The end of all (or at least some) things

You probably noticed I recently stopped posting again. This is because I have just about nothing to post about. So here’s a little rundown of what will, and will not be continued on this blog:

• Little Big Planet Wallpaper: is put on hold
• “What I’ve Learned This Week”: discontinued, as it became boring
• Tody (the personal agenda program): discontinued
• Announcements of Garrysmod addons: continued, but of course I can only do these if I have a new one
• Animations: new, once in a while I might draw a little animation and post it here

That should be it then, I’ll just leave you with the first animation I did, and I’ll post new stuff when I have new stuff (and it might take a while).

WILTW 4

Maths. For school. So come back later.

WILTW 3

• I should find a feed to inform me on Freeman’s Mind, since I keep finding out about new ones a whole week after they’ve been released.
• I should do my planned post on RSS feeds sometime soon.
• The Hunters from Half-Life 2: Episode 2 are damn easy to take out with the gravity gun (if only I noticed this the first 3 times I played…)
• Various stuff about Valve’s games (I really recommend to anyone with a game from the Half Life 2 series, Team Fortress 2 or Portal to listen to the developer comments, it’s really interesting stuff)

And that’s about it, since i’ve been spending most of this week playing through my games collection again.

Media Molecule Podcast 2 is up

What are you waiting for? Go! Go! Go!

Wood

Here’s the latest progress on the LBP Wallpaper, I didn’t have much time so I detailed the wood, in a very simple process that I will explain to you, since I don’t really have anything else to post about. It’s all done in GIMP, but it shouldn’t be too hard to translate to Photoshop.

Little Big Wallpaper - v0.5 - Wood

Steps to create a simple wood texture:

• take a base colour for your wood, fill the area with it
• on a second layer, create some black-and-white noise
• motion blur the noise in the direction you want the lines to go
• select the first layer again and open up the bump map filter
• use the second layer as the bump map, and experiment with the sliders ’till it looks right
• additional: afterwards, draw thin, darker brown lines in the same direction as your blur
• done!

Enjoy the wood!

Monday…

Right now I’m flatcolouring the wallpaper, so more details will come in a later phase. Today’s a monday, which is usually my most unproductive day of the week (I guess that’s true for lots of people). So to make up for it, I used Sackboy’s shape to whip up a simpler wallpaper. It’s 1440×900, my resolution, but if you want it for another resolution, just leave a comment with the dimensions you want it in.

Little Big Wallpaper - v0.4

Simple Sackboy Wallaper

What I’ve Learned This Week – 2

• HTML tables and lists (I’m just doing this whenever I feel like it)
• The very basics of makefiles (thanks a lot Tix, see previous post)
• Bacon and cheese rolls should at least stay in the oven for 10 minutes, not 5 (it’s just hard to wait that long, also 400°F = approx. 200°C)
• Bacon and cheese rolls fill your stomach more than you’d expect
• Linking to other wordpress posts automatically creates a comment for that post with a link to my post. So I guess I should be saying ‘Thank You’ to smoothfewfilms.com and firstpersonshouter.com.

And that’s about it for this week again. I didn’t get a chance to work on the LBP Wallpaper today, since I was away for most of the day, and spent the rest of the day playing HL2:Ep1 because I lost my savegames when I completely reinstalled everything a couple of months ago. And after that, I have some developer commentaries waiting for me.

Titles are the hardest part of a post.

Another day, another update on my wallpaper:

Little Big Wallpaper - v0.3

Work on Tody (the agenda program), has stalled, since I need Tix for the main part of the interface, but Tix doesn’t have any binaries so you have to build it from source. Which doesn’t work with bcc32, mingw32 or MSVC2008 (the 3 compilers I currently have installed). According to the build instructions, the supported compilers were mingw32 (well, combined with cygwin, which I don’t have) and MSVC (no version listed). So tomorrow I might try with an older version of MSVC, see if that works. Else I’ll have to redesign my interface.

And as a little extra, here are two interesting things for you: First Person Shouter’s post about ‘The Graveyard’ and a very big tetris game.  Try beating my record of building a line in 20 minutes and 3 seconds.

1 Line

I just made them drop as fast as possible here (still took more than 20 minutes)

Progress

So, as said in the previous post, here’s an update on that Little Big Planet wallpaper. Just a note: the final version is going to be 1440×900, but to show the progress, I use 640×400, because it’s easier to upload. I’ve now arrived at the step where I have a layout of the elements, and their basic shape defined.

Little Big Wallpaper - v0.2

Iv’e also made progress on a new project of mine that I’ve started 2 days ago. To help me (and when it’s done, others too) organise my day, I’ve started creating a personal agenda application in Python, which at time of writing this post, still doesn’t work yet, though some important functionality is already done. At this moment, there’s 85 lines of code, which is a lot less then normally could be done in 3 days, but this is due to the fact that I had to learn Tkinter for Python before I could go on.

Last thing I progressed in, is my “blogging skill”, which can be seen by the quality and frequency of my posts going up. I’ve also collected some more news to pass on to you: Smooth Few Films has brought us The Leet World: Season 2, Episode 6 and Little Big Planet won the BAFTA-award for Artistic Achievement.

Also, for one of my future posts, here’s an open question to the readers: “Are you subscribed to any RSS-feeds, and if ‘yes’, how many?” Answers (if any) can be put in the comments .

LBPSP Wallpaper – WIP

I’ve started working on a Little Big Planet wallpaper today, expressing my gladness that it’s coming to the PSP. So here’s the work in progress, some official LBP images (from the fansite pack) and some of my sketches, experimenting with the shape of the PSP and Sackboy. Expect more about this soon.

Little Big Wallpaper - v0.1

Also, has anybody near the centre of Belgium got a spare 80mm computer fan laying around for me to use? Because the one I use now in my scrapbuilt computer is way to noisy, even after cleaning out all the dust I could get to (that includes opening up the power supply). In return, you can get the old fan, if you want. Or maybe I’ll do a request drawing for you. Actually, I could offer €100 for it, because no one is going to react anyway (but I won’t, because you never know on the internet).