The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Collision detection

I’ve been writing some simple games lately, since I’m completely terrible at programming and I’m going to need to get better if I’m ever going to make anything good. Today’s project so far has left me with a bounded single-screen game with a player character who can move in eight directions and attack with a sword in four, a bunch of mobs that spawn on one edge of the screen and move toward the other edge, the ability to attack the mobs and kill them and get points for it, and proper layering of various textures.

Currently, though, the collision detection is pretty thoroughly half-baked. Turns out that collision detection on transformed sprites is kind of a bear. I spent a few hours working on it, reading tutorials, and looking at examples, but eventually my eyes started to rot out of my head and I just had to set it aside for a while. I’m pretty bad at programming.

The bright side is that once the collision detection is working, I’ll have something pretty solid (unless you count the art assets, which are currently a weird bunch of really shitty hackjobs I did myself and some stuff I pulled off the internet) to build on.


September 26th, 2009 Posted by | Games | one comment

New heights of weirdness

Gordon’s latest ellipsis-delimited random notes blob concludes with the following:

"Doug Melvin of the Brewers will make history of sorts this Sunday in Milwaukee, when he becomes the first GM to have his own bobblehead day. That’s according to bobblehead expert David Hallstrom, who tracks such things."

The following things are bizarre about this situation:

1) The Brewers are giving out bobbleheads of their general manager, a person few Brewers fans will be acquainted with and fewer still would recognise or care about.
2) The Brewers will be the first team to give out GM bobbleheads, ahead of teams like the Athletics, Red Sox, and Mets, who have much better-known and more-cared-about general managers.
3) As a general manager, Doug Melvin hasn’t exactly done a very good job. The Brewers have made the playoffs exactly once on his tenure, and he mortgaged a large amount of their future to do it.
4) The Brewers have many more colourful options to produce bobbleheads of, such as their players or any of the running sausages in the sausage race.
5) There is such a thing as a "bobblehead expert."


September 26th, 2009 Posted by | Baseball | no comments