dokuro's web development

Final Fantasy rants, Bravely Default

2014-01-14T11:14:00.000-04:30

So I have been playing a bit of squaresoft's bravery default on my 3DS, feels like a final fantasy 4 heroes of light 2 which is nice, kinda miss the way the overworld Looked.

a top to botom comparison of the cast!

Besides the obvious graphic improvement the combat system enables you and your enemy to activate an action that allows 2 actions to be taken in a turn, great for taking frequent enemies fast since the points/penalties taken reset for every battle, sadly from what I've played that is all the new things for combat.

The job system is also similar to 4HoL, but the way you use the abilities varies a bit and now you get a nice twist, jobs grant passive skills that reflect the characteristics of it, like the tried and true shield wounded companion or the black mage synergy damage bonus when there are more black mages on the party.

They seem to make a big deal of the street pass function but I haven't got the chance to benefit from it.

My regret from the game is the interface, most menus are navigated by the d-pad just a few places allow touching, making combat a bit boring for me, not that i loved the 4HoL menu but still more pros than cons.

The music is as good as all final fantasy games and by the size of the menus the will be a lot of loot and abilities to play around for a good while.

Feel like giving it a try, is a whole small village free of charge (30 uses) with some of the goals getting into the full version when you get it.

Chibi Ninjas, the blend file

2013-02-12T08:40:00.000-04:30

Here it is the blend file for my little ninja project, they form a group where the foe can just face one of them at a given time, they kinda take turns in order to create the perfect tactics for defeating an adversary, they use special technics or ninjustu to make it seem as if they were no different from one another, allowing for ease of swapping positions in battle, making it seem to their foe that there is just one very powerful ninja instead of 3, each with their own specialty .

This were all made using Bleder 3D and a copy paste of GIMP, they share an armature object and use no textures to color them, it is just well placed materials ;), and a few extra objects.

blendswap to get them!

Anaconda 2 a Cow's Revenge

2013-01-27T04:50:00.002-04:30

Hello all!, since setting up the Cow at the office is done, is time to move back home to a better computer system, bearing an AMD 4800x2 video card and 8Gigas of RAM on a 500Gb hard drive, this time there is a part of the drive that is already being used by one of Ubuntu's animals, and is time for some Cow revenge.

Hard Drive Partition Scheme

This time the Cow's target is whatever that lies inside the /dev/sda4...
And so it begins:

Image Downloaded,
DVD burned,
Computer Rebooted,
Live System Started,
Installation Process Initiated,
Hard Drive Selected,
Manual Partitioning Chosen...

File Systems Exposed

Knowing how this works makes this a slice of Pizza (not a fan of pies). On the panel located at the right side of this menu of file systems we can define what we want Anaconda to do with them, this means we define what our /home or / and swap are going to be from what it found; as an example take the sd3 that belongs to Unknown, it will become my all OS file space (I call it Skull) if I just set the following:

So we take Ubuntu's / and swap and do the same that on /mnt/skull up there and I would also have made /dev/sda2 into /mnt/win so windows gets auto mounted but I can't edit that one, so the New Fedora 18 Installation ends like this:

End this and pressing Begin Installation, set the root password and wait until the Cow is set by blogging about it ;)

In conclusion, I've just tested a tiny part of the cases that Anaconda is prepared to handle:

I did not encrypt need to nor had any partitions encrypted before hand,
I did not have free space to let Anaconda take by itself so as to save me (the user) some time on the installation process,
Anaconda does not automatically download Updates in the style of Ubuntu's Installer (set aside the adding of repos),
as so picking the software to install was not part of this version of Anaconda, however, it seems to be a work in progress

I'm Happy to announce that it all went well and I have my Computer ready to work.

Installing Fedora's Spherical Cow

2013-01-23T16:05:00.000-04:30

Yes I know this has nothing to do with web development but, I am documenting this since I have installed several different GNU/Linux distributions and this Cow uses the new Anaconda Installer, witch comes with several (so lots of) changes, that sadly I have read lots of complains about.

I did try to install Fedora as it was on the alpha state but, trusting the partition maker, it took all my drive instead of just the free space :D, so I took into the beta kind of late due life taking the time out of my hands and my need to get the lost information back from the dead, I read it was about a week to final release, so I waited the month.

Its fair to add that I do love Fedora, and have used it since 16th, I ran from Ubuntu's Unity to Gnome3, and now I'm hooked on G3 so I don't care if you hate it and love mate or whatever other desktop; its your choice.

From the top, download Fedora's Cow, burn the image in to a DVD and boot the computer with that DVD in it (remember to check that the computer boots from that drive).

As all (linux) installers it will show a screen with a few options and if you press enter or let it happen it will start the Live DVD environment. Now you'll have to select if you would like to try the Live environment or go direct and install. I choose to try so I can do something else while installing like blogging or checking mail, reviewing my machine stats, etc...

On the first try for this I got no network so being it Friday afternoon I did nothing and went home.

Monday arrives and I give it another try, presto magic I get network and start trial number 2!, this time I chose to install and still got the Live environment working, so you know, I'm happily online, so I yum install GPARTED. (can't live without it!) and continued with this.

After the installer asked for the default language, the normal behavior for all Linux installers, I get the Summary view of Anaconda:

(what happened to the screen shoot maker, it didn't ask where to save... now yum GIMP!, wait they get saved on the pictures folder)

Anaconda's first screen

The installer adjusts to any screen size, tested from 800x600 to 1280x1024, and shows three (3) icons divided on two (2) categories, Localization and Storage. Since I selected US as the default keyboard layout I just need to adjust the time setting to Venezuela, and then off to Storage, where the real meat of Anaconda's hate seems to be.

Localization, Date & Time

As you can see, now the map is as big as your screen, no more weird zooms!.

Choose your time zone

However, even tho I can turn on and off the network time, I can't seem to choose between the 24/12 hour system, or date, so if any needs to be done, just make it post install.

Press Done on the top left to return to the summary screen.

Storage, Installation Destination

With the summary updated to my country, we go to the Installation Destination option.

Choose your Disk

This is the screen that appears now, the physical disks are shown and you can select the one that will hold the GNU/Linux installation of the Spherical Cow.

It seems I left one of the disk that I was working with on connected, a wise choice... is better to take it out, just in case.

With the target disk selected you can press to see full summary and options below and get this bit of information:

Disk summary and options

Or just press continue and get this bits of information, but they might differ from what I got:

Storage Information

It seems I have no free space on the disk so, Fedora needs 3.2 Gigs, it shows that my disk has 131Gigs used that could be reclaimed from a partition, or that there are 152Gigs I can take by deleting other partitions, I choose to do thing by hand. Since I will create the simple layout that I'm used to, I check the don't help me option and press reclaim space.

gparted, not included on Live environment

This is pretty much the disk layout that I need to work at the office (extremely low security). There is a Windows installation, a huge amount of EXT3 space used to keep files for all the offices, and the space for one Linux installation, in this case Fedora. It was empty space until the alpha did something and I had to re-install Windows, but now we can compare with what Anaconda found!.

This is the starting screen for manual partitioning; the no gparted style has made ppl rant about being weird, like all new things, it seems however very clean and organized.

The first option top allows the user to automatically make the partitions for you, Linux pros don't like that, but we press it just to see what happens, a message showing me that I have no space to use that appears at the bottom, this leaves me with no choice but to follow the instructions, so I press the "+" button on the bottom?, no I press the "+" next to the words Fedora Linux 18 for i386 and it expands to this:

Partition scheme found

It shows a partition scheme left by a previous Fedora alpha installation, now it is time to compare with what gparted shows; so it found /root and swap where I need them but it also made /boot that I was unaware of, and placed /home into the special partition I use for everything, I can't have that so I'll take it out and keep /home inside /root, cos I don't care about it.

As I select the items and press the edit button below, this window shows no sign that I can make any change, so I go on and press the help button.

Anaconda's Help documentation

And a nice read that is, it will introduce the user to the new interface, how it works and some things you might need to do; lets look at the tips:

You can enter sizes for new filesystems that are greater than the total available free space. The installer will come as close as possible to the size you request.
By default, new devices use any/all of your selected disks.
You can change which disks a new device may be allocated from by clicking the configure button (the one with a tools graphic) while that device is selected.
When adding a new mountpoint by clicking the + button, leave the size entry blank to make the new device use all available free space.
When you remove the last device from a container device like an LVM volume group, we will automatically remove that container device to make room for new devices.
When the last partition is removed from a disk, that disk may be reinitialized with a new partition table if we think there is a more appropriate type for that disk.

Since the /home is the only thing I don't like on this scheme, I select it and press the "-" at the bottom to take it out of the list, so I get this message:

Confirm Deletion

Anaconda's help button states that "Removing a device that already exists on your disk from the "New Fedora Installation" does not remove it from the disk. It only resets that device to its original state." But I am doing this "To remove a device that already exists on your disk, you must select it from under any of the other detected installations (or "Unknown") and hit the - button."

By this point if I press Delete, Anaconda will delete, as it states, the Data, so I chicken out and press Cancel, and read up the help again, paying special attention to the description of the layout and the items on the list.

"New Fedora Installation" is the one that Anaconda tried to make, and has no space for.
"Fedora Linux 18 for i686" is the old Fedora installation that is in the disk, has a layout but it marks my special partition as /home.
"Unknown" is windows.

The wise choice here is to open gparted and delete the old Fedora to try again and check the result.

What I did was I went back, re-selected the disk, then selected the /boot that appeared on the old Fedora, edited it (there is no need to press that edit button at the bottom) marking it to be re-formatted and pressed apply, this made an orange message appear at the bottom of the window, "choose a correct mount point", so I added /boot and

Scheme magic

The /boot entry was moved from the old scheme to the new installation scheme. At this point I keep modifying the rest and this moved them from the old scheme to the new installation in the same way, what I was not certain was if the work was only being done on the new installation and the rest would remained untouched.

The new Scheme

There was only one way to know that, pressing the Finish Partitioning button, if any problem arises there is always a good moment to start a how to System Rescue post! ;)

Review the Scheme

Done that, Anaconda seemed to gaze at my selection for the Partitioning Scheme, with that message to review those choices, as I pressed print screen to capture it, the screen flickered and

Ready to Install

It seamed that the scheme was approves, still I entered the storage option to review that it was all there, and it was. :)
So I pressed Begin Installation and BAM!, I got caught in a bug, lost the screen but I could see that it was about to ask me to set the root password, I did try to make the bug report but the computer crashed, seems 3rd time could be the charm ;)

Waiting...

2012-10-17T10:41:00.003-04:30

...well this was done while I was waiting to get the internet access back from our ISP at the office... then it was modified at home to fit my android asus tablet! as a live wallpaper.

here is the video!

Rush's Queue

2012-08-02T11:29:00.001-04:30

In all Turn Based Combat RPGs, a virtual (and most times visible) queue is implemented to set each of the character's turn to perform actions, it was meant to emulate the Iniciative rolls used on P&P RPGs, consisting of a random number draw plus the reaction trait value of each character, this was simple enough for people to use on paper and it was simple for computer games too, but the lather can do so much more.

To make things more interesting in video games, the queue became Active, this meant that the player now had to input the characters actions with haste, since taking too long would allow Foes to cut in line and attack.

I don't think the Queue systems have changed that much over time, instead the addition of characters position and/or area of attack where used in some games to make the players take extra turns in order to reach certain foes, this added more depth to the game's tactical repertoire but turns where still just based on the NEXT! idea.

In this post I'll combine all of Rush's rules so far; and for this, let me introduce our contestants:

Necro-Jester Vs Dragon-Knight, and their party of course...

One of Rush's Queue ideas, is to randomly generate the characters "roll" on every loop, this means that when a full round has been completed, the order in witch the characters will act is recalculated, thus adding a bit of chaos while creating a strategy in combat. It is a simple addition that could just be enabled on harder difficulty levels. Here are their party configurations:

The Order: Undead 00, D.Chain, Warbarian, Dragon Knight, Jester, Undead 01 and Sorceress.

CSS class

2012-07-27T10:11:00.004-04:30

Ok so I've done some JS on Code Academy, a few bits of HTML and then I jumped to CSS, it seams that the smart thing to do finally got to HTML by separating the looks from the brains of a web-page (and it has been a while since that happened!). In the first few exercises, I was introduced to a few styles that could be applied to bits of text selections caught between <spam></spam> tags; after that they where caught between <p></p> tags and finally I got to read about CSS classes, what a relief! this really makes it all more readable, there was a part of the exercises that emphasized on that by making me add a bunch of CSS tags and properties to so many bits of text separately, and all of them within <spam> & </p> tags; those where 5 minutes of hell... and there was no brain to it!...
This is pretty simple stuff in the course but, by browsing Code Academy's code, I found a bunch of classes for the instructions texts that appear on the side they use it mostly between <div></div> tags, this allows the use of extra configuration classes inside the <p></p> tags, this way one class takes control of a mayor view while the next inside class makes more precise changes and so on... until the <spam></spam> tags get to be used.

this is it for today...

Combinations on Rush

2012-07-09T16:07:00.001-04:30

I can remember just a few games (Chrono Trigger) where you could send several characters to perform an action together, and since most turn Based Combat RPGs have evolved into an ever growing list of Turn Based Strategy games, where instead of a party there's an army whose movement and position is more important than the actions itself, making combinations go into oblivion; its the main reason why I decided that...

Combined Actions

Had to be a part of Rush. Several characters can join in on any kind of action, whether they are physical attacks, spells, even a defending stance, crating this way, a more difficult duel or reaction for the opponent, more powerful actions or reducing any of the action's requirements. This is the part of the system that will force strategy into the player, figuring out when is best to use Combined Actions and when not to, also in some cases, when it is required to.

Different kinds of Actions can be combined

Combining is meant to provide greater results than each character using separate actions, this requires some kind of commitment, this is why the main requirement is for all characters involved in a Combination to be on the same Queue's time frame; but as an outcome, they are all left open for attacks until the next turn.

The Queue will explain how all of this comes together, just hang out until I get the rest of the parts of Rush keep popping into my head...

Defense on Rush

2012-07-04T10:43:00.001-04:30

In most games (I've played), defense plays a secondary, almost useless role in combat. Mainly, it has been used to reduce the enemy's physical attack effects (or damage), but with no real defense strategy. Since for now, the Rush Combat System has been all about using actions as attacks, the only way described to defend is by reacting to a Rush attempt, so I would like to propose the...

Active Defense Action

Normal Attack Vs Normal Defense

Used on the player's turn, choosing not to Rush but instead to Defend itself, or another character; the Leader (or selected character) will stand its ground, waiting for a Foe's action, if attacked, it forces a duel against the opponent.The objective is to counter the action before it starts, thus denying the attack completely.

You'll have to go through me!!

As mentioned above, the Leader can choose to protect a party member, this allows those character to remain safe, whether to prepare a special action that requires more than one turn to accomplish, or for simple protection.This opens up special scenarios where specific actions must be used in order to complete a Quest or defeat/weaken a special Enemy. This move applies specially to the Hero and Temp Leaders.

You must duel against both the Undead and the Dancing Chains

In the Captain's setting, the party members use their active defense to protect it from incoming attacks, by placing themselves in front any attackers and dueling. Even on a defender's failled attempt in a duel, provides the main target an advantage on its defence interaction, since every duel acts as a Rush attempt, it increases the action's dificulty level for the attacker.

The art for this post was done by me! using Blender 3D, with low resolution renders.
To get that old school feeling... check out my swaps.

The Party's Leader part 2

2012-06-07T12:07:00.000-04:30

As mentioned before on the previous post, Rush focuses on the Leader, but this does not mean that there is just one way for Leaders to fight. There are many different kinds of Leaders and in this post I will share some ideas for their set up.

The Hero

This setting portrays one of the characters, not only as the most important one but also, as the most powerful one, the destiny's chosen one. This kind of Leader will jump in head first into combat, regardless of what the rest of the party is doing, and sometimes even protecting the rest of the party. Most Knights or Paladins, and even Barbarians may fits on this category.

Stand back, I'll get this!...

The Hero plays out the same way it was described on the first post, they'll get their chance to attack and take it, cleaving its way through the enemy lines, rarely requiering any assistance from its party members, and if they do, it consist mostly on improvements to its own abilities. They act like an Army of One.

The Captain

This is the kind of Leader that uses the strength of its party as its own, meaning that the party members are sent to Rush by the Leader's abilities. Its role and abilities are meant to provide buffs or activate special abilities to its party members. This is a support character class turned into a Leader.

Go Get'em!... minions...

The Captain is a great way to introduce Necromancers, Druids and even a new way for Bards and Cleric healers into this kind of games, where the party members would not act unless covered by the Leader's aid, waiting for its command and defending it in the meantime. The Captain is the Party as a Character.

The Temp

Not all Leaders are this extreme, there is a place for Leaders that work well with others; in fact they work so well that there is no real felling that there is a Leader what so ever. Mashed up between the Hero and the Captain, we get the Temp Leader, which exist in a setting where it does not stand out, so at any point in a game, or even in combat, any character could be the Temp Leader; yes, even during combat.

Any of this Ninjas could be the Leader

A Temp Leader can use party members both as support or as part of its own actions, meaning that it is the setting used if the Game does not need or want to use one of the special cases, but still uses Rush.

Hope you like them, and if you have an idea leave a comment! :)
Thanks to djbisparulz for the art!
And soon part three The Defense System.

Variant The Party's Leader

2012-05-25T11:31:00.000-04:30

Turn based RPGs have had years of existence; there are one character RPGs, like Diablo, Ever Quest, and Party RPGs like the Final Fantasies, Earth Bound and so on. In Party RPGs, most of the times (if not always) there is one character in particular who is, at least, a bit more important to the game's plot than the rest (cough Cloud), the Lead Character. What I'm about to propose is to modify the regular combat system rules to create one where the Leader's presence is what really matters; a turn based combat system I call RUSH.

To explain Rush, lets take the old Combat Queue out of the equation, and the party's size, is not importat at the moment. The fight begins and its the player's turn, there is no need to select the Leader since its traits and chance made it act first, and its going to be facing one of its Foes; both parties will be ignore at the moment, so imagine them busy with each other or running around the battlefield. The UI for selecting actions appears, the player makes its choice and it is executed at once, with no waiting nor need to know what the rest of the cast will do, the player just needs to focus on making that ability play out the best way possible.

Rush attack successful and will continue...

If successful then the Leader has the chance to use another ability, repeat the same one, or even let a different party member into action, over and over again, even if the Foe is downed; however, every time an action is played, the following ones get harder and harder to perform, until the player makes a bad roll and the ability is played out poorly, allowing the defending Foe to start its turn, if any is still available.

The Follow up!, a second action that can go on and on...

While being attack might seem harsh, the defender also has the chance to play against the ability, trying to outperform the attacker, not only to reduce the attacks effects but also, if the defender is good enough, its more likely that its turn might come up sooner. Now in the awesome case that both performed equally well, then a Duel kind of interaction must be played out, with a nice handicap on the attacker in the same way its actions get harder to pull, to check whose turn will it be.

Who will Rush whom this time..

This is it for now, I'll keep posting on the subject...
Thanks Pityu777 for the art!

Variant for Hit Points

2012-05-23T14:41:00.002-04:30

My take on Hit Points. All video games make use of HP, characters get a value to represent how much damage they can take, and that is it. Maybe it seems simple for players, or everyone is just used to this.

Making Hit Points an integral part of the Action System, not only as a representation of a Character's "life" but more like the "Stamina Cost" required to be on combat and use any kind of actions, whether it is a special attack, asking for assistance, a defense opportunity; it is an interesting idea that I've had for a long time, that can by used for any kind of game (with characters).

To balance the need for this costs, Regeneration is applied at the beginning of every turn/cycle. The ability to recover Stamina must be tied to one of the Character Traits, allowing for some Character to improve recovery, while a different Trait provides improved Stamina (meaning more stamina). For some reason, I've tied High Regen to Spell Casters and More Stamina to the Warrior kind, leaving Rogue style characters in the middle.

In my opinion, there are two ways that the Stamina/Regeneration system can be represented, and it is a duck or bunny situation here, the game can use character traits to either 1.-improve the stamina and regeneration- or, 2.-reduce all stamina costs-. It would be on the developer's side to decide what could be better to implement, so lets expand on this.

Traits that Increase Stamina/Regeneration; in this case, the values that are increased are those for the character, meaning that they get more max stamina, more regeneration per turn/cycle, while all actions have a fixed cost that never changes. This method uses real values, i.e. rice skeletal archer costs 10.
Traits that Lower Costs, in this scenario the action's costs get reduced as the character's level improves, and the characters trait's values are fixed; so instead of using a real value for representation, the best option is to use percentage, i.e. Cleave costs 2%.

The use of this Self Healing System, allows some interesting situations for players to experience, some examples can be:

the abuse of a character's complete stamina in a Rush (*link next)
to have the Leader rice after being defeated
involving more characters to pay for the cost of another character's ability
your pick here....

Turn based RPG Challenge

2012-05-23T09:56:00.000-04:30

I stop with the Javacipt course from Mozzilla's U, since I took some of Code Academy's classes, but now it's time to write a bit about Game Design.

I took up a Came Carrier Guide challenge about old style RPGs combat systems, without posting it, and since then I have been changing this Google Doc about it constantly, but I believe that it's time to start sharing some lines from it.

Today lets begin with the idea at hand, a Turn Based Combat System where the player's party is a Group with a Leader. Most TBRPGs have a party but aside from the Leader having a special place on the game's main plot, it is no different from any other of the party members in combat, for the player that is. There are many examples of this in my SNES background as a Gamer, from all the Final Fantasys with Terra or Cloud as Leaders and Chrono Trigger where all characters had some sort of special interactions between them and Chrono, the Leader.

The following posts will develop more about the idea at hand.

The structure of FOR

2011-05-03T16:35:00.002-04:30

As I read along the chapter 4, some things came into my consideration... considering the FOR statement.

Lets look at this piece d'code:

var mailArchive = {0: "Dear nephew, ... (mail number 1)",
                   1: "(mail number 2)",
                   2: "(mail number 3)"};

for (var current = 0; current in mailArchive; current++)
  print("Processing e-mail #", current, ": ", mailArchive[current]);

In this FOR the control variable current is located IN mailArchive, since the object has the values 0, 1, 2, and so on to be looked for, however when working with arrays the book gives us this code:

 var mailArchive = ["mail one", "mail two", "mail three"];

for (var current = 0; current < mailArchive.length; current++)
  print("Processing e-mail #", current, ": ", mailArchive[current]);

The control here is now handled by current being minor than the size of mailArchive, because now it does not have the values that where used with the object.
So it is important to note the different ways you can control a lop with different kinds of data.

Ex. 3.2 Inline...

2011-04-06T10:48:00.002-04:30

Write a function greaterThan, which takes one argument, a number
>>function GreaterThan(argument) {

and returns a function that represents a test
>> return function test(number) {

It returns a boolean: true if the given number is greater than the number that was used to create the test function, and false otherwise.
>> return number > argument;
>> };
>>}

When this returned function is called with a single number as argument
>>var gt10 = GeaterThan(10);

For this part I checked the answer...
>>show (gt10(9));

Lexical Scoping, nice!

2011-03-29T12:09:00.000-04:30

First, writing about recursiveness, there is nothing more recursive than * power (base, exp -1), so it goes and goes until it reaches 0 and multiplied by 1. Too bad for the speed disadvantage of calling functions over and over...

Now, what can I say about Lexical scoping, seems great but its a little crazy to grasp at once, so here is my try at that using the makeAddFunction example.

makeAddFunction is created with one argument amount, and inside is just a function add with another argument number.
add returns the value of numer+amount and then makeAddFunction returns the result of the add function.
Here comes the important bit, the creation of 2 variables that will act as variations of the makeAddFunction, so we have the addTwo and addFive variables, both take the type makeAddFunction, one with one it's argument as 2 and the other as 5 (hence their names), this arguments are the values of amount.
At the end they call this variables, with show, each with an extra argument, that will be passed to the add function inside makeAddFunction.

So we get this : "show (addtwo(1) + addFive(1))"

that at the end is
"show (makeAddFuntion(2) add(1) + makeAddFunction(5) add(1))"

and this would be how it works, the value of addTwo/Five goes to number, because the makeAddFunctions had their arguments already given, in amount, while the variables addTwo/Five where created.

This way the programmer doesn't need to say "hey by the way, this little number at the end of addTwo, is the variable number that is inside the function, ok Js? good..." having the ability of getting a variation of functionality with less lines of code.

next the ex...

Functions...

2011-03-22T16:03:00.001-04:30

So the 3rd chapter is about functions, I describe them as small programs inside a program, you "summon it" by its name and give them the information they need in order to finish their job...

The simplest example would be the addition so instead let me tell you the subtraction the function will be named "sub" and in order for sub to subtract it needs the 2 values to subtract, so you tell sub that you need to take 3 from 9, and then sub will tell you it is 6.

Functions are what libraries are made of, a bunch of functions for specific works, like OpenGL for polygon graphics, OpenAL for sound, most languages have a Math library for heavy mathematical calculations, also another for network connections and so on.

The idea of Functions is not to copy-paste so much code, but just to call it every time you need to make that job, making the program jump to look for that functionality.

The Ex. 3 from the book is done like this:

function absolute(value) {
var result = 1;
if (value < 0) result = value * -1;
else result = value;
return result;
}

Ex 2.6 while it lasts...

2011-03-16T11:11:00.001-04:30

What I learned on this Ex, a var MUST be initialized, else the script won't run.
{} are very important when there are more than one statement, if sometimes is not too clear on it..
And, the condition variable must exist before the condition, or you will get a no run.
still not too hard, just need to pay attention to the keyboard.

var ans ="";
while (ans != "4") {
ans = prompt("2 + 2 = ?", "4");
if (ans == "4") {
alert("Ok");
breack; }
else alert("NO!, again...");}

continuer reading after this ex, and you can see that var=4 is the same as var="4", for comparisons.

Ex 2.5 if you do what I say...

2011-03-14T10:57:00.002-04:30

This took a few minutes because I forgot to erase the } from the previous code... pay attention...

var ans = prompt("Hi, we need to test if the 4 key is working. Could you answer how much is 2 + 2 = ?", "just press the 4 key");
if (ans == "4")
alert("The #4 keys are working perfectly, Thank you!");
else if (ans == "3" || ans == "5")
alert("The key next to it...");
else
alert("come on idiot, JUST PRESS THE 4 KEY!...");

2.4 rince and repeat, with for

2011-03-14T10:28:00.006-04:30

this is the 2.2

var value = 2;
for (var power = 0; power <10; power++) {
value = 2 * value; show (value); }

this is the 2.3

var chain = "#";

for (var cont = 0; cont <10; cont++) {

print (chain); chain = chain +"#"; }

Ex 2 "triangles" with strings

2011-03-14T09:51:00.000-04:30

based on 2.2,

var cont = 1; chain = "#"; while (cont <= 10) {
print (chain); chain = chain +"#" ; cont = cont + 1; }

I print first to get the original "#" and then start to add more "#" on every loop and we get a rectalngle triangle.

Ex 2.2 2 to the 10th power

2011-03-14T09:34:00.002-04:30

Using while it goes like this...

var power = 1; value = 2; while (power <= 10) {

value = 2 * value;

show (value);

power = power + 1; }

2 vars, one for control and the other one to show the result.

ex 2.1 true or false!...

2011-03-09T14:59:00.001-04:30

(4 >= 6 || "grass" != "green") && !(12 * 2 == 144 && true)

As we can see here, we have 2 main comparisons, being compared, an or and nand situation.

The solution for the or is between false or true, and that is true.

The inside and is not false and true which is true or not false.

And finally the main and between true and true, with a result of true.

:) is a nice ex for the brain, could there be any other like this with trues and false online...

hardest logic puzzle ever

this is not one but its an interesting read!.

week 2, the others are comming...

2011-03-04T15:07:00.001-04:30

Better late than never!... . . .

After reading chapters 1, 2 and 3 from the book, here are the important bits, I will clear all the theory first and then post for every exercise.

Types are the definition that variables need, in order to know what they represent. The main ones on the are: Numbers, strings, Boolean, objects, functions, and undefined values. This where created so the programs would know when they are using numbers of letters or any other thing on execution, this way it treats 2+2 as an addition or as the string 2+2 (as characters).

For calculations we would lose precision when dealing with too many decimals, it would be a problem if we need that level of precision in calculations, no solutions was presented on this chapters about it, since, most of the time, general calculations fit the limits of JS.

And as Alex pointed out, "as I was taught in Calculus: Multiply First, resolve everything above the division, then divide… its simple arithmetic"

What is the use of a backslash character in a String?, well is to insert special characters, the most common (in all programing languages) is /n as the end of line.

Typeof returs, as the resutl of its operation, a string indicating the type of the value to evaluate, typeof 4.5 tells you that 4.5 is a number, typeof (typeof 4.5) indicates it as a string because the result of typeof 4.5 is the string "number" so the typeof "number" is a string...

and now the exercises..

my ticket to the school of webcraft

2011-01-19T16:21:00.003-04:30

An annoying little message that tells you how much 2 + 2 is...

<script type="text/javascript">

var sum = 2 + 2
alert("the total is: " + sum)

</script>

just accept... stopped!