BlackHC’s Adventures in the Dev World

Long ago (about three weeks ago to be correct) I still had lots of free time and no university lectures yet, so I decided to look at all - I repeat: at all 1000-something - Cyanide & Happiness comic strips on www.explosm.net and make a collection of the ones that I liked the most. Of course my collection isn’t complete and I got pretty tired at the end but I still think I’ve found quite a few gems among the strips.

I’ve stored them as a list of links in a raw txt file (it can be found here, if you want take a look a it) and it wasn’t really usable the way it was. I wanted to put it on my blog though to let others view it in a comfortable way but since I didn’t have enough time I postponed it.. till yesterday. Yesterday I’ve finally found enough time to sit down and think and code something nice to let you (and myself, too) browse through my favorites.

You can find the final page here: http://www.icculus.org/~black/stuff/explosm/explosmviewer.html

How does it work?

It uses AJAX! Well actually it only uses XMLHttpRequest to query the .dat file that stores a preprocessed list of C&H links (plus the respective image links) and uses that data to let you browse my favorites dynamically but it contains the code to create the said .dat file out of my raw .txt file.

Consequently if I ever update my list I can do so simply by updating the .txt file with a few links and regenerate the .dat file with all additional information.

I’m mostly using some RegExp to parse the Explosm pages and my .txt and .dat files. If you want to try the code out yourself, mind that you need to uncomment the compileList( true ); line and use Internet Explorer to run it because FireFox doesn’t allow cross-domain access which is naturally needed if you want to parse the pages on explosm.net. The result is copied into the clipboard and can be then saved and uploaded to the webspace of choice (if you adapt the links in the script, too).

Enjoy

Cheers,
Andreas

Finally the second university term has started and I’m back in Munich working hard to get through university as fast as possible.

I’ve also moved into a new room - I’m staying at a dorm now - and it’s really pretty awesome. There are lots of exchange students (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan to name a few) and we’re all having a good time constantly, so really it’s a huge improvement, when it comes to meeting other people. On the other hands it not a typical dorm either: my room has got its own little bathroom and it’s all new because the building has been renovated in the past months - although to be honest, some parts are still being renovated, which sucks badly, because there is still a scaffolding standing outside and I can’t really look outside.

But pictures can convey a lot more than words, so here are some low-res photos that I have taken with the web-cam that is built into my notebook.

I guess you don’t know what a games company looks like. And even if you think you do, let me add some adjectives that will change everything: an great games company. a cool games company. a SplashDamage-esque game company.
You get the idea.

We, that is the #q3mods channel, had a meeting recently at Arnout’s, Gordon’s and David’s place on the 8th and 9th of March ‘08 - it’s like Friends, the tv series, only they have got a house, a bigger TV, lots of game and Guitar Hero 3 \o/ They were so kind to let me stay in the dungeon - the basement - for a week and I spent all of my free time playing Guitar Hero or watching them work at SplashDamage’s office, which was grand. I can’t really say a lot more, otherwise I’d get torn to pieces by some attorneys for violating the NDA I’ve signed but let me repeat: It was awesome. I took quite a few pictures of the office though (and the people in it) and have even uploaded them to flickr, so here we go. Enjoy.

The meeting itself was also awesome. We all at the their place, played games (Guitar Hero!! and lots of Wii games), watched movies, ordered pizza and Chinese and even ate it all up, too, and had a splendid time.

Cheers,
Andreas

I’ve linked to a few pictures directly, in case you’re too lazy to follow the other link and only want to see the office ASAP.

Continue reading SplashDamage Photos on Flickr…

I think I’ve been talking about Edu2 a lot already and I don’t really feel like giving a huge overview again - probably I will end up doing so nonetheless. Edu2 is finished, over, done. I’m not going to touch it again - ever! That said, I think there are a few nice things and lots of bad things to say and tell about it. I usually paint bleak pictures and I won’t stop here, because I try to be honest with the negative side of things.

I guess this is going to be a bigger postmortem because there are many different topics that I should mention to give the reader a fair impression.

To begin with, a few links first for those interested in Edu1 and Edu2:

• http://www.edu-shooter.de/ Official Edu1 Page - only German though
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/edu2 Our SourceForge Project - you can even download an almost final build

Interesting fact: google for Edu2 and you’ll find a project that is almost about the same things that we worked on - except it’s 2D only.

Continue reading Edu2 Postmortem…