Update is coming...
Saturday, February 27, 2010
I've been out of town the majority of this week on a work trip to San Diego (nice change from the cold and snow here in the Washington DC area!), and as such haven't picked up this week's comics yet. Once I do, I'm sure to have some fodder for new MUGEN updates, so look for something here tonight.Labels: _meta_
Character page redesign
Monday, January 25, 2010
Sorry the blog's been quiet lately; I've been in the middle of rewriting the character pages to fit in with the visual theme I established a few weeks ago with the stages and add-ons pages.
I'm not quite done yet: there are still a few issues related to overflow and cross-browser compatibility. But when done, the pages which used to look like this will look (more or less) like this.I've also got v2.0 Release Candidate 2 coming up soon for Parasite; it'll have bug fixes, sprite improvements, improved AI, better effects here and there, and a few more filled-out power sets. Look for an update on all of that later this week; I want to get it out of the way so I can get back to work on Hal and Sinestro!
Labels: _meta_
Finished Tweaking
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Okay, I've fixed the stuff I broke the other day. My web server supports PHP, and I figured that would get me most of the code reuse I wanted, even if it is duplicated on the front page and all the archive pages (there are apparently ways to get Blogger to serve up PHP )or at least PHP-friendly content) instead of HTML, but I haven't figured them out yet, so this'll have to do as a stopgap. Note that Stages and Add-ons are both PHP-ified, but Chars isn't yet, because when I do that page, I'll also need to do all of the character pages at the same time... so that's a task for another night.
Earthquake special from Juggernaut
Rudy Smash! hyper from Hulk
Oh, and Parasite's finally got a cool ground-smash anim for Juggernaut's special and Hulk's hyper, thanks to ScruffyDragon forum member GODzilla and my partner Jet the Phoenix. (thanks to both of you!) I've got almost all of the changes done to him that I wanted to make for the next v2 release candidate, so I think that'll be done and ready for download sometime next week. I also owe a new YouTube video showing off all the cool new stuff he can do; more on that soon.
Caution: tweak in progress
Friday, January 08, 2010
I woke up to a couple of inches of snow on the ground today, and my carpool-mate and I didn't want to drive to work in the dark, so I had a little extra time this morning to work on my site. I've updated the stages page to match the add-ons changes I made yesterday.
I've also started trying to drag my site into the new decade by using Dojo to dynamically fetch page content and inject it into the main content frame, and not have to include all the header and sidebar code in every single page of the site. That said, there are a couple of problems:
- Currently if you have a bookmarked link to my characters, stages, or add-ons pages, it will now load with no header, sidebar, or stylesheets at all. Yuck.
- I don't want to have to go back and manually change every single internal hyperlink on my entire site and rewrite it to load its content the new way. Ugh.
- I mistakenly deleted the main CSS stylesheet being used by all the character pages, so they're all going to look demented today.
- This new approach doesn't work with the browser's Back button, so I'll need to implement something with dojo.back
Ugh, this may be more trouble than it's worth. So anyway, I'm at work now and won't be updating anything until tonight, so watch your step today and try not to trod on any broken glass or nails, or fall through any holes in the floor. I'll find a solution to both problems tonight.
Labels: _meta_
Tonight I rewrote the Add-ons page here on the site. It now fits in better visually with the front page, and while I was at it, I added links and blurbs to two of my resources previously unlinked anywhere here:
- the DC/Marvel character templates I released a while back to help aspiring creators quickly build something that feels like it "fits" the DC vs Marvel screenpack
- the MUGEN tools I released yesterday
Enjoy!
On the 4th Day of Christmas...
Monday, December 28, 2009
Today Sic-1 and Zvitor are releasing their latest collaboration, Namor! I'm writing this post early and scheduling it to auto-post for me on time, so I don't have a link yetI had this auto-posting, but have come back and added a link to the release thread, but you can find it on the front page of ScruffyDragon.com, too.
He's already a very full-featured character, sporting 4 special attacks and 3 hypers, which Parasite has already figured out he wants to steal:
The reason I'm writing this post early is because today I'm in the hospital getting some minor sinus surgery done. I doubt I'll have an internet connection at all today, and very likely won't feel like getting online anyway, so I may miss a day or two here... hence me posting these things early.
(note: there's a small chance that something may go wrong with the release, and you won't see it on the portal by the time this post is uploaded. If that's the case, have some patience and I'm sure you'll see it post soon)
Labels: 12 Days of Christmas, _meta_, Parasite
Parasite Plus Hal Jordan Equals...?
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Quickie update tonight. Last weekend I had some productive hacking time while at my mother-in-law's for the Thanksgiving holiday; I put it to use working on updating my three blogs a bit more, especially pertaining to the navigation. Tonight I uploaded the latest update to this blog's template; the navigation toolbar you see in the header should be much nicer and more usable than the last attempt.
I promised in the comments thread for the last post that this one would be "Hal-centric", as people were asking about the progress I'm making on "War of Light" Hal Jordan. I spent part of last weekend's hacking time working on the complex state files that this new version of Hal is going to require; that effort is progressing, but I don't have any screenshots to show yet. Instead, I offer up the following:
I've been asked how Parasite is going to behave if he drains Hal when in one of his special-mode palettes. Now, you have an idea. And, as many of you probably know, Parasite is often my testbed for coding new moves for my characters, so at least some of Hal's special-mode attacks will probably get coded there first, then moved over to Hal's complex tree of state files when polished. The fun thing is that I know of character WIPs being discussed for Red Lantern Atrocitus, "Agent Orange" Larfleeze, Blue Lantern Saint Walker, Indigo Lantern Indigo-1, and Star Sapphire Carol Ferris, so in adding these power sets now, I'm building in future support for those characters down the road.
Finally, since it's December 1st, a note about this month: yes, I will be continuing the "12 Days of Christmas" tradition this year, together with my ScruffyDragon teammates. And since I know what some of the goodies are, I can say with full confidence that you're going to want to check back, here and at the ScruffyDragon portal, a few times between now and the 25th... ;)
Labels: _meta_, Green Lantern, Parasite
New site feature: Google Translate
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
I know from FeedBurner and Google Analytics that I have quite a few international (that is, non-U.S.) readers on this blog. As such, I thought translation would be a good feature to add. Today I have done just that: courtesy of Google, you now have the ability to select a language from the new drop-down in the right sidebar, and have this page's content translated into whatever language you'd like (they don't support every known language, but there are a LOT in there).
Let me know what you all think if this feature, and if you think it's worth keeping.
Oh, and in unrelated news, I'm working on an actual update. It seems Parasite was last seen on his way to the X-Men's island Utopia... expect chaos to ensue.
Labels: _meta_
Hal Jordan - Smart Palette
Friday, October 09, 2009
Sinestro corps -- Default (GL corps) -- blue/green lantern
indigo -- violet (Star Sapphire) -- black
First, a quick note on this week's outage: I've done a move from my old web host to Dreamhost, and it took a couple of days to get the domain to switch over correctly. There was probably a better way to do the transfer that wouldn't have taken it down for so long, but at least it's done now, and good for a year.
Now, to tonight's topic: Hal Jordan, the Multi-Spectrum Lantern ® (heh). Friend and ScruffyDragon forum member ArmageddoN sent me some feedback on the color corps palettes I've been showing off over the past several weeks, and ways to make them even better (separate the glove hands from forearms so the Sinestro Corps palette can be accurate, lighten up the torso & gloves on the Black Lantern palette, etc). I took his advice, and also added another shade in the lower torso to make the suits a little more comic-accurate.
Oh, and I also added a palette for Star Sapphire (i.e. Violet Lantern), just for giggles. ;)
Labels: _meta_, Green Lantern
New portait
Sunday, September 06, 2009
(First off, sorry for the apparent "filler" nature of this post; the next episode of "Hal Jordan: Blackest Night Edition" is coming soon, but I'm still working out the kinks in the palette and how I want the intro to work, before I post it.)With the above caveat out of the way, I wanted to show off the awesome portrait ScruffyDragon forum member The Arlequin just did for our in-progress Mandarin character:
Isn't that awesome? It's now the image on both the Character Select and Mandarin pages of the site. Thanks again, Arlequin! :D
I also tweaked the code that I was using to generate my tag cloud on the sidebar... the maximum and minimum text sizes were too outrageous, especially considering how many different tags I am using. So hopefully you'll agree that it looks better now.
Since this is a long weekend here in the U.S., hopefully you'll be seeing "Bluish-Green Lantern" Hal on Monday.
-Edit- Fixed internal page links.
New site features: tags/labels
Saturday, June 20, 2009
So, yesterday I got an itch to try and write some code to auto-generate a "tag cloud" to present a slightly different way to dig into the deep content on my blog. It amazes me that I've actually been writing this thing for nearly 7 years now! (since August 2002) That's a lot of content to go back through, if you were looking for some particular post that had dropped off of my front page due to age.
So, as of yesterday, all the content on this blog has now been tagged (Blogger uses the term "labels," but it amounts to the same thing, and "Label Cloud" doesn't sound as snazzy), and you can see the label(s) for any given post at the bottom-left. (this post is tagged as "site news"). If you click on the tag/label name, you'll be shown a single, large page that includes all of my posts on that subject. I've also added a preliminary (and admittedly rough) Tag Cloud section to the navigation bar on the right side of the blog.
You probably know how tag clouds work, but in case you don't: the size of the tag name indicates how often I talk about that subject. Some of those surprised me: for example, I expected the "12 Days of Christmas" posts to be pretty prominent, and the tag reflects that, but "Lobo" still has all the rest of them beat, hands down. Makes sense, I suppose: if you view that tag's page, you'll see that early on I posted just about every little stinking detail of his progress up to the 1st alpha release, 1st public beta, 2nd public beta, 1st "it's done" release, and last year's remix. Plus I still think of him as one of my favorite MUGEN "children." So yeah, I've posted a lot about Lobo. ^_^
One note: a lot of those early posts are broken in one way or another... either because I linked to my old CJB-hosted redirect (prior to getting my buyog.com domain), or because I used relative paths to link to stuff, or because the old content doesn't exist online anymore (which, alas, is the case with many of the old screenshots, sprite animations, and alpha/beta releases). At some point I may go back and fix some of them, but then again, maybe they're more authentic this way. What do y'all think?
Anyway, I've found it mildly diverting to trip down memory lane and see how far I've come in the past 7 years. Here's to many more.
Labels: _meta_
Schedule notes
Friday, May 15, 2009
For the past month or so, I've been following Chris Guillebeau's blog and Twitter updates thanks to a link from Seth Godin. Even though the stuff these guys talk about has little or nothing to do with my "bread and butter" sources of income (computer and linguistic consulting), I find it fascinating to see how people transforming the collective zeitgeist about what a "career" can and should look like for our generation. Highly inspiring stuff. Case in point: in his recent publishing sensation, 279 Days to Overnight Success, Chris suggested that bloggers who, like myself, aspire to extend their personal reach, should establish a regular publication schedule for that blog. So, that's the main point of this post, which I'm going to cross-post to my root and coding blogs as well.
Moving forward, I'm going to try an experiment, and we'll see if I can stick to it. If so, I may expand it out at some point, but this is probably a good place to start:
- Sundays: I will post something on my root blog
- Tuesdays: I will post something on my code blog
- Fridays: I will post something on my MUGEN blog
So, you can expect an update from me here on this blog, tonight. There have been some pretty cool things happening the past few weeks since the Scruffyversary with my character projects, and I can't wait to show you. :)
Labels: _meta_
History matters
Monday, January 19, 2009
So, my "previous posts" and archive links have been broken on this blog for quite a while now, and I finally made time to fix it. So if you look over there ---> you'll see that those sections are back again, and fully functional.Labels: _meta_
Beginning a site redesign
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Had this site layout for too long, figured it was time to change it up. After all, the 12 Days of MUGEN are coming up soon! ;)Labels: _meta_
Halloween
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Well, if you're reading this you've probably already noticed that I've redecorated the site for Halloween... and if you've been paying attention to the DCvsMarvel forums, you also know there's another reason for the change in color scheme. Yes, Lobo's due out for another MAJOR update... most likely the last public release he'll see before the DCvsM game is released. It's in the hands of my beta testers now, and I'm doing some final tweaks based on their feedback. I've also asked my teammate ShinGouken to craft him a killer AI to match the one he did for Ice a few months ago, so time permitting that'll be part of the release as well. I'm not going to commit to a release date, but I can say it'll be some time in the next week or two.Until then, some teases to whet your appetite:
New Logo! W00t!
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
I finally got around to making a logo for the main page. Like it, hate it, whatever. At least it's better than orange text on a white box. =PAlso, I added a few alternate palettes to the Human Torch page. The green one is supposed to be reminiscent of Ice's old friend Fire (Bea DaCosta)... not sure how effective that actually is, or if I'll even end up keeping it, but there you go.
Labels: _meta_
Site update news
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
I updated Ice over the weekend with a small sprite patch, so she fit in to normal MUGEN screenpacks... the initial release contained stuff that was specific to the DCvsMarvel game screenpack (which will be released with the project beta, hopefully in Q1 or Q2 2006). I still have some tweaks I want to do before I can call her finalized; if you have comments, feel free to weigh in over at the DC vs Marvel forum.Also revamped the characters page somewhat, to better reflect what's in beta, what's released, and what's still just a WIP. I'm not 100% satisfied with it (I would need 1 more DC character WIP for the whole thing to fit together properly as is =P), but it's better than it was, I think.
You'll notice new screenshots in just about every character section, except Silver Surfer & Hal Jordan. Those will come in time... progress is being made, but due to sprite theft concerns, I now only post specials & hypers on these pages. :-S
I've also added John Stewart & Warmachine WIP pages to the characters section. That makes 8 WIPs in total that I'm still working on, 9 if you count Ice. I must be totally insane. =P
Big Update Coming Soon!
Thursday, November 17, 2005
I've started working on a MAJOR site revamp in preparation for a big release I've got waiting in the wings. You can see a few peeks here and there, as well as a slightly-redesigned characters page. But the full update, when it comes, will be a lot bigger.I'm not going to put a time constraint on when I'll upload the new stuff; it'll be done when it's done, but I'm hopeful it should be pretty soon. ;)
Labels: _meta_
Testing...
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
I've moved to a new server, thanks to my good friend and DCvsMarvel teammate, Magus81. :)The direct URL is http://buyogslair.studiosmh.com, but I'll be switching CJB over to point here as well.
Labels: _meta_
Start the Presses!
Friday, January 23, 2004
Blogger (my weblog service) just added a cool new feature: Atom syndication! So for those of you who like to aggregate your weblogs into a single news reader feed, you can now do so. :) Click here for more information about Atom.Here's the link to the site feed for those of you that want the hook-up:
http://buyogslair.cjb.net/atom.xml
Labels: _meta_
Super update!
Thursday, September 25, 2003
GokuEX3 recently asked me to host his DCvsMarvel WIP (Work-in-Progress, that is), Superboy. He and Erradicator, creator of many cool superhero chars for MUGEN, are collaborating to bring Kon-El into the fighting game world... check out his progress in the new "Hosted WIPs" section.Digging out
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Hey folks, you may not see much of me on the message boards or blogging here for a good long while. Hurricane Isabel came in our back door and forced us out of our home for the next several weeks to months, so "real life" will be dominating my thoughts for the forseeable future, though I'll have things to post here from time to time as I work on my laptop. More info on my main blog, if you're interested.Labels: _meta_
Monday, June 09, 2003
Upgraded the WIP pages for Lobo, GL, and Parasite so that they should work in Mozilla/Netscape. (And I must say, if you haven't tried Mozilla Firebird yet, go do it right now!!! I love it! The Parasite page still isn't working right on Moz because of the little palette thing I'm doing with the image-swapper, but you IE people (in other words, 99% of you reading this page) should have no problems.Other slightly cool news: I've got CJB domain forwarding turned on now, so if you want to shoot straight to your fave WIP page, you can bypass the news page entirely! (not that I'm suggesting this is a good idea, mind you, as news often hits the main page before it trickles down to the others) Anyway, give it a try here:
lobo.buyogslair.cjb.net
gl.buyogslair.cjb.net
parasite.buyogslair.cjb.net
Labels: _meta_, Green Lantern, Lobo, Parasite
Saturday, April 26, 2003
Wow, where to begin? I'm here at our new home in North Carolina now, settling in a bit. Three rooms of the house are still full of boxes and such, but we made it. :)I've done quite a bit with this site. I'll list the changes, going from minor to major:
- Tweaked various text around various pages, to make things a bit clearer where necessary.
- Changed the color schemes on the stages, add-ons, & Lobo WIP pages.
- Finally got around to doing a nicer logo for the add-ons page.
- Made the logo & background on the WIP page slightly cooler (see if you can figure out where the logo ends and the background begins! Whee!
- Moved the site to a different server (again)-- when we moved, we had to change ISPs. I may have one final move to make in a few days, if I decide it's necessary.
- Tweaked the layout of Lobo's WIP page a bit
- New animations for Lobo: he's got all 6 basic punches & kicks now! Just a few more frames & he'll be ready for an Alpha release!
- New WIP pages up for Green Lantern & Parasite! Check'em out!
Labels: _meta_, Green Lantern, Lobo, Parasite
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Hello from Kentucky! I'm on the road, in the middle of a 2500+ mile (1500 km) move from Utah, to North Carolina, USA. I don't have Blogger access at the moment to the site (long story), so I'm hand-inserting this entry to say that I've got a BIG update to the site in the works-- with some surprises! Look for it this weekend.Labels: _meta_
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Testing new server... I've got DSL now, Woohoo! (Covad, in case you wondered, and so far I'm VERY happy with their service! :))(This, ladies and gentlemen, proves the value of a good redirection service like CJB... if I hadn't mentioned it, you probably wouldn't have even noticed I'd switched!)
Also, minor updates in Lobo-ville. New kick anim uploaded, several more in progress at the moment. stay tuned!
Labels: _meta_
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Made minor tweaks to things here and there. Props go out to tof01, who "beta tested" the site for me... you get a cookie ;)Labels: _meta_
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Got the new layout working. Me likey. :)TDXIrregularHunter's custom lifebars/fight fonts are in the Add-ons section. Also, find info about my DC vs Marvel WIPs in the "Works in Progress" section. For now, that's it!
Labels: _meta_
Thursday, August 08, 2002
Funky new news page layout... I'll probably be tweaking it soon.Labels: _meta_
Friday, August 02, 2002
New site up; still ironing some things out, finishing off section logos, etc. Using Blogger to do this news page... let's see how it goes.Labels: _meta_