Courne Supremacy

http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/162151

That’s my NaNoWriMo page and yes I wrote 50,238 words on the month of November. Despite having a 5 day break for Thanksgiving with friends in Los Angeles and all the temporal haphazards of working in the video game industry, I imaged to stay the course and write my 50k. Is it the best 50,000 words I ever wrote? I’m sure like the last 50,000, that answer is a big fat no. But what counts is that it’s given me time to write down the bits and pieces of my sci-fi story and hammer out the details. Before I can rewrite my story, I need to have one first, right? I don’t know how this fits into the other pieces I wrote or if this would stand better on its own — I definitely have the notion that it will join a larger story arch but I’m working without a deadline. I get to do things pie-in-the-sky for a long while yet, but the end result is that I would like to find a publisher after I feel out the story and really vet it in my mind and on computer screen.

I’ll post an exerpt of it later this week for your enjoyment. But! I know, better yet, since you already clicked the link you can read what I have there.

The story’s called “Common Sense” after the phamplet by Mr. Thomas Paine. Currently, my story, in its state, bears absolutely no resemblance to those words that spurred our great revolution (not even close), but one of the passages from his famous essay did incited the idea for this story:

“In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest; they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thousand motives will excite them thereto; the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same.”

The gist of the story is that a small group of people survive a horrible accident onboard a larger starship and find themselves together on a smaller one. They have limited food, supplies, and don’t know one another and have about a month to go before they reach Mars.

So the November project is done. What does this mean? Time for Assassin’s Creed. More Super Mario Galaxy. And next months project… well, if you read my previous post. You’ll have an idea and you’ll definitely see what I’m brewin’ at home.

homebrew style. How cool is DS homebrew?

It’s this cool!!! I drew that using a DS homebrew program called Colors. I didn’t think a DS had pressure sensitivity, but the homebrew proves me wrong. It’s time to start bringing my DS with me to drawing meats so I can at least claim that I’m drawing…on my DS!

My friend Ricko is helping me get setup and I figured I’d throw the instructions up on my blarg, mainly for my benefit, but for yours too! Here they are…

How to install devkitpro:

1. Go to Devkitpro.org and download the latest version of the software (download link is on the left hand column), devkitProUpdater-1.4.4.exe is the one I got from the site

2. Follow the instructions in the installer. It will download a bunch of stuff to your machine and then extract and install them. Don’t really need devkitPPC or devkitPSP (unless doing NGC or PSP homebrew). Don’t really need Programmer’s Notebook either (IDE)

3. Let the installer download and install everything, and then you’re done with this part of the process

Visual Studio .NET 2003 Setup

I use Visual Studio .NET 2003 at home. If you don’t…well…have fun.

1. Open up a new solution, make a new project, and create a new “Makefile Project”

2. Name it something like “MyFirstDSProj” or whatever…

3. Before you leave this dialog, go to “Location” and browse to your c:/devkitpro folder, make a new folder so you can store all of your individual DS projects in there — not necessary to do this, but recommended to keep all your homebrewin’ in the same place. NOTE: Do not put any spaces in this new directory you’re making or you’ll run into build time issues later on.

4. Click okay and go to the next dialog apart of the wizard setup. Go to application settings. Set up your settings like this:

Build CommandLine: make -r 2>&1 | sed -e ’s/(.[a-zA-Z]+):([0-9]+):/1(2):/’

Output: DSTest.nds (NOTE: it’s not EXE, NDS is the executable extension)

Clean Commands: make clean

Rebuild command line: make -r 2>&1 | sed -e ’s/(.[a-zA-Z]+):([0-9]+):/1(2):/’

-r is a redirect from make

“2>&1″ Unix thing to redirect something to stdout.

“| sed -e” - takes stdout and pipes it to stderr. -e is for expression.

What this all does is takes the output from gcc and puts it into stderr and passes it to Visual Studio so you can see your errors and be able to click on them and view the errors along with your code.

That’s a make command with a regular expression.

5. Finish up with the application wizard and you will get into the empty project solution.

6. Now you want to set up your debugger to output to a DS emulator. I’m using one called desmume-0.7.2. There’s a link to it below. IN VS 2003 goto Projects->Properties. For “Configuration Properties” goto “Debugging.” Under the Action subsection goto “Command” and redirect the ($TargetPath) to the desmume executable. I’ve put the Desmume emulator in my c:/devkitpro/emulator path (I made the emulator folder) and linked to it from there.

Change Command Arguments to “$(TargetPath)” (without the commas).

7. Close that dialog and goto Tools->Options. Under the Projects sub menu goto “VC++ Directories,” make sure “Show Directories for” drop down is set to “Executable files” and add this directory: C:\devkitPro\msys\bin. Just go and browse to that directory. This allows you to build from within Visual Studio. Why? The DS homebrew uses a unix shell to build your code and this line gives it access.

Change “Show Directories for” to “Include files” and add this line: C:\devkitPro\libnds\include

Change “Show Directories for” to “Source files” and add this line: C:\devkitPro\libnds\include

Change “Show Directories for” to “Library files” and add this line: C:\devkitPro\libnds\include

Press OK and you’re done with that setup. You should be able to build an NDS project.

Setup a DS Build

If you want to just get up and running goto your c:/devkitPro/examples/nds and you’ll find all the examples you can compile and run. The one I ran is in ../Graphics/3D/nehe/Lesson10/.

Here’s how you run it:

1. Go to the project directory where you created your Visual Studio 2003 work folder (c:/devkitpro/DSProjects for example). and copy and paste the contents of ../Graphics/3D/nehe/Lesson10/ in there.

2. Back in your VS 2003 workspace build the solution. If everything worked out right you’ll get two folders in your DSProject folder called arm7 and arm9, and you’ll have a ton more files in there. The one you want is called an .nds file. This is the executable that you will run in the emulator software or on the R4. Copy it to your R4 and enjoy your work!

Hardware

R4 — this is an NDS card that take a micro-SD card. You don’t get a MicroSD card with the R4. The R4 itself has a bunch of circuitry and software onboard the chip to bootup and run your homebrew games, mp3s, and some other stuff. I’ve seen it running a 3D nehe demo converted for use on NDS. Feel the potential (to your face).

You can get an R4 here: http://www.volumerate.com/details.vr/sku.1202~r.DX

It costs about 33 bucks and will take somewhere around 2 weeks to get to your house. I haven’t gotten mine yet, but I did order it.

Some useful NDS bookmarks:

These first 3 links are the big ones that give you tutorials for working with the NDS

http://www.dev-scene.com/NDS/Tutorials
http://www.double.co.nz/nintendo_ds/
http://www.drunkencoders.com/

These are useful engineering links to Unix shell commands and working with make files which you’ll need.

http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/Make/
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/1945/index14.htm
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Regular.html
http://www.coderjoe.net/

NDS Emulator link (good for testing on your PC, but the emulators aren’t that fully functional, my friend says he had the best results with this — but these are a temporary solution until you can get an R4):

desmume-0.7.2-win.zip

You can find it at this link: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=164579

So this is the super-quick primer on how to get started. I was installing and setting up while I was writing this down so I made sure to include all of the little nuances and such that I had to go through. If you have any issues, feel free to leave a comment and I can try and help you out or find out more.

“Work, work, work…” At least that’s what I think the Elite in Halo 1 was saying while trying to kill me.

But this Wednesday I’m going back to sunny and plastic Los Angeles to spend a couple of wholesome days smack dab in the ghetto, where I used to live while as a student at the University of Southern California. It’ll be like the good ole times except I won’t have any homework, which I wasn’t doing anyway — I swear to god, I still have some minor nightmares of being back in college and realizing I went the entire semester without going to class, taking a midterm, or doing any of the assignments. That was like that shit-ass-retarded database class I took, like I need more SQL in my life. It’s nice to be out of that rat race.

Who knows, maybe I’ll run into the General of God’s Army — I bought him some fried chicken at the Market 32 once, and I did it out of the goodness of my cold, cold heart. God bless that supermarket and the cockroaches that ran rampant under the shelves. The food was never bad, but I never once got posioned by their second hand wares and week old produce.

Super Mario Galaxy is awesome. I beat it. Here’s how lamer0z I am: that’s the first Mario game I ever beat. I had Super Mario Brothers, but I couldn’t get past Lakitu as a small child. His ability to drop spiked balls thwarted my stupid-finger joystick acumen and feeble young brain and I never did cross the threshold of level 4-1. I had Super Mario 3 (who didn’t after watching the Wizard) and Super Mario World. Played the hell out of them, but never finished either of them. I played Sunshine but the camera controls were terrible and I swore off games where the camera was total shit. I can’t stand running around and then having the camera face the backside of a blurry, low-resolution textured quad. If that’s your fear, Mario Galaxy has allievated it. The camera is 99% of the time, excellent. You can always see what you’re doing. You never have to futz around with the best camera angle or lining the camera up for a jump. You can just play, and that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to direct the game. I just want to platform. The levels are bite sized and manage to pack some mind-bending gravity defying puzzles. Excellent shit.

One of my good friends doesn’t like waggling the wiimote to do a spin attack or pointing at the screen. It makes me wonder, does Super Mario Galaxy really require the wiimote to be an excellent game? Most of the game seems to be playable with a regular Gamecube controller. Sure you can’t point at star bits, so you need a wiimote for collecting those. Waggling for spin jumps? Could they be replaced with just a “B” button press and we could all live happily ever after? Why not the waggle? I have to admit, sometimes when I was waggling like mad to spin jump and kill some enemies (and missing) I was annoyed that it wasn’t as responsive as I wanted it to be. I figured madly waggling would make Mario into the tasmanian devil but it only plays a pre-canned animation. Maybe if Nintendo changed it that the constant waggle motion would make him spin like a top the feature would be more in-line with what you’re doing with the controller. I liked point and collect for the star bits, the star pulling, and all that fun stuff. It’s really nice to be able to collect things like that.

Whoever says the Wii can’t do good looking graphics has to check this game out. Galaxy’s graphics are amazing. Everything is nicely lit, there are some shader effects at work to do specular highlighting, bump mapping, and making platforms appear metallic. Sure it’s not the Crysis Engine or Halo 3, but the color and lighting are amazing. Nintendo has a way of making a very unique look with their games and it’s such a breath of fresh air after the harsh and gritty worlds of Halo and Half-Life that I love to inhabit most of the time. I don’t know if I read the credits right, and if you beat the game, and how could you not, it’s not that difficult, check out the credits, I counted at least a dozen engineers who worked on this game. Granted those 12 folks probably had 5 years to work on the game and perfect every little bit of it engineering-wise, but come on, that’s damn amazing work.

Oh and I also enjoyed Rosalina’s storybook but then I like all sorts of fairytales. And Rosalina’s hot. There I said.

What’s the next game on my list? Assassin’s Creed.

P.S. There was a project I was working on for this month: Nanowrimo.org

I’m 27,000+ words into my 50,000. Will I finish? Will I let you read it?