I have been doing a lot of development on Furasta recently and the project is nearing an alpha release – I hope to have it out next week at some stage.

Below I have attached a screenshot of the new admin interface.

A sneak preview of what is to come in Furasta.Org 1.0

The release won’t be feature packed, but the plugin architecture should be working. Note that the SVN has not been updated in ages, but I should get around to it next week as well.

I have been flat out recently with school and work and this ICSP thing. Well anyway I have had no time to do any furasta or any independent spur of the moment programing! It’s driving me crazy, but hey, it’s all over in just over 6 months….

Capture the Flag Part 3

This time I have deviated from the rules a wee bit. The red player is controlled by the CPU, while the user controls the blue player. Once again the objective is to capture the red flag and return it to your blue base. If you bump into a player who has a flag then flag gets returned to it’s base.

The players, and flags have three random starting positions each. I have re-written this example from scratch, not using any of the code from part one or two. I am happy with the code this time, and have done my best to make it effective.

The red player has two modes, aggressive and defensive. When the game starts the red player attempts to capture the flag and return it to it’s red base automatically. If at any point the blue player acquires his flag the red player will go into defensive mode and attempt to recover his flag.

To throw a spanner in the works I have added a BOOST and an obstacle. The boost can gradually makes the player who absorbs it smaller to increase evasive skills. It also makes the player a lot faster. The obstacle has two modes. If you bump into it the wrong way, you will simply bump off it. If you follow the arrows through the obstacle with your player then you will receive a big speed bonus. Both these items will prove vital in winning against the red player, who moves faster than the blue one.

Controls

Up Key – Move Up
Down Key – Move Down
Left Key – Move Left
Right Key – Move Right

Learn more about this project

I started a course in UCD last week called “Introduction to Computer Science and Programing”, or ICSP. It’s gonna be going on for three months and then I will have a big exam which I will probably fail!

The whole course centers around the use of Java, I’m not sure yet if we are going to be using anything else. We haven’t actually even started with Java yet, but we are using this program called Scratch to program our Java for us! I wouldn’t say that it is the Dream-weaver of Java, far from it. In fact I think that it is a great method of getting into Java. It has a set of preconfigured code which you can arrange into blocks, which then run – quite similar to the source of Java actually except simplified. It also eliminates the need for compiling.

Last week I went to my first “lecture” which was good enough, but I learned something valuable that day; computer hardware is not the road that I want to go down! I didn’t really enjoy the hardware aspect of the day but when it came to the Scratch lessons I was flying! For our first assignment we had to write a game in Scratch, which is essentially it’s own unique programing language. The game is called “Capture the Flag”. I was actually flat out all week and didn’t get a chance to start work on it until today, which is coincidentally the deadline for it’s completion! I spent about three hours making the game, here’s the manual and the game:

Capture The Flag

Overview
Capture the flag is a simple two player game which involves stealing the flag from the opposite colours corner.

Controls
Blue Player
Up Arrow Key = Move Up
Down Arrow Key = Move Down
Left Arrow Key = Move Left
Right Arrow Key = Move Right

Red Player
W Key = Move Up
S Key = Move Down
A Key = Move Left
D Key = Move Right

Rules
To gain a point a player must capture the opposite colour flag and return it to their base (the starting point).

If a player is in possession of a flag and his opponent touches him the flag is returned to it’s base and the player to his base.

To win a player must gain three points.

Faults
The one fault with the game is that, at least on my computer, when one player is using the keyboard to move the other player cannot move simultaneously. Although this is a fault it does also make the game a bit more interesting because the players have to fight even to move!

Learn more about this project

Would you believe it? It’s the first anniversary of my Blog! I have officially been ranting about shite for a whole year!

Anyway to celebrate the birthday of my Blog I decided to do it up a wee bit. I added a nice wee sidebar to my theme, which I am actually thinking of releasing at some stage in the near future. Also I added a new download manager to http://files.macaoidh.name . It is very useful; it keeps track of how many people are downloading what. Hopefully in the future it will give me an idea of what people that view my blog like and don’t like. I will actually have to go over all my previous posts and make sure that the download links are correct considering there was a big change in the link format.

The only real reason I wrote the thing is because someone has commissioned me to do something similar, starting next week. But the commissioned work will be a bit more complete and stuff. So feel free to try and hack my system. I don’t want to find faults when I’m finished writing it and then have to go back… The manager also serves as a very useful tool for me. I have included an admin area in which I can log in, upload files and choose to store them, make them available for download or even to download + password protect them! This feature will no doubt come in handy, I like to think of it as my personal, non-user-information-gathering, version of Google Docs!

What else has been happening recently… ooh I am in the process of making/releasing an album with The Dominican Affair. It is called Stealing the Ceiling. We have our last mixing session this weekend and hope to have it available on piratebay towards the end of October! It will also be available to purchase or download at http://www.holygrailrecords.com

Just thought I’d mention that 6th year is terribly shit. I can manage to squeze about 2 hours of programing in thrice a week. Also I am doing an Introduction to Computer Science Programing course in UCD over the next few months just to prepare me for college and to make sure that I actually want to study Computer Science! It will be good craic to learn Java at that course; I plan to make a facebook application/game when I have learned Java and base it in Monaghan.

Oghgbjkc damn! I just realised that I still haven’t renewed my macaoidh.name subscription! Better get to it… three days left…..