Halcyon | flow

Calm and peaceful; tranquil | Continuity and smoothness of appearance

American Heritage Dictionary 4th. Ed.

I've had a busy weekend, but I'll be back to work on various things soon. The biggest recent development in my projects is the decision to switch PSP development libraries for my game. Oldschool Library has been useful, but unresolved lock-up bugs with the oslDrawTextBox function have forced me to find an alternative. LTE Studios Engine was recomended to me, and the documentation and examples have encouraged me to try it out. Although it is primarily a 3D engine, the UI and event handler functions seem ideally suited to what I'm doing with my advenure game. I'm going to begin implementing it later today.

Once I have the PSP project moving forward smoothly again, I'm going to continue improving this website. I have repeatedly planned and put off doing the About page, so that is a priority, followed by improving the formatting of the Links page. Next, I plan to change the way these news items are stored and displayed in order to clean up the HTML output generated by the PHP script. Later on, I intend to add pagination to all of the content pages, fix a bug that occurs when changing news pages while viewing a category, and improve the admin PHP upload function so that I can use it exclusively for managing files on the server, removing the need for an FTP client.

Before I go, I will leave you with something interesting, if you happen to be a horror movie fan. I discovered a trailer for Saw 3 on the IGN network, and it looks very promising. The movie opens, appropriately, this Halloween.

Although you probably haven't noticed many changes in the site lately (unless you use Opera; more on that later) I have been working steadily on cleaning up the code. I've discovered that trying to reconcile PHP and HTML markup in the same document can get very messy; either the HTML output will look messy, or the PHP source will look messy. I'm looking into applying the Smarty PHP template engine to neaten things up a bit.

I might put that off for a while, however, since I have been neglecting the development of my PSP homebrew game for far too long. I need to rework the title screen (it's functional, but ugly) and concentrate on finishing the text output for dialogue. I do have someone working on drawing character portraits right now, and the early sketches I've seen look excellent. I'll post a few here when the work on them is completed.

I'm also thinking about making some more themes for the site, and expanding my pixel art experiments to something more than basic cubes. I also need to figure out some rendering issues that have cropped up in Opera. It seems that my fix for deformed container divs in IE6 has caused Opera to shrink the divs to fit the content, preventing the boxes from lining up properly. I have plenty of stuff to work on; now I just need to stop "preparing" and get to work!

I'm beginning to realize that writer's block isn't solely the property of literary writers. For the past week or so I've suffered from coder's block. Both of my current projects - this website and my PSP game - have been neglected in favor of playing GTA: San Andreas (which I will never get tired of), watching movies, and being generally inert.

My block in further developing this website is making it Internet Explorer compatible. My efforts to get the headline working properly, with the news icon overlapping the bar, have been only partly successful. My attempts to compensate for IE's broken implementation of the CSS "box model" have met with complete failure. I'm going to try some other ideas tomorrow, and ask some fellow web developers for advice.

I've also roadblocked on my PSP game. As I mentioned previously, it's a text-driven adventure game, sort of like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, so obviously the text presentation is the most important part. I've managed to convert a TrueType font to a fixed-width bitmap format and I got it working in the game, but having the text display properly is giving me headaches. I can draw one page of text (three lines) to a dialogue box on the screen, but that's it. My intent is to draw a page, wait for the user to hit X, then draw the next page. Depending on how I approach this, it either draws nothing, draws one page and locks up, or locks up as soon as I run it. I suspect the lockups are a result of char variable pointers begin passed between functions incorrectly, so I'll need to find a better way to handle the text itself.

Anyway, I feel that I've had enough time off for now. I'm going to dig into both of these projects again tomorrow, and see if I can accomplish anything.

Hacks, trickery, and ritual sacrifice (small exaggeration) have failed me in my efforts to get this layout working just right in IE. The page will render properly in Firefox and Opera, and perhaps some Linux and Mac OS X browsers, but for now some things will be broken in Internet Explorer. That is unless the planets come into alignment, angels sing, and Microsoft properly implements CSS in IE during my lifetime.

Once the PHP code and the layout are completed and working in non-IE browsers, I'll take another stab at getting it compatible. Until then, get yourself a real web browser.