| Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 |
| 3:54 pm |
waves ho!
the game now has ultra creepy liquidy waves...very trippy...I'm still working on getting it to look like an ocean, which is more complicated, but is mainly just a graphics problem, not a programming one. I'm gonna have to make some wave foam sprites...I also may try adding a turbulence factor to the wave model, which I could use to simulate foam...but why bother when you can just make it in photoshop....I'm gonna have to go down to Alki and stare at some waves for a while and take notes... but I must be careful when I'm down there: Current Mood:  sick |
| Thursday, June 14th, 2007 |
| 1:30 pm |
Recockulous
Dear Pitt Jason, The Heritage Registry of Who’s Who™ is recognizing you for possible inclusion in the upcoming 2007-08 edition. Your invitation is a result of the success your organization has attained. Recognition of this kind is shared by thousands of Executive Men and Women throughout the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smartt ags" />United States and Canada. The Heritage Registry of Who’s Who™ acknowledges individuals for their achievements in their specific profession. The Heritage Registry of Who’s Who™ will be distinguished by being registered at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Since the inception of The Heritage Registry of Who’s Who™ there have never been any fees associated with an individual’s appearance. I emphasize, do not confuse The Heritage Registry of Who’s Who™ with imitating publications that may charge fees to be included. Please go to http://theheritageregistryofwhoswho.com and click on the invitation button. To be removed please click on the link below and then press send. Thank You. Thank You, Chris Jespersen 1351 Meadowbrook Rd. Merrick, NY 11566 Current Mood:  annoyed |
| Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 |
| 5:54 pm |
back on track again
Well as you know Ganja Farmer 2 is not out yet... I know you, my devoted fans, are disappointed in this, but like all great works of art, these things take time. And obviously it's taken a lot of time, not because I have been lazy, but have been very busy working on other things...mainly music and school, and I have not been very motivated to work on the game, primarily because I really didn't like my water animation system, which is really one of the most important features of the game...since after all, it's about an island full of rasta soldiers...and you need water to have an island and if your water sucks, how good can your island really be? Anyway. I started getting the urge to fire up the compiler a few weeks ago and started looking into the water thing. One of the main things I've learned the past year in grad school is that the old scientist's adage "A day in the library can save you a month in the lab" is really very very true...so I decided to apply that rational to my GF2 water problem and lo and behold I found this on the gamedev web site: So anyway not only does this help my water problem, it also proves that I've learned something after 6 years of grad school....yippee! So the effect is pretty straight forward. I've coded all the easy parts and now I'm working on getting it into the game engine...I'll post some screen shots when it looks pretty... Also I've been thinking of turning Jesus Christ Super Commando into a user generated project...more to follow Current Mood: accomplished |
| Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 |
| 5:32 pm |
Update Mon!
Well...it's been a long time since I've updated the blog. But work on the game has been proceeding. I completely rewrote the sprite engine. I have a new SDL sprite library that I can work with to finish the game. I'd previously been using other peoples libraries which left a lot to be desired. I may also write a wrapper library to port over all my old game code so I can port the original ganja farmer to SDL (and therefore Mac and Linux...which people have been bugging me about). I've mainly been working on overhauling the graphics of the game. I upgraded to Truespace 5 and bought a bunch of plugins including pyrocluster, to make bad ass explosions, ganja smoke, and of course the Rasta Tornado. Much of my time lately has been spent animating water. Fucking animating water movement is a complete pain in the ass! I finally have a loopable perlin cell noise shader working to give me animated water...with about 10 second loops that are seamless. This was hellishly difficult but the result looks pretty fucking cool. I'll try to post an avi of the water. Next up is rerendering the ganja plants, then the explosions, then the walls. I'm also going to start working on an intro movie :). The networking code is nearly done, the only thing left to write is the game launching negotiations between the lobby server and the game host...also I need to debug the in game chat, which isn't working for some reason. more updates soon.... |
| Monday, February 7th, 2005 |
| 8:24 pm |
Liquid Silver Distortion in Bryce
Well I've been working a lot on the background level maps. I'm making them in Bryce and rendering the backgrounds with water effects. Since the game is false 3D this saves me from having to make a cheesey wave sprite and gives the backgrounds a really cool look. The problem has been with getting the water to look right from the orthagonal view point of the game. Bryce is really optimized for looking at things from a side on view and the nearly top down view (60 degree) of GF2 make stuff look kinda weird, but after a lot of playing around I've been able to make some maps that look pretty good...I'll post some screen shots soon. The test machine/game server has been running smoothly for over a month now (knock on wood) and my new cable modem had made it really stable. I still need to rewrite the sprite engine to deal with z-ordering and support shadows. My Truespace sprites are rendering quite well...although I'm having a hard time making convincing trees. I've been trying to make palm trees which really end up looking like shit when they are superimposed over the background...the problem in the damn fronds...any way I'm really starting to hate trees...even with bryce's tree lab it still seems imposible to get ones that look ok. I finished my grant and a paper at work but I still have 3 presentations to give in the next 2 weeks so I'm gonna be super busy. I have the music done for another song for the soundtrack and just need to record the lyrics...I'll post the song when it's finished. So I got midway arcade classics which includes Rampart...that game was so so optimized for quarter munching...it's ridiculous...GF2 will be WAY more fun...I can't wait to finish it so I can play it. Honestly what's motivating me the most is the prospect of playing the game...it's going to be so damn fun :) |
| Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 |
| 11:14 pm |
still going
well...it looks like the computer is still stable....it's been on for over 36 hours now without crashing...but I convinced if I pick the hard drive up off the carpet and screw it into the machine it will stop working.. I have a damn grant proposal to do this weekend. Started redoing some of the game graphics to fix a POV problem and address a shadowing issue...I think I'm going to have to rewrite the sprite engine to handle Z ordering...I hadn't thought it would be a big deal, but stuff is "tall" enough that it will look funny if I don't do it....oh well...and can add shadow support at the same time. Current Mood:  anxiousCurrent Music: Styrofoam |
| Tuesday, January 4th, 2005 |
| 10:32 am |
Computer has been stable for about 12 hours now
trying not to jinx it but it seems the hard drive switch has fixed the problem...also I didn't reformat repartition the drive and left the existing FAT32 on it....one of the files that was still on the hard drive was this  Current Mood: anxious |
| Monday, January 3rd, 2005 |
| 10:12 am |
still fucked
fucking hard drive is fucked now....windows 2k can't find the boot sector....fucking retarded...... Current Mood: annoyed |
| Sunday, January 2nd, 2005 |
| 1:49 pm |
WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO!!!!
in the immortal words of AJ Razor "We're back on traaaaaack!" Got the new machine working...turns out I had three problems: Unstable power supply *fixed by upgrading to 620W power supply 3.3V old agp card *fried the old Ebay board....got a new one with built in VGA scratched Windows 2000 disk *wiped off the disk and burned a copy of it and then used the copy So it only took 2 fucking months to deal with this bullshit....fucking unbelievable...but I've got a decent server machine now....Athalon XP 2200, 20GB drive, 256MB Ram, all for only about 200 bucks....not bad...I just hope it holds together now...jesus Shout out to my new computer store boyz at Computer Sonics...guys sold me the power supply even though they were closed...they are the shiznit....and a shout out to the sales guy at Fry's that told me about Computer Sonics....werd. Then I fired up the game server software and then I started my client and guess what...it didn't work. Turns out no-ip.com is down...I don't know if they went tits up or what...but I joined dyndns.org...and now we're in business. Connected to the server...did some chatting with myself...exciting. Current Mood:  ecstatic |
| Friday, December 31st, 2004 |
| 3:03 am |
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| Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 |
| 8:35 am |
MotherBoard Nightmare
Well I seriously suggest not buying surplus motherboards on EBay...jesus....trying to figure out if a motherboard is defective or if you've just screwed something up is fucking lame. Bought a new power supply for the MB because I could tell it wasn't getting enough power, but when I installed new power supply the board still wouldn't work.....I give up...somebody send me a new socket A motherboard...please...god damn it.... So an update on Josh Rafferty the long lost author of the music to the first Ganja Farmer...I haven't seen/heard from him in almost 4 years....It turns out he's living in a van...no not down by the river but in the woods....fucked up eh? I was hoping he could do the music for GF2 but finding his van in the woods will probably be a daunting task and convincing him to stop living off the land and record reggae tracks probably won't happen. This totally sucks. Josh is a musical genius and in all fairness should be a rock star...not a hobo. Thanksgiving was good....ate way too fucking much. Found some interesting stuff on the beach.... Game development is completely halted because of this BS...I was making serious headway with the networking code until this fucking roadblock....but it's pretty damn near impossible to write a networked game with one computer...so I guess maybe I'll just work on graphics or something until I get some extra cash to buy a new MB/processor/ram. Current Mood: pissed off |
| Sunday, November 14th, 2004 |
| 3:03 pm |
Ministry Kicks fucking ass
So I went to go see Ministry last night at the Fenix. Fucking hardest, tightest shit I've ever seen live. The drummer was some kind of fucking cyborg...so fucking tight....really unreal. Anyway Donovan got us guested in...very cool. Saw Tatum Brown and Tom Phillips last night, two people I knew from high school in Ferndale. They were friends of Tim who just moved back into town from Denver. Found out Ramsey is married and has a kid...he's living in Ferndale, I'm gonna try to find his ass this christmas. Anyway I went to Re-PC to try and find a mother board to replace my fried one....couldn't find one that was acceptable...going to look on ebay...hopefully can find one cheap. -jason Current Mood:  apatheticCurrent Music: Star Wars Battlefront |
| Sunday, November 7th, 2004 |
| 11:35 pm |
game stalled...
So development has stalled due to a hardware failure on my test machine. Also my shitty cable connection has final become too much to deal with.... does this look like a normal ping to my gateway? I think not.... Ping statistics for 67.170.100.1: Packets: Sent = 200, Received = 178, Lost = 22 (11% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 172ms, Average = 39ms Current Mood: pissed offCurrent Music: space ghost |
| Wednesday, October 27th, 2004 |
| 10:43 am |
Game just got a lot harder
Well the game is starting to feel more like a game and less like a graphics demo...you can actually shoot missle and destroy walls now...and guess what...it's hard as hell. This game is a total mind fuck...way more strategery (sic) than the original ganja farmer...I hope the pot-heads can handle it. |
| Tuesday, October 26th, 2004 |
| 10:03 am |
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| 9:51 am |
a river runs through it
Well I bought Bryce5 and have been trying to do some better landscapes for the game...They're still pretty much in the suck phase of my bryce learning curve...but should hopefully get better soon. New screen shot
Starting to work on 2 player mode so I can get all the network shit done. Finished the cronic cannon.
Got another dialog box done and some rasta voice overs...Had a busy week at work last week and wasn't able to get much done on the game. Lots of trial and error in bryce
I actually tried building the newest version of the game on my Mac...got 1008 compiler errors....anyway I think I'll just probably wait to get the whole fucking thing done and then port it over...otherwise it'll be a nightmare...I've just been worried about performance issues on the mac....I'd like the game to be able to run on my g4 400 powerbook....we'll see
oh here's a goat I made in Truespace
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| Monday, October 11th, 2004 |
| 1:12 am |
Hot Network Action
Well I've got the network gaming system working...got wall building and rocket launching working between two machines over my lan. It's pretty sweet! Launching rockets from across the room :) Talked to Jess today...poor fucker turned 30...i only got a few months left myself...fuck Anyway I'm still trying to get something more playable....should have something soon now that i got the basic network communication worked out...main task now is to couple the ganjafarmer2 server with the in game host system to get the games to launch from the chat room....shouldn't be too hard...I don't know...we'll see. Those of you waiting to get the beta...you can start by opening up ports 4200, and 4220 on your fire wall :) Also the requirements of the game are going to be higher than i thought...my second test machine is a thunderbird 800 with an 8MB video card and the game is pretty slow on it, for this type of game it isn't that big of a deal, but I was surprised...I probably just need to optimize the grid drawing algorithm. Current Mood: lazyCurrent Music: carlito's way |
| Friday, October 8th, 2004 |
| 2:58 am |
Jah Bless Dem walls
Well I got the wall system working...to toggle between the build mode and play mode, got the ditch and the white picket fence done, 3 more wall types to go...
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: X prize documentary
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| Tuesday, October 5th, 2004 |
| 10:24 am |
Heavy Explosions Mon
Well I got the explosions going and the rockets rotating. I basically have enough elements now to get a playable version going, so I'm going to start building the game play logic and get a two player playable demo ready. Latest screen shot
Current Mood: anxiousCurrent Music: silence |
| Sunday, September 26th, 2004 |
| 2:56 pm |
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