run Fox-like pretty well. It's not a very exciting change, but it really should happen sooner rather than later. The end result will be pretty cool. If you have an awesome computer, your performance will be smooth as can be. If you have not such a good computer, than it will still be playable.

The next bit will probably be to improve how my objects are stored and used in collision detection. The current algorithm is pretty amateur, and I can think of a few ways to make it much better. Doing this will probably require another layer of abstraction - woot!

So for the next while Foxlike will be all about black triangles.

-Liam

Penny Arcade Over the Years

2011-08-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

Penny Arcade is about to change there site design and that got me thinking about what the site used to look like. I thought maybe other people would like to see too.

Here is a snapshot of Penny Arcade for every year since 1999 to our 2011. It's kind of cool to see how it changes from a 90's website into the multifaceted brand we know today. It shows you what creativity and hard work can do for you.

It's almost getting to be start-up time.
-Liam

There is Nothing Quite Like

2011-08-02T11:14:00.000-07:00

The feeling you get at the end of a good rpg.

-Liam

6990 - The Number of the Beast

2011-07-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

I am currently working with a computer I have named "Beast". Literally, it's in the cs departments name as Beast.

Technically beast is the best computer you could buy right now with an AMD Radion 6990 coupled with an Intel i7 26000k and a ton o' ram.

In reality Beast is as vicious as Beast is powerful and hates locking mechanisms. The Beast does not like to be synchronized or controlled and as such fights back the only way it can - by locking up completely.

Truly filled with a dark soul and angered by its captivity, Beast also hates restarting and takes forever to do so. No doubt biding its time. Waiting for another prime moment to initiate its grand betrayals.

Finally when it does restart and boot up again, it says it had an error and shut down unexpectedly. We both know I shut it down, but only Beast won't admit it.

-Liam

You Buy Bags of Delicious Waffles Here!

2011-07-18T09:59:00.000-07:00

Maybe you can in other countries too, I haven't really looked, but in Belgium you can totally buy a bag of delicious sugary waffles!

I went to the store looking for crackers, I came back with so much more.

Woot Belgium!

-Liam

2011-07-17T05:18:00.000-07:00

Silent Protagonist + Chrono Cross

2011-07-17T02:00:00.000-07:00

Silent protagonists are pretty awesome, but they don't happen nearly as much as they used to. That's kind of too bad. RPGs seem to be built around ever talking protagonists.

Anyway I was skimming SMPS' Chrono Cross Review again. and I noticed this bit and I figured I'd pass it on:

"Chrono Cross is the rare post-SNES JRPG that can accurately be called a role-playing game. Even though the term RPG continues to be used in regard to Final Fantasy, the Tales series, Xenosaga, etc., but there is actually very little role-playing to be found in most of these games. As soon as an RPG's player character begins speaking on his own or making decisions independently of the person holding the controller, the term "role-playing game" becomes a misnomer.

This is why the silent protagonist device is such an effective tool in video games. When the player's character in the game's interactive narrative -- and technically, every video game is an interactive narrative -- is incapable of exercising any autonomy of supplying his own voice and thoughts, there is that much less of a boundary between the player and the world of the game. In Chrono Trigger, the player is Crono, and vice versa (up until the Ocean Palace disaster, anyway). Conversely, in Final Fantasy X, the player really only acts as Tidus's arms and legs, and only when the game cedes control to him. There is no role-playing; Tidus and the player are totally seperate entities. The player nudges Tidus along and views events from mover his shoulder rather than through his eyes.

Chrono Cross uses this tool to a more daring end. Chrono Trigger was designed to be a fantastic adventure in which the player vicariously leads a life of daring action and heroism through Crono. It's a blast, but fairly typical video game fare. Chrono Cross, however, is a story that's less about saving the world from disaster than Serge's quest for identity and meaning. Because Serge and the player are inextricably bound, Serge's existential struggle becomes the player's own."

The review itself is a really awesome read and I suggest you check it out even if you've never played Chrono Cross. It's long, but it provides a really relevant discusssion about story in video games.

-Liam

Stop Spying on Our Internet

2011-07-11T04:43:00.000-07:00

The new conservative government is attempting to push through a series of crime related legislation. Most of which I don't really know about, but I do know about "Lawful" Access. To be fair it was originally a Liberal initiative. Either way it is a pretty naive and impractical bill.

The Lawful Access Bill will make it mandatory for internet service providers to collect your personal information when you use the internet and then hand it over to the police if they should ever ask. They won't even need a warrant and they'll be able to find out litterally everything you ever do online. Right now you may be reading this on Facebook. After this bill, the police will know everything you ever post here - without court oversight.

Privacy aside, this bill will force ISPs to monitor and store everything everyone does online. That seems tricky and indeed witll require them to build significant infrastructure to do so. Running a 1984 version of the internet isn't cheap and this cost will be passed on to consumers. To make matters worse, smaller ISPs won't be able to keep up - effectively reducing the number of providers and competition in our already dominated market.

Right now we only have three major providers and Canadians have been forced to pay more for their internet. If this bill get's passed, not only will we have to pay more for unnecessary infrastructre, but we'll also be living in a near monoploy, so be prepared to pay again.

The biggest problem I have with this is that the police have never once shown a need for this sort of system. There really hasn't ever been an instance where their current powers have stopped them from solving a case. Their current tools are sufficient.

The bottom line: Please speak out and spread the word if you have any interest in your privacy, your pocketbook or sensible legislation. An affordable open internet is important to Canada: socially, economically and culturally. You can find more information here:

http://openmedia.ca/StopSpying

Thanks for reading

-Liam

Adventure Log 2 - Settling In

2011-07-02T02:58:00.000-07:00

I'm currently sitting in my place drinking coffee and eating a box of truffles (woot Belgium!). Here's what went down in the last couple days:

After spending an evening in my temporary accomodations, I moved to the Groot Begijnhof which is a UNESCO world heritage site.

Where I Live

That's kinda neat. As it was originally constructed in the 13th century, this is by the far the oldest place I've ever lived in. Victoria has a lot of "Heritage Houses" and other old buildings, but I none of them predate Columbus. So if your touring Belgium and hit up Leuven and happen to find yourself checking up historical sites, you should totally drop me a line.

Bells ring out in song every half hour. On the hour is a Belgian folk song. I don't know about what.

Also of note, while I've never seen a cobblestone in Victoria, they are everywhere here. I don't think I've ever seen a "paved" sidewalk. It's always an ever changing mix of various types of cobbles. They can be a little bit tricky to walk ok, my rolling suitcase hates them and I bet if you wore high heels you would have to be extremely dextrous. They give me even more respect for the Paris Roubaix. That remind me, the Tour De France starts today and I'm in the same timezone!

My Street - Cobble Stones

Another somewhat surprising structure standing only slightly more than sixteen steps away is a massive church.

Dare I say Cathedral?

Victoria was also pretty big on the churches, but nothing like these ones. Here is another from downtown:

There a quite a few and they are all huge buildings. I've found that I can almost navigate on churches alone. "Look a church, I can get home from there"

That being said, Leuven is a small but difficult city to find your way around. I'm used to living in places that were panned around a grid system. You have numbered streets and named streets and you the avenues make sense. Here we get this:

There are no numbers and street signs are almost non existant. Instead of having them on the corner of an intersection, they're usually little blue signs hidden on the side of buildings. But even if you do find out your on Tietezstraat, were that meets Dakenstraat or Parkstraat is a mystery to me. After spending a good portion of the day trying to find a building were I could get my internet account activated I determined two things:

Without the internet, I cannot find my way around a city much less a european one.
I needed a some maps and I needed to plan out my routes to and from my place

And this was how my dinner table became a map table and my dinning room became a map room. Why? Because you can't eat, if you don't know where to buy food.

I must travel from Groot Bejignhoff to mystical place known only as Dakenstraat 2, but how!

With a system of planned routes and the recently reaccuired power of google, I've managed to get a line on everything I need to keep my alive. That being said I often get lost on the way home. I get turned around pretty quick whenever I go inside a building. That being said, so far so good and Leuven has proven to be a pretty awesome little city. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to be here.

Here are some more pictures to take you out:

Every pizza place appears to be proudly Italian. Some even have maps which point to the specific part of Italy. I guess you gotta have the credentials

So many building have courtyards. It seems like your almost always in nice cobblestone courtyard.

This is above my door. I have no clue what it means, maybe it involves a saint? I couldn't tell you.

The street to the right of me. There is the church I talked about earlier.

More church. What!? I've never ever seen a building like this before. The inside is really awesome too.

Angela asked me if there as a subway here. I said I didn't know, but I figured there had to be one. Turns out Angela was asking about an underground rail network not a sandwich shop. Well you can get sandwiches, you cannot ride underground trains. Not that you'd have to. This city is 2km across.

-Liam

Adventure Log 1 - Travelling to Leuven Belgium

2011-06-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

A little while back I got an internship over at the IMEC Institute in Belgium. There was a lot of work with regards to visas and figuring out flights between then and now, but it has all paid off and now I'm in a small guesthouse room in Leuven Belgium across from a pizza place I may hit up later.

The flight took me accross nothern Canada and over Greenland. Any time you opened a window, it was super bright out. It litterally have not seen darkness in over a day. Between time zones and long flights I've lost over 21 hours(I think). I haven't slept in quite awhile. It reminds me of when I first discovered Oblivion (zing).

The first thing that really stuck out was the insane Condor safety video:

I watched the video both times they showed it. Condor also seems to be running with a Charlie Brown motif. You can find snoopy on the side of the plane, your coffee cup and the pillow

They fed me on the plane - twice! - which was pretty good. Near the end they started selling a bunch of duty free stuff - cigarretts mostly - which I thought was kinda strange for a flight.

Airports themselves weren't bad at all. Even as someone who only speaks english both Frankfurt and Brussels weren't hard to navigate. Both were pretty big and it took me a fairly long while to get between gates. The airports themselves had smoking areas which unlike in Canda, appear to be sponsored as opposed to tucked away:

Anyway, so far so good. I'm not sure what to do now, but I'll think of something. Work starts on monday, so I have a couple days to sleep, adjust to the time change and explore.

-Liam

Foxlike: Scenery, a Fancy Camera, Intros and Outros

2011-06-24T01:12:00.000-07:00

I added a bunch of little things in the past couple days.

The coolest is a slightly more cinematic camera that can be put at any point in the level. This works pretty well for any beginning exposition or ending recap. This can be seen in the first couple screen shots.

Also of note, things don't have to be in space anymore and the sky can be colored and ground can be generated.

The other cool thing is the edition of scenery. I added some code to allow the drawing of anything you can model. They don't have much - if any - game logic or collision detection attached to them, but they can work pretty well for beefing up the environment. Usually they'll be to the side of the level adding ambiance or in a place that doesn't matter too much.

Finally a found a pretty large collection of creative commons music I like as well as a large collection of creative commons character portraits, so those are in there now. The portraits can be seen in the screens, the music cannot.

Anyway it's very game like now and you can even string levels together one after another. That's pretty cool in my books. There is no transition between them or anything, but it works. Right now the first 'level' loops forever.

The next big thing is to come up with a boss for the first level and a few more enemy types. Then I can start thinking about asteroids for the obligatory asteroid level.

I'm also ruminating on a potential plot. Honestly there doesn't need to be one, but it was suggested to me once that the characters literally always talk and I like that idea a fair bit.

-Liam

Yet Another

2011-06-21T14:33:00.001-07:00

Kinda small update, but here it is: Foxlike 0.1.1.1454

-Liam

Foxlike: Many Changes, One Video, One Release

2011-06-20T16:17:00.000-07:00

Kinda neat. I couldn't record it at speed, so I sped it up using a video editing program. This probably is a bit different than what it's actually like to play. You can grab it from here: Release 0.1.1.1203

The big things shown off here are:

"Particle" effects
Improved collision logic
Increased collision accuracy on the player ship, The Vendetta
Pillars added as deadly obstacles.
Speed changes allowed during levels. The level can crank up the intensity or slow things down.

I hope you like it.

-Liam

Trigonometry and Why I'm Glad I Learned that Stuff

2011-06-20T14:19:00.000-07:00

If you ever decide to go into games and more specifically programming or designing them, you should know that math is a pretty big part of what goes on there. Specifically trig and linear algebra and how to move between them. Vector seems to come up a lot, as do angles and all your favourite trig functions: sin cos and tan.

When I added my exhaust particles, I had to write a fair bit of math to get them behaving properly. Check out what's required to make one particle:

((std::vector *) g->debris)->push_back(new Exhaust(X + width*cos(roll_*M_PI/180.0)- height*sin(yaw_*M_PI/180.0), Y - width*sin(roll_*M_PI/180.0) - height*sin(pitch_*M_PI/180.0), Z+.02, 0.02,-height*sin(yaw_*M_PI/180.0)/2 ,-height*sin(pitch_*M_PI/180.0)/2,-0.005,g,"spark.png", 30));

Sin and cos and a firm understanding of radians vs degrees are used pretty heavily in order to make them both appear in the right place and then move in the right direction.

It call comes together to make this:

Math at Work!

-Liam