Like most previous versions of Flash, CS3 does most of what you want to do in a totally different way than its predecessors. ARGH, it's frustrating. Now I'm relearning all the class stuff, which was obscure, obtuse, and difficult under AS2. It's slightly better under AS3, but it would appear that the Flash dev team never considered that someone might want a custom class to contain another custom class. What a novel concept! *sigh* I'm still trying to figure out the proper way to make that bit work.

One of my friends on the TwoKinds Forum (I suppose I will use the familiar, even though our only point of contact is that forum itself) suggested that I deserve to be the subject of a dunking game for a joke I made (I suggested that Keith and Natani are in the process of demonstrating that it is indeed possible to base a relationship on very little except a pair of lies). So I decided I would attempt to create such a thing, as I could use it to contribute to development on the Ambition Engine and familiarize myself with CS3. Well, it's doing that I suppose; though I'm not getting much development of the game done.

Labels: ambition engine, flash

Just a quick note. Went out to Kobe with a few of the guys tonight, sort of a belated graduation celebration. This is when I discovered that one of my neighbors is a cook there. Now, for those not in the know, Kobe is a Japanese steakhouse, the whole habachi, throwing things around, setting the grill on fire, dinner and a show deal. And this was the best time I've ever had there. Now, I disagree with my friends that it was freakish coincidence that my neighbor cooked for our table -- I consider it freakish coincidence that he was working there the night we went, but I think he purposely asked to work our table. Regardless, it was spectacular. He's been working there for five years, and the experience shows. And he bought us sake bombs (a shot of sake dropped into a glass of Sapporo). Awesome food and a great time. Because he bought us liquor, and we were neighbors, and he honestly was a terrific cook, I wanted to tip bigger than usual (which is already bigger than most tips, because the cook and the waitress share the tip for the table)...I'd put the numbers down before I realized that I'd just tipped 50%. Oh well, it's not like it wasn't well earned, even if it's a big tight on my finances. Yes, this is a very pointless entry, but we had such a spectacular time that I just wanted to put a shout out.

Labels: life

Whoa! It's been too long since I've posted. Tons has happened.

First, my brother got married to one of the nicest girls he could find. Seriously, it seems that God placed her on this Earth to make me feel bad for being a bastard. Congratulations to the both of them, and the best wishes for their life together. The wedding was very nice, and my brother made me a groomsman, so I was very pleased. For the record, that's what I wanted -- I'm a firm believer that you should choose a close friend to be best man, there should be no obligation to make family so. And I don't think I could have held it together as well as his best man did. Pretty much without a hitch. The reception was a little hard on me (partly because I seem to have forgotten how to dance, but mostly for the usual reasons), but one of the bride's sisters (how in the world do I refer to my sister-in-law's family?) took pity on me and danced with me a lot.

I got salary at work, which really doesn't affect how much I work very much, it just means that I get paid better and I get all the full-time benefits. It's really nice to have health insurance. I also moved, so I'd be closer to work, and now I've got a nice little two-bedroom duplex. I've even got a teensy little yard of my own for Kethra to play in. I've also got a landlord who's pretty willing to let me do just about whatever I want with the place, so I'm pretty happy.

Unfortunately, Xotz's flashbang powersupply's really caught up with him, and he rather went kaput. I'd been dealing with instability, but this week I became lucky if he'd boot and then every moment he was running was a race to get things done before he crashed. It looks like I don't have much good RAM anymore, and the RAM slots on the motherboard are all suspect. So I pulled Syd out of mothball and I stayed up to install updates on him last night (76 updates for Windows...wow). All the constant crashing took its toll on Xotz's hard drive, and Windows won't boot on him; so I'm going to try to reinstall Windows tonight, running on Syd's systems. I need those files if I'm going to stand a chance to get the new Deviant Paradigm up (even if it's months late) and work on the Ambition Engine. Hopefully that'll go, I'm rather deep in debt to want to be putting together Xotz revision4 at this point (though I've started looking). What's the opinion of my readers on running a 0+1 RAID on 500GB SATA drives? Overkill?

Ah, the Ambition Engine. That's the name I've given the Flash Universal Game Engine that I've been "hired" to write. I've got some good ideas, and a copy of Flash CS3, so I need to get started on it. I'll try to keep you all updated on my progress as much as I can. Also, I'd like to apologize to the Adobe Flash devs. I stand by my statement that Flash is probably from Hell, but most of my complaints about it have been fixed, including dynamically importing PNG files. I didn't understand you fully when you commented, but you were right; you fixed my complaint in Flash 8, and I'm really excited about using CS3.

I promise, I'm going to try to be better about posting here...But you all know how things get.

Labels: ambition engine, life, work, xotz