Whose Lime is it Anyway?

Today was our Beta milestone turn-in. It went okay. We all had a few changes to make (that we didn't think would take long), but it took five hours to get it all done. I guess most of it was integrating and making quick fixes. Brown added a player shadow; now it's easier to land jumps. However, he managed to overwrite his code with the source control's, so he had to rewrite it. Then he had to talk to our asset guys about the animations they've given us.

I guess the joints of the models were weighted, allowing some of the joints to control more of the vertices. Brown's animation exporter apparently didn't handle getting these weights. But I don't know what else was wrong with it; He was having a tough time figuring it out by himself. I guess the solution is to rebind the model in Maya 6.5 instead of Maya 7.0. The animators use 7.0, we use 6.5. So ... I think the problem is solved, but Brown is still a bit worried about it.

Since we aren't allowed to have placeholder assets in for Beta, we just neglect to have those entities altogether. There is no frog model for the character, so now that form is locked. Slash, the scissor boss, also isn't modelled, so he's hiding outside the classroom. We are still using some placeholders, but we can get away with calling them final assets. I'm fine with it.

The menus look pretty awesome now. They use a chalk font on a chalkboard background. The text on the background (like the menu title) were "hand-made" by me. I had to piece together some of the chalk font letters to create the words. And this is so that I didn't have to write code and verify that each word was placed right. Doing it all in Photoshop was much easier, since the changes were immediately apparent. But the 512x512 backgrounds are stretched to 1024x768 in the game, so they turn out a little blurry.

We had a little problem with our PowerPoint presentation; apparently the test machine doesn't have the font we used. I'm pretty sure it worked last time, but they may have wiped the machine's harddrive. So I had to change the font on all the slides. It didn't take to long, but I hadn't been expecting it. Oh well.

I don't think we're ready for the presentation on Thursday, but we'll be practicing tomorrow. I totally forgot everything I said for Alpha, so I get to make it all up again. It shouldn't be too bad, but I don't like talking about my scheduling.

***
Ants ants ants. We have ants. They started to appear while I was at GenCon. I first saw them feasting on a roach near the garbage can. *shudder* I hate insects. After the roach was devoured, I didn't see them until the next day.

They managed to find their way into the Pop-Tarts. When Del opened his pouch, they were all over it. He was quite surprised/appalled. They were in the pantry around the Pop-Tart box too. We through out that entire box; they didn't seem to get into the others.

Some ants took up residence underneath the garbage can. I wasn't surprised to find them scaling the side of the can to get to the contents inside. So I took out the garbage and left the can on the porch for a while. Then I took some air freshner and annihilated the ones that were hiding under the can. It made the kitchen smell too flowery.

That was last week, right after GenCon. I hadn't seen them again until today. They've found the sink. I don't think they were on the dishes in the sink, but rather the little food bits in the drain. All I know is that the ants have formed a little trail across the counter leading to/from the sink. I think the other end goes underneath the counter, but I'm not sure. I kinda killed off the first trail before a ton more came rushing out of the sink. Some of the scent is still there, as they are still in trail formation, but the leaders have no idea where they're going. They're kinda just trying to get out of the sink. *sigh* I hate ants. And I hate Del leaving his dirty dishes in the sink.

***
So I never want to have a roommate again. This probably includes significant other as well. I am very picky about certain living conditions: no dishes in the sink, toilet lid closed, lights off, etc. And it drives me insane when these conditions aren't met. And since Del, Red, and Brown aren't on the lease, I feel I deserve their respect about these conditions. However, they *do* pay rent, so I can't just throw them out or anything. Well ... I have no problem with throwing Del out, but Red and Brown are on my Final Project team. If I throw them out, our team is going to disband and we're aren't going to do so well. But I think I can hold onto my sanity for one more month.

But in the future *shakes fist* NO SASS! I prefer tyranny over anarchy (when it comes to my apartment).

***
And the good news: I made it past stage 1 of Cryptic Studio's application process. I had to make to programs in a limited amount of time. The first problem was harder than it looked. I spent an hour making a function that would solve "10+1*3", because those quotations make it a string, not a number or operation. So I had to parse the string for numbers and operations. I had to preserve order of operations, so that didn't help anything. After that, it wasn't too bad. It was just a little weird and inefficient how I finished it. But, not my problem. If I had more time, I would have fixed the efficiency. The second question was as hard as it looked. I had to chain 2x2 tiles together so that the two numbers on any given side of a tile would match up to two units in the chain. I didn't solve it in the time given, but I came close. I made the tile's side line up with any previous tile's side. The difference being that some tiles are supposed to connect to the sides of two tiles. I could have kept working on it, but I had given up on actually passing. See, they said that anything incomplete after five hours would automatically disqualify me. And I turned mine in just after five hours. So ... I don't know how I passed. Maybe they didn't actually compile the programs, they just looked at the code. Fine by me.

So stage 2 is a phone interview. I have that scheduled for Friday. I'm pretty nervous about it, since they may ask me about *why* I did certain things in my programs. For which my answer is, "I didn't have enough time to think about it?" (Yes, I'd answer in the form of a question.) And if they ask me, "Where do you see yourself in five years?", I don't know what to say. Hopefully I'd still be employed at Cryptic, doing something better than entry-level programming. But I'm not sure I want to say, "Working as a team lead". Because they'd probably follow up with, "What qualifies you as team lead material?" And I don't know what that answer is. I'm very charismatic? No one can win an argument against my "logic"? I have people skills? *shrug* I don't know. Maybe I'd be safer with "general programmer". That way I don't corner myself into physics only or graphics only programming. But maybe they want someone with a specialty. I'd *prefer* R&D, but I don't think Cryptic does that. R&D would be so freakin sweet. I kinda want to go to MIT because they do that sort of thing. But I think one college loan is enough for now.

I'm crossing my fingers on this one. I guess I'll write up some questions they may ask and my answers to them. That way I'll be prepared! Hurray for me!

***
Just to add more pictures, here are the studio logo and team logo. I pieced the team logo together. That's Full Sail's logo's airplane and some random cowboy. The cowboy may be from Microsoft Word, but I'm not sure. And then I had to place those letters too. The studio logo was made by one of Exyhodu's asset people. Don't ask me why the laptop's shadow forms an artist's palette. I thought it was Pac-Man's decrepit ghost.