16/05/2002-17/05/2002 @02:13:35 ^03:27:15

Another entry in "Rob's boring weblog" (Hi, Matthew!:-) )

Things that make you go "Hmm..."

Firstly, what to do when one of your friends decides to ostracise himself because he thinks no-one gives a monkey's backside about him. I don't know, but I know it doesn't work. You can't ostracise yourself. Trust me, I've tried it more than one time before... But anyway he's cheered up a bit again so for the moment it's all good.

Secondly, what to do when you apparently lose all contact with the girl, um, how can I put this... that you're doing stuff with. (I can't think of a better term!... but anyway, I digress) Yeah I know, "expect to be ignored" (for valid reasons) but first there was the no-show at that party last weekend and then two of the "usual times you email me" that have gone past and you know what my brain's like it starts to yammer at me...

Yeah okay it's not like people always go to email at exactly the same times every week. So it's not much to go on. But you know. One possible explanation is that I'm being cold-shouldered for dissing that Nickelback record too much:-) Of course there are others...but they can stay confined to my real diary for the time being...

Damnit I might have to bite the bullet and use the damn phone again, oh horror of horrors. Speaking of which I might keep missing phone calls due to having the connection up so much. Oh it's all a mess:-)

PS If having read this, you now have a C+C Music Factory record in your head, then I'm sorry.

More on automatic addition of things to path variables

Okay it's not bash that's doing it, because none of the bash files, /etc/profile, /etc/bash.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc have commands that adjust the things. Well, not mine anyway, but then I've customised all of these files on my system:-)

How do I know this? Well today for a change I didn't log into X via xdm, but via a good, old-fashioned text login. And none of my scripts in ~/bin/ could be found, nor could the gorgeous manual page I wrote for rndsig be found in ~/man/.

Further investigation required. But isn't this fun??

Making Doom maps - in BBC BASIC!

A long long time ago I made a Doom level, it was just a big box with a monster spawner in it. You'd run around and monsters would spawn. They'd fight each other, and you, until the place got completely full and you had to start over. It didn't work very well and was deleted.

Fast forward to the end of last year, when the infamous NUTS.WAD (textfile), and a few weeks later, the unbelievably spooky and atmospheric Equinox, (textfile) came out. The first was simply two big boxes rammed with 10000 monsters (it is 10000, not 100000 like the text file says) and the latter contained, among a lot of incredible stuff, a few large areas infested with lots of different types of monster. These would inevitably fight each other.

Anyway I love huge monster fights and I wanted a map in which to set them up. I felt the easiest way would be to code it. I made a program, in BBC BASIC and its built-in assembler, that built a level. At the time, it was just a big square box, hence its name Sandbox. The code populated the map with random monsters and you ran the game with it, turned a couple of cheats on, woke them up and sat back and watched.

Today, I rewrote the code. The map is now circular (ish, you know, you approximate a circle by a regular polygon with many sides) and uses a new algorithm for laying out the monsters that gets a lot more into the space. I've been messing with it all afternoon, it's great:-)

Not sure why you need to know this except for the fact that it's damn cool to run and its construction is nicely automated. Used a lot of coordinate geometry stuff I did at A-level, which cheered me up because I could remember it:-) Not to mention how you put a Doom map together in the first place - lines, sides, vertexes (sic), sectors etc. not to mention BSP trees. It's all good.

PS It might be that I just want an excuse to go on about Equinox, which is fantastic. I think that in another update I might go through it, level by level...