log

I’m still fid­dling with Gallery to get images dis­play­ing — I have a feel­ing that the prob­lem is to do with file cas­ing, although I can’t be sure since I can’t see the PHP logs to see invalid fgets.

I just spent two hours fix­ing data­base ref­er­ences; I did­n’t realise that MySQL cre­ates tables in low­er­case in a Win­dows envi­ron­ment. For a while I thought I was going crazy, with iden­ti­cal tables and code refus­ing to act the same. In the end I export­ed the low­er­case db to SQL and used regex to fix the cas­ing, with an export of the prop­er­ly-cased table names as reference.

As for the images, I’m ready to blame a vari­ety of soft­ware. I’ll dig in with error_log tomorrow.

Hon­est­ly, who thinks file­name cas­ing is a good idea? The only ben­e­fit I can think of is per­for­mance (and depend­ing on the imple­men­ta­tion, stor­age size.) It’s just a pain in the arse.

Wow, that sure was a long 12 hours!

xhva.net is now pro­vid­ed by Dreamhost. I bor­rowed a user account from my course teacher Michael Nel­son to try host­ing a PHP app I’m devel­op­ing, and end­ed up get­ting my own account. Prob­a­bly the most sur­pris­ing thing is just how many fea­tures you get for a rea­son­able cost. My pre­vi­ous host­ing com­pa­ny set my expec­ta­tions far too low, it seems.

My first impres­sions of the SSFII remix came from pho­tographs of a Cap­com pre­sen­ta­tion back in April. Wow! Ryu looks real­ly good, even if they did mod­i­fy his face to be more ani­me/S­FAl­pha-like.

Ken’s first sprite release was the icon­ic fire­ball pose. I thought it was decent enough, but the arms need­ed some work—more like rope than muscles—and his thumbs gained an extra joint or two.

Aku­ma took the mus­cled look a bit too far, but the style was still impres­sive. I’m not sure what the deal is with the flat blad­ed elbows, but I was­n’t very fond of the orig­i­nal SSFII Aku­ma sprite and this was an over­all improvement.

Guile was­n’t so crash hot. It was our first hint that not all Udon artists are cre­at­ed equal­ly. Dark spots for eyes, sim­plis­tic shad­ing and hor­ri­bly inac­cu­rate mus­cu­la­ture. His face did­n’t quite fit either, and the age-old sprite-mir­ror prob­lem was par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent with the flags on his arms.

A re-imag­in­ing of Chun Li’s defeat-screen ani­ma­tion came next. I want­ed to like it, but the nag­ging voice insist­ed there was some­thing wrong. Some­one in the blog com­ments point­ed out that she was sniff­ing her hand more than dab­bing her tears. Fol­low that with a com­par­i­son shot of the orig­i­nal ani­ma­tion (with com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent facial pro­por­tions) and a com­ment men­tion­ing bukakke and that was it for Chun Li’s new animation.

T‑Hawk, a char­ac­ter I’ve nev­er been com­plete­ly con­vinced about. There was a lot of dis­cus­sion on his first frame release. Every­thing was hap­py-la-la until some­one realised his head had been trans­plant­ed from anoth­er artist’s work drawn years ago. It’s fine to be inspired from oth­er artists; past­ing parts direct­ly on and then chang­ing half the sprite in order for it to fit decent­ly is anoth­er thing. There are plen­ty of things wrong with this sprite that the new detail-work can’t cov­er up, includ­ing an unnat­ur­al upper-body twist, a head that’s not scaled cor­rect­ly, and shoul­der and head posi­tions that don’t reflect any of T‑Hawk’s orig­i­nal impos­ing posture.

Splayed through­out the blog posts on the site are my crit­i­cisms, ques­tions and sug­ges­tions. I tried to avoid the “mon­key fling­ing poo” style of com­ment­ing so pop­u­lar on the blog (while cring­ing at the unwar­rant­ed fan­boy arse-kiss­ing). Through the com­ment shit­storm many rea­son­able ques­tions did­n’t get answered, but the prag­mat­ic part of me under­stands a con­ser­v­a­tive man­age­men­t’s unwill­ing­ness to give one per­son the reins to a title’s mar­ket­ing, espe­cial­ly in the direct com­pa­ny of the great unwashed.

After the T‑Hawk deba­cle Bri­an (the poor guy shoul­dered with the blog) focussed on Super Puz­zle Fight­er II X HD Remix for a while (which comes with its own col­lec­tion of low devel­op­ment bud­get issues). Many, like me, were hop­ing for a re-post of updat­ed char­ac­ters now that we’d made our opin­ions known. Instead, after weeks of wait­ing, we got this:

Com­pare to the orig­i­nal SSFIIT stage:

Or even bet­ter yet, the orig­i­nal dark­er SFIIT version:

Style-wise, the last one is the best of the lot. There’s a visu­al rich­ness that was lost with the SSFIIT change, and the new hires ver­sion takes even more away with flat, washed-out colours (too much mid­tone) and poor light­ing (way too much bloom). There’s scal­ing prob­lems (that must be an extreme­ly short or under­age gener­ic biki­ni-clad girl) and the back­ground char­ac­ters are drawn so blunt­ly that they look like extras from a low-bud­get Nick­elodeon cartoon.

Apart from the styl­is­tic changes which I dis­like, the increased detail and over­all bright­ness intro­duce a lev­el of visu­al noise that could make stages such as this dif­fi­cult to play on. Halfway down the blog a help­ful chap named Coy­ote links a pho­to­shop mock­up he put togeth­er using the back­ground and pro­to­type sprites:

Not jump­ing to con­clu­sions based on an unof­fi­cial mock­up, but if that’s a rough indi­ca­tion of what the final game will look like, then either the back­ground detail will need ton­ing down or a stronger colour con­trast between fore­ground and back­ground must be introduced.

Got­ta go!

Minch2 is live! Go check it out. I regard it as some of my best work.

I’ll update this post lat­er, as well as the work page, after I’ve got­ten some sleep.

I’m at TAFE right now, and we’ve just reviewed a non-acces­si­ble web­site demon­stra­tion at DRC. Out of the three exam­ples, I think the mouse one is prob­a­bly the most eye-open­ing; even though I’ve seen peo­ple with arthri­tis and Parkin­sons I’ve nev­er made the con­nec­tion to how hard it would be to use the mouse accu­rate­ly. I sup­pose there’s dri­vers out there that smooth mouse input, but that’s not the point.

The low-con­trast demon­stra­tion web­site is hor­ri­bly dif­fi­cult to read when a basic blur is applied, remind­ing me that it’s time to boost the con­trast of my own blog’s text.

Peo­ple with a screen-read­er real­ly suf­fer the worst. I haven’t ever got­ten around to play­ing with screen-read­er soft­ware, though for the last few years I’ve been acute­ly aware of the issues pre­sent­ed by tables and images with­out alts. The bad old days of tables are thank­ful­ly gone, but there’s still a large num­ber of devel­op­ers find­ing oth­er invis­i­ble pot­holes to put in their code.

Men­tioned on the blog when I first rebuilt it, Eldalam­bë still exists in a frac­tured state with only two entries and ter­ri­ble CSS in a neglect­ed direc­to­ry named, pre­dictably, eldalambe. I had anoth­er look at it today after LOTR was men­tioned at lunch time, and I’m more hor­ri­fied than ever.

I was a bit bored and decid­ed to trans­late the slight­ly-bodgy Quenya back into Eng­lish. A hour or so lat­er and I’ve got a cou­ple of con­fus­ing strings, such as “this (place?) are now (fin­ished?) and (I am glad?) (I to show?)”. Not par­tic­u­lar­ly good. Shows what hap­pens when you’re refer­ring to a wordlist based on an unfin­ished language.

At one point I was con­sid­er­ing remak­ing the site, but I don’t think I’ll both­er. My fetish with reading/writing/speaking Quenya has long since died, and I’m con­tent using the charset for translit­er­at­ed English.