I am z3rb of Borg.

A-ha - Take On Me Intro on Ukulele tabs

z3rb — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:17:54 +0000

I figured these out for hilarity:

A||----------------------4-4-5-7---5-5---------------------|
E||--7-7-3-0---0---5---5---------------7-3-3-7-7-7-5-5-7-5-|
C||--------------------------------------------------------|
G||--------------------------------------------------------|

brynsfaceiscancero.us!

z3rb — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:18:44 +0000

It’s true!

Space organs

z3rb — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:50:35 +0000

Right, there’s no air in space. Thus, pipe organs don’t work out there.

I think I can tap this market, since there are currently no pipe organs in space due to the lack of air, I can sell pipe organs + tupperwear tubs full of air to the people in space so they can play organs. I’m going to make billions. If you would like to invest, please shoot me an email.

The company shall be called SPACE-X-ORGANS-X-TREEM since it sounds spacey and we will spend all the investment money on tupperwear and second hand pipe organs. Hopefully we will eventually get a NASA contract to supply them with air at a cheaper price than they are buying air right now.

“£200 million for 1.3%? Let me just say now, I’m out!” - Duncan Bannatine.

Thar Be Jewels! part 5

z3rb — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:57:57 +0000

I love shitty programmer’s art:

Thar Be Jewels! part 4

z3rb — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:07:44 +0000

The frequency of these posts is ridiculous. Oh well.

In this latest version, I’ve fixed the swapping of gems, and added in where the explosion things should be. The video is worth watching due to the SURPRISE ENDING!

This video also contains the game’s theme music, “The Curse of Captain Morgan” by Alestorm. Used with permission from t’band!

I’ve also decided against using the mouse for input, it’s just too much effort to code. Instead, you can use either keyboard or xbox 360 pad.

The scoring in this will be different to PopCap’s original Bejeweled; instead of a straight-up score, your score will be generated based on your “points per second”, and each game will last between 2 and 5 minutes, depending on how testing goes in terms of how long it takes to exhaust the number of moves you have. Another difference between this and PopCap’s will be that you can swap a gem with the one next to it, even if it doesn’t create a row of 3. This is mainly because I’m too lazy to write the verification code for it. Oh lawdy.

It’s my plan to have the game playable by Sunday, thereafter it’ll just be polishing, adding menu screens, the help screen, et al. Shouldn’t take as much as the “alloted” 40 hours.

Thar Be Jewels! part 3

z3rb — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:37:47 +0000

Oh lawdy, I have no idea what’s going on here:

I made the particle thingy better though, I accidentally had coin.velocity.Y = MathHelper.Clamp(coin.velocity.Y, 0, 10) which was silly, it’s now -3, 10, with gravity set to 1px/frame^2 so the coins jump up initially which looks way cool.

The Dark Knight, not so good

z3rb — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:33:59 +0000

The Dark Knight is a terrible film.

Thar Be Jewels! part 2

z3rb — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:41:28 +0000

Finished porting what I had done so far for Thar Be Jewels from C++ to C#. It wasn’t as much work as I had expected, however I was forced to redesign the structure of the program into a more workable object-oriented one, which is good. I hope to keep to a standard of “Try not to write hacky shit code”. It’s been working so far.

So that took a couple of hours which included learning more about XNA and C# in general.

I also added a thing since I was bored that creates coins that fly drop from where you click. Eventually, this will be used for when you create a row of 3 gems, coins will drop from where the gems were. A purely visual thing, but it adds to the polish of the game so it’s relatively worthwhile. It works by creating a 2d vector for the position, and another for the velocity of the coin. Gravity is then added to the velocity.Y each tick. It works pretty well and looks relatively cool. Video:

New Year

z3rb — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:48:57 +0000

My new year’s resolution: To code, and release at least one piece of software every month during 2009. No matter how small, or how useless.

Stay tuned for me giving up on this sometime next month.

Thar Be Jewels! part 1

z3rb — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:46:15 +0000

I’ve just started porting the 447 lines of code I’ve written so far for my Advanced Higher computing project from C++ to C#. It shouldn’t be too much work, especially since the languages are so similar anyway, and 450 lines really isn’t a lot of code in the first place. The reason for this is that I’ve been teaching myself C# over the past week and have fallen in love with it. Not having to worry about my own memory management code is lovely, lists are lovely, the language is just lovely. Also, C# has Microsoft’s wonderful XNA framework, which is just lovely to work with. Lovely.

So, build No. 33 (latest) of the C++ version looks like this, anyway:

TharBeJewels build 0033.

This will also allow me to finish the damned thing, and much fasted than I would be able to in C++.