gunner weapon and run animation

Took me this long. His weapon's textured completely now, and I've made a looping run animation test of him.

BLARGH in 2009

So I decided to haul my lazy ass and continue working on BLARGH Text Editor. I've successfully ported my code to the new devkitARM release 24, and libnds 1.3.1.

Just get the file save/load working, and its already a full-fledged text editor. And now that there's some official sample code on how to get libfat working, it'll be easier for me.

Next major features needed are some unfinished text editing features (cut, copy, paste, search), and multiple text files opened via tabs. But I want to concentrate on file save/load first.

Unicode support would require me to create all those characters from foreign languages. I'd be willing to make ones for accented english letters, but that's about it. I sure as hell won't be doing all those Chinese characters. Perhaps the Japanese Kana letters, since I'm learning them, but definitely not the Chinese Kanji.

Dictionary lookup will perhaps be the last on the list.

Gunner Rifle Weapon

I finally decided on the gunner's rifle weapon. Not textured yet. He'll also have a pistol as a secondary weapon.

BLARGH Text Editor File Save Dialog Box GUI

This is a mock-up concept of BLARGH's File Save GUI that I've made so far. It should work almost like a standard file browser program. While in the File Save GUI, the upper screen should still show the text editor, and you can still switch between other opened text files.

wrist rot problem fixed

After a long time, I tried working on the gunner's wrist problem once more. I bothered downloading The Mancandy FAQ only to find out it didn't explain how the rigging in the wrist worked.

I tried searching in BlenderArtists and found a solution in a thread. It was this blend file in particular (made by doncuan) that gave me the idea. However, I did realize that I had modeled my character's mesh without giving forethought to wrist rotation. This other blend file (made by Vertex Pusher) demonstrates a much better forearm mesh designed to twist properly. I'll study it in detail when I make a new character.

I also modeled and rigged the gunner's weapon. Its not textured yet. After looking at it, I decided it looked too much like a fireman's hose, so I'm going to make a different model.

The Girl in Byakkoya

Paprika
Movie - 90 minutes running time


Final Verdict: You know "The Cell"? The one with Jennifer Lopez? That sucks compared to this movie. If you haven't seen it, then this is the movie that you should have watched back in 2007.

Don't forget to download the ending theme music from http://www.teslakite.com/freemp3s/e/paprika/. Its been made free for personal use by the music artist. He wants you to read the license before downloading it.


The film was directed by Satoshi Kon, same guy who made Paranoia Agent. This film is his latest (released) work as of 2008.

Paprika was created by Yasutaka Tsutsui. It was originally a short story in a Japanese women's magazine, which he later turned into a full blown novel.


Unfortunately, http://www.radioclub.jp gives a 404 error.

And you need a DC mini to access it.

Kamen Rider Kiva

I watched Kamen Rider Kiva Episode 1 and I have to say, I had hoped it'd be something I could watch in earnest, but these shows are still mainly for kids. But since its only the first episode, I'm willing to watch more of it first.

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BLARGH Text Editor is moving along at a slow pace, only a few bugfixes and refactoring being done right now. A lot of things being done under the hood.

In the meantime I am thinking of:

• saving/loading files to/from a pc via wifi (using libdswifi, and perhaps somehow porting UFTP to ARM executable NDS code)
  
• additional on-screen keyboards: OPTI and Quikwrite
• dictionary lookup, using perhaps code from NewDictS. The GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English  packaged in  StartDict format is roughly 150 MB big when uncompressed¹ (and NewDictS needs it uncompressed), so I want to improve it by compressing the .dict file in either QuickLZ or LZO.

These are all only ideas for the future though. The text editing and wiki editing functionality will come first.

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¹This is odd though. The version of GCIDE from the GNU ftp server (latest version 0.46) is about 53 MB in size when uncompressed. In contrast, the version that comes in the StarDict website is 156 MB when uncompressed, about 103 MB bigger (about two-thirds bigger).

The stardict version reports its wordcount is 174,222 words (coming from the .ifo file). The version from the GNU ftp server reports its wordcount is 125,445 words (coming from a grep -c "<hw>" cide.*). The StarDict version has 48,777 more words. Its quite odd though that the additional 48,777 words would take up 103 MB (approx. 66% of the file size) while 125,445 words would take up only 53 MB (34% of the file size). So it probably means other than the addition of 48,777 more words, more content have been added to the old words.

Coming from the .ifo file, the stardict version was last modified in 2003, May 13 (most likely outdated information), while from the GNU ftp server, version 0.46 was last modified in 2002, April 15.

This is making me think that the GNU ftp server is probably outdated. A certain Linux dictionary reader software has a GCIDE version 0.48, released last 2007, December 20.