AoD + VBall

Really looking forward to donning my Journey cosplay again this weekend for AOD!  Should be a fun time; I'm looking forward to seeing AiviSura perform (omg!), getting together with the TGM folks for lots of tetris, and hanging out with my artist/partner-in-crime as she hosts her table at artist's alley, etc.

I don't actually have great photos of my costume at the moment (something that should be fixed!) but here's one from before fanime:

I love love love it!  Was really happy with how it turned out.  This year I also hope to add another "level" of embroidery to the bottom of the cloak, so that it'll look like a "second run" red cloak:

Thankfully this one shouldn't be too bad -- it'll just involve three lines of bias tape all around, and then cutting out and ironing on the little wiggly shapes using more heatnbond (I should probably have enough extra?  But if not I'll have to go buy some more).  Also, bias tape.  So much bias tape.  I'll probably have to go and raid Joann again to get more, hahaha.  So much bias tape...

I'll be wearing it to VBall this year too, with a petticoat underneath.  I'm really looking forward to it!

All these years and I still haven't learned how to say no.  Feh.

Empathy isn't something that you can practice by yourself.

It would probably be better if I could learn to be less critical of others, and less critical of myself :)

Small steps of progress are being made in my relationship with you-know-who (no, not =that= you-know-who).  Today we can rest and know that we tried, and we did the right thing.

So sleepy today...not sure if it was because of the early waking, or because of allergies.  Allergies!  I've been relatively safe for a while but looks like I'm getting hit again.  Beh.

Hang in there, everybody having hard times.



Progress on Zenith Fighter, and actually a bunch of my projects, has been rather slow and/or nonexistent as of late.  Argh...I need to try and do a better job of getting home and doing things that I really want to be doing.  The eternal struggle...

Anyways, for Zenith Fighter I spent a bunch of cycles seeing whether I could do anything about the fact that HaxePunk and associated frameworks have yet to implement per-sprite shader support (just due to the way that the OpenFL/Lime draw pipeline works right now).  I actually went down the proverbial rabbit hole and made an investigation into switching the render mode into Blit/Buffer mode (so, software rendering instead of hardware) and manipulating the pixels of the buffers manually using inlined functions, and it actually worked great......for simple test shaders that for example, set the blue component to 255.  Unfortunately, as you might figure, doing any sort of more complicated operation on every pixel manually (such as hue shifting, etc) ended up killing performance and so I had to scrap that idea completely.

Not all was lost, though!  Even though having realtime shaders is still out of reach (until the framework gets to its next major revision, at least), I realized that it's still fine if I just apply a shader once at image load time, for a one-time shader effect that doesn't need to be updated.  Which is perfect, since I need to do either palette swapping or a hue shift in order to generate the different colors for each player (in case they choose the same character).  So now instead of generating 4 different spritesheets (each with different colors), I can just use one and recolor it at runtime when I load the spritesheet.  Awesome.  Still haven't decided whether I need hitflashes in the game (e.g. turning an entire enemy white when they are hit) or any colorize effects -- I could achieve that by turning the rendering mode to buffer/blit mode, which would give me worse performance but enable me to use the Colorize tint mode (instead of just multiplicative tint).  For now I'm just sticking with hardware rendering.  I guess if all else fails I could do some sort of elaborate workaround where I have a duplicate spritemap that I prepare at load-time with a shader effect that just makes it all white.  *shrug*  Anyways, I don't even know if I want that feature, so it's not worth worrying about.

Next thing I want to work on besides actually using the hue shifting that I implemented is to have some sort of animation for the enemy spawns...some sort of teleport effect or something, and have the enemies fade in instead of just popping into existence.  Then I can probably start thinking about implementing upgrades...



Have a bunch of music stuff I should get to soon.  Wish me luck...

There's nothing like waking up crying at 7:30 in the morning to make you remember what is important in life

I dunno
what I'm doing, really

I've been using https://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/track/ring-memoir-1 as my alarm tone recently.  It's been great!

Lots of things happening...can't really write about much of it though.  I am doing ok!  Want to become a better person...let's try our best!

Sand Castles

Why do we build these castles in the sand
when they won't last?

When the tides of change come in and undo all of that work, and all of those things are washed away, remaining only as memories in our minds...

Maybe it's because
it's fun?

Maybe it's OK
as long as we don't pretend that they'll last forever.

One of these days, the tide will come in for the umpteenth time
and my castle will still be there

But until then
Maybe it's OK

I still can't believe that I was finally able to reach you again

Kiki

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest music

Hot damn.  I should be relistening to some more SNES/NES osts more often.  Despite being scoffed at by many, I actually really loved Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest and the soundtrack endures as some of the most epic hard-rock snes music in existence.  Not only the Doom Castle theme, but also all three battle themes.  Hellion sounds did a cover of the main battle theme that is also pretty epic.  And the town theme is also really nice.  Gotta hand it to FFMQ for the music.

Anyhow, maybe I should be going back and listening to some of the great soundtracks...the Actraiser OST, maybe some other classics like the Super Mario Kart ost or even Street Fighter 2...Super Mario World maybe?  And of course, the Mega Man soundtracks, and don't forget the Star Control 2 OST!



Writing is really important...I don't think I'll ever stop writing letters.

Out at Night

12:30AM on a weeknight is a perfectly reasonable time to be going out for a run while waiting for soup to cook, right?

Ahh, being out at this time of night feels nice; it's almost like I'm in high school again!  I was even listening to some trance tunes during my (short since I'm out of shape) run.  As boring as being alone is, I think there is something special about being out there by yourself -- maybe call it some sort of spiritual peace?  I really value alone time, as I'm sure many other people do too.  The mental and emotional atmosphere in my house was stifling at some times, particularly during the high school and college years, so I'd escape to the night quite often.  There were times when I had good reason to, like maybe practicing glowsticking/glowstringing or something, but there were also times when I did it just for its own sake.  During college it was perhaps even more awesome, and easier, but I still have very strong feelings of nostalgia for my home street at night, and the park at the end of it, haha.