Last night I sat down to balance the dynamics in the game "Strike!", described yesterday. I thought it'd be a simple task. I ended up pondering some stuff from mathematical modelling ( Read more... )

Last Friday, things on the First Capital Connect commute that I take from St. Pancras to Streatham had gotten completely unreasonable. Half the trains were cancelled because the drivers were refusing to work overtime. I was pretty exasperated ( Read more... )

In a recent post I mentioned that I was looking into exporting data from OpenOffice Draw into another format. I've had a look on the web, and I'm pretty amazed by how little has been written on this subject. The majority of extensions seem to be written in Java, and most tutorials are aimed at that language, or the internal BASIC ( Read more... )

One of the shortcomings of OpenOffice Draw (another that can't be ascribed to the programmers) is that is doesn't export files to Word very easily. If you put together a flowchart (for instance), it loses all formatting and cohesion if you export it to Word via OpenOffice Writer.

I'm looking at ways of sorting this out, more as an exercise than as ( Read more... )

While I was on holiday in Madeira earlier this year, I had what I think is a rather good idea for a new piece of Interactive Fiction (or a text-adventure to our 8-bit ancestors). The plot has to remain a secret for now, but I'm greatly enjoying writing it and I'm up to something like 130 rooms and as many items.

At the moment I don't know how long ( Read more... )

Recently I promised that I'd post a screenshot of the new "Monster Panic". So here it is:


( Read more... )

Playing around with the Python functionality in OpenOffice today. After doing a "Find File" to work out where everything sits in the tree structure, I found this:


( Read more... )

Some time ago, I began working on a platform game called "Monster Panic". Wyc Tippins (explodi) did some great graphics, and the code got pretty far before life got in the way and the project went into an extended holding pattern ( Read more... )