Frustration Unleashed

I'll preface this post by saying this - I had to hard boot my computer, and I'm thinking that a lot of the "issues" stemmed from that.


Right then, yesterday sucked, both for working and for play. As I had in the previous post, it turns out that the restart didn't matter after all, the script was broken. It's supposed to be simple really, draw stuff and save it. I've done both before, and compared to say, the new AI, the process isn't hard. The one piece, the only piece that is different this time, is drawing to an image buffer instead of the screen buffer.

Ah, I'm using new terms. I'll explain. When a computer draws graphics, it draws them one at a time. So it draws the background, then each thing on the foreground, then GUI graphics (for example). That looks nice, but as far as doing work, it sucks. So, what a computer does is use something called a "Screen Buffer." It draws everything to an imaginary screen, then when it's done, it shows that screen and starts drawing the next.

An Image Buffer is almost the same thing, except instead of drawing everything to a screen to be shown, it draws it to a blank image. This image can then be displayed or saved. It's how my Screen Capture function works. I draw everything to an Image Buffer and then save the image as the Level number. That works.

Yet, when I tell it to go fetch the little pictures of the levels and stitch them together, it falls down and gives me crap. By "Crap" I mean pixel junk. Nonsense. It's what white noise would look like if you drew it, while on acid. It seems that the picture has gone to another place, a new dimension between space and time, like it took a ride on the Event Horizon.

For the life of me I do not know why. The sorcery involved with the Image Buffer seems just outside of my comprehension and knowing it, like reading the Necronomicon, will drive a man mad. When I went ahead and had it draw the script as a regular Screen Buffer, it worked. It bloody worked. Same thing with the Image Buffer and well, see above.

At the very least, each time I ran the damn thing it took 6 minutes. Usually, it would be a lot faster, but courtesy of a hard boot, everything took longer yesterday. This gave me some time to find that I enjoy STFU a little less than I thought I did. As I was fighting a giant rock monster looking thing, I kept getting killed, hard. I'm not bad at these games, but that damn boss-ish enemy kept putting the hurt on me. Again, not so bad, except I kept having to play through a section of game each time I went to go fight the stupid thing.
So, here's how development went yesterday: Change code, compile code, let process run, restart STFU section, finish half of a puzzle, fight a boss, die and not know why, find that my code still isn't working, repeat. Eventually, I gave up on the Image Buffer problem and just played XBOX instead.
After finally finishing the level I was stuck on I got the privilege of moving on, and here's the part I don't like so much. The only way to fight and not suck is to use the Force tossing move. You can't rush in and swing a lightsaber and ruin some chumps because they will kill you. A Sith Lord can apparently be taken out by some tribal aliens. WTF? In all fairness, they did attack from off screen and the block button is is more of a suggestion. What that you say? My reflexes suck? Don't blame the button? Ah, but the block button works in Ninja Gaiden Black, every time. STFU, not so much.
So, yeah. Get the demo. It has all the good parts of the game in it and is free. Me, I'm going back to playing Fallout and getting back to the AI.

- Just realized that I like peppering the blog with links. It makes it look all official and whatnot.