Cheater

Wow, its been over a month since I updated this thing! Doesn't seem that long, but then thats probably because I have a couple tutorials simmering away: one being 'Animations part 2' which has a few things to add (but a lot more to test first) and the other being a 'how to' thing on implementing brawling, which I started writing because I thought I had it cracked then stopped when I realised I was kidding myself. Not that brawling is that hard, but I wanted to take it to the next step - duelling - and since the brawl subroutine thingy interprets the use of weapons in a brawl as cheating and starts a free-for-all, it got real ugly. I could keep it one-on-one by booting the other NPCs from the fight every round, but damn that looked like a cheap hack. Finally I side-stepped the issue by just making the dueller a different faction to everyone else, but that introduced a whole other host of problems since he is the leader of a pack of NPCs: leave him a different faction and start a general fight, and they of course go for him instead of the party (sigh). I finally got it going with many workarounds, and it ain't that ugly (works real nice actually) but I just know something is going to come back and bite me in the ass, like if one dueller takes the other out with an act of exertion and they both collapse a la Rocky II. More testing needed.

One things is for sure: when the PC dueller LOSES, its a sight to behold. And damn it is going to cause some feedback. "Hey when I agreed to a fight to the death, I didn't mean THIS!"

Anyways, while folks await my next tutorial, I am gonna take a leaf out of Yvy's "use cut-n-pastes" book a little something I lifted long long ago from SomethingAwful.com. Don't forget to drop by their site and give 'em their dues.

The subject of the following list is, "things that are worse than what you are suffering right now". I am suffering a lack of a blog - here is a bunch of stuff that is worse.

Racketeering

Unions

Disappointed kittens

A duck with no friends, alone in a pond of infinite potential

A baby panda who skinned his knee and daddy is too busy to kiss it

An Eskimo

A little kid with polio writing a letter to God but then running out of stamps

An octopus using its eight tentacles and 1,600 suction cups to type several lengthy suicide letters at once and its own ink to print them

A rake that doesn't know it's a rake and tries to get a job

An island with two palm trees but no coconuts

A porcupine getting married to a nectarine

A domino coming short of knocking down another domino

A mommy continent getting separated from a baby continent over a million years due to shifting of tectonic plates

A census taker who doesn't even know his own family

A lighthouse keeper who realizes that he is trapped in a Thomas Kinkade painting and quits his job to build the hillside cottage of his dreams.

A tramp who gets rich and buys a lycra bindle and a ten-million-dollar bottle of whiskey

A bunch of kids stealing a condor

A beaver dam made entirely out of sacred Indian totem poles

A continental divide that tears a hammock in two

A rope trick that is too realistic and scares a man into sobriety

A falconer with a fancy for stealing wigs

A man who becomes an angel the day after bells are outlawed

A time traveler who can't stand to be wrong, constantly time traveling to fix his own dumb mistakes

The man who would be king stuck in a long line at Arby's

A trampoline in zero-gravity

The biggest jumbo screen ever for the man with binocular eyes

A manatee driven mad by baseless guilt and shame

A revolving door tired of being the center of the universe

A monkey too old to bust open a walnut

A walnut living in a glass shell

A Tone Loc t-shirt in a thrift store with nobody around to appreciate it

A blindfolded mailbox being executed for refusing to talk (mailboxes cannot talk)

A hairdresser giving the best haircut she'll ever give in her life to a man who will be decapitated the next day

The most unique traffic cone in the world lost in a sea of identical traffic cones lining the edge of a road.

A man misses the bus and never sees his son again

The bus that hits that man's son, the future President of Sealand

A dozen turtles crawl across the road only to find out the promised land is all dried up due to a clogged storm drain

A man who falls asleep thinking about true love and has a dream about being eaten by a bear

The man who dreamed about being mauled by a bear once shot that very same bear's true love while robbing a convenience store

A beekeeper who lost his legs to war trains a hive of bees to act as new legs, learns to run again, enters the Olympics, and gets stung by a wasp an dies

An abused child who grows up until he's finally big enough to take on his old man, and then his old man drops dead of a stroke

A turtle too afraid to come out of its own shell due to acute agoraphobia trigged by post-traumatic stress disorder

A kangaroo who lives in a house with really low ceilings

A boy who wakes up one day and realizes for the first time that he no longer "gotta have his Pops."

A bunny rabbit so tired of poor TV reception that he uses his poor wife's head to reduce static

A clown who cries so much that thirsty birds peck at his eyes for moisture and laughs

A bulleted list update

O yeah, and by the way, Yvy's PREGNANT!!! 8^D I'm gonna be a dad!