Blogs - shindig

Well it's actually an Asus knockoff of a kinect sensor, but it works well at tracking up to 2 players.

In Unity you can add triggers/colliders to your hands/elbows/knees/feet, to allow you to hit things. You can also attach triggers around you to allow you to switch weapons/spells. I just rigged up a simple fireball toss by doing an over head throw.

With triggers you can make different arrangements, if you put your hands together you could trigger a different spell than using one by itself or if you reach for your hip you could switch to a sword. Lots of possibilities....

If you throw a fireball all the way to the target (white cube) it triggers an explosion:

And a little demo where you punch a skeleton to kill it and another one spawns and comes after you.

I just landed my first professional programming job after 3 years of using Unity, 1 year using the mobile licenses, and experience with javascript, html5 and front-end development.

The last W-2 job I had was in construction, I went back to school at 26 and have been doing handyman/drywall jobs for money, using Unity every free moment I've had, now I'm 29.

I got picked up by a company looking for someone just getting out of school because the work is experimenting and prototyping concepts/api's and is being funded out of the owners pocket and I'm cheap but have several years worth of experience and am eager to get as much experience as I can.

They've bought tons of cool gadgets, sensors, controllers, cameras coming out in the future, most of the popular kickstarter dev kits that have been released over the past year, and I get paid to learn the API's and see what I can make. :)

And the job just came out of nowhere, unexpected, from looking for freelance work.

I was playing around with my sprite sheet generator yesterday and made a little sprite player for a webpage using jquery.

I make the sprite sheets with a single click as shown in this vid:

Then use Jquery to move the backgroundposition of the sprite like:

//CrusaderLeft
var framecrusaderL = 1;
 function crusaderLanim() {
	var bufferb = 256;
         var leftb = bufferb * framecrusaderL;
         // top stays 0 since all the images are have Y positioned at  0
         var topb = 0;
         $('#crusaderLeft').css('backgroundPosition','-'+leftb+'px -'+topb+'px');
        framecrusaderL++;
	if(framecrusaderL > 7) {
framecrusaderL = 1;
}
 };

In my stylesheet CSS file I declare the sprite's div ID:

    #crusaderLeft {

         /* our flame sprite png */
         position:absolute;
         top:500px;
         left:500px;
         background: url(http://pugetsoundtraining.com/Portfolio/images/CrusaderSwingLeft.png);
         width: 256px;
         height: 256px;
 } 

And in the html page I setinterval:

<script type="text/javascript">
setInterval('crusaderLanim()',100);
</script>

And Somewhere in the HTML I declare the div ID we declared in CSS:

And the webpage that plays it can be seen here: Pugetsoundtraining.com

As if being a broke 29 year old student isn't enough I got nailed with a neurological problem called atypical trigeminal neuralgia out of nowhere which has consumed nearly 2 years of my life and creates agony every day even with terrible meds that qualify people for disability just for the meds let alone the agonizing problem.

If I hadn't been neck deep in game projects I would have killed myself to escape the pain but I just want to get through it and pursue my true passion. It's called "suicide disease" because people kill themselves to escape the pain, meds aren't very effective for it.

I'm supposed to schedule a craniotomy where they perform this procedure. I met with the surgeon last week and he said to schedule when I'm ready.

Trying to code on meds sucks, oxycodone, tegretol, neurontin, cymbalta, amitriptyline, daily for pain. The cymbalta was because I was too high on amitriptyline and getting seratonin syndrome so had to lower it and added the max dose of cymbalta which also blocks nerve pain.

Getting medical bills more than your yearly salary is pretty depressing as well, especially when you're young and have health insurance but get co-pay'd to death. Some of the drugs take away creativity completely turning you into a clouded zombie.

The worst part was not being taken seriously by doctors because my bloodwork and spinal fluid (spinal tap was terrible) is flawless and I look fit and healthy, 29 years old, 6'4 and 165lbs. Not until 8+ months when I got an MRI they found a lesion and arteries damaging the nerve which causes sharp ice pick stabbing pain across the half of the face and behind the eye whenever you move it. The lesion was diagnosed as tolosa-hunt syndrome but the eye pain never went away after taking immune-suppressing steroids for months.

Right now I'm trying to wrap up some childrens android games before I get the craniotomy, and it's my last semester of school to top it off, so I should probably work ahead before getting chopped up. Frustrating...

I can't seem to help my impulsiveness when it comes to coding or prototyping whatever idea I come up with, no matter how useless. I'm so behind in so many places in life, I was disabled for 6 months of last year, yet I can't stop working on whatever gets stuck in my head until I've satisfied my desire to figure it out.

Here's a prime example...something of no purpose whatsoever:

Last week for example, I've got 3 games I've sunk months into creating that aren't finished, numerous prototypes and yet last week I had some idea about making a program to generate 2d animated sprites, which I don't need for any of my games. I just got stuck on one idea after another until eventually I was out of ideas and motivation to look at it anymore.

The key parts of my interest were in packing multiple images into a single atlas, which is pretty cool, but useless for most people. Then once that was done I was wondering how can I remove the color I set the background to with the alpha channel. Then I got to thinking about lighting and shader options, and then my hunger was over. Here's yet another file on my hard drive that will never see the light of day:

Here's how it generates the sprite sheets:

Well that's my rant for the day.