Anime News Network, one of my daily internet stops, is hosting a art contest in which the prize is a free trip to Japan. Seeing as I am planning on paying for such a trip within the next couple of years, I figured it'd be worth a shot to try and get one for free. Granted, my art skills are probably nowhere near the level of the more devoted and talented frequenters of ANN, but hey. Never hurts to try. So, here's my entry for your viewing pleasure/horror.
Kirino Kousaka of "My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute" fame, drawn for the ANN Go to Japan contest. Sadly, I have not actually begun to watch this show (was busy finishing out Toradora!), but it certainly is high on my list.
I'd say that this is, to date, the fanciest piece I've attempted over all (color, background, pose, etc). Arguably, I think I may have missed on the pose, but moving out of one's comfort zone is how one improves.
Made with Illustrator and Photoshop CS4
My brother and I are programmers. This must be discreetly understood or no good will come of the story I am about to regale. Every once and again, we'll embark on a coding competition. Last time was a game, this time a chat client. My weapon of choice was various web languages (PHP and JS for the programatic stuff) and his was C++. Arguably, I had an advantage.
Even though I was able to bypass the whole sockets layer, I did set a rule for myself: I could not resort to using a transactional database (i.e. MySQL). Granted, I didn't foresee any issues as I had the power of APC caching on my side. It turned out that this would be what I fought with most and, eventually, just give up on.
For whatever reason, despite the fact that apc_store was returning success on caching an object, it would not persist. A quick call to apc_exists immediately after the store command with the same cache key confirmed this. I went round and round with this issue. Sometimes the object would persist for one or two sessions but ultimately would up be dropped. I read somewhere that storing an array of objects could cause issues (which I was doing), so I serialized the bitch before caching. No dice.
In the end I said "screw it" and just created my own disk-based caching model. I decided to take the whole thing a little further and account for cache collisions (two instances accessing the cache at the same time) which may or may not work. The only reason I even bothered was because I have an ID variable that needs to iterate for every single chat posted and sought to avoid two scripts running simultaneously and writing an erroneous value (a point that was raised in some fashion during my Digg interview.
So, two hours after the initial one we'd allotted for the competition, I wound up victorious. While not glamorous, my chat client does indeed work: Live Demo - Source
What of my brother's program? Well, let's just say the computers weren't talking too nice and the program kept crashing.
Victory is mine!
I was sitting in lab last night bored out of my skull. Yes, I could have (and should have) been working on my project, but when you're already ahead of schedule it's okay to slack off now and again.
So, as I was saying, I was sitting there and I think "Hey. I'll make a game between now and when final roll is called." I turned to Ryan and asked him what game I should make to which he replied "Space Invaders." I figured "Why the hell not? I did that back when I was fourteen." I told my bro (whom I was Skyping at the time) and he was like "Yeah, well, I bet I can make Asteroids before you can finish Space Invaders." The gauntlet had been thrown and much coding ensued.
After a couple hours of some intense typing and trying to pull down sprites off of the crappy ass wireless in the school, my Space Invaders clone was complete. Not two or three minutes later my bro finished his game, but alas it's not Flash and can't be embedded in browsers like so:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:640px; height:480px;" data="http://www.dxprog.com/files/SpaceInvaders.swf"><param name="movie" value="http://www.dxprog.com/files/SpaceInvaders.swf" /></object>
It is by no means a mind blowing or even polished game, but for just two hours I'm not complaining. And I also had a hell of a lot of fun coding it which is the important part.
I won't be a total dick and not give Chris any credit. In his defense he did create a vector renderer from scratch (I say create because technically he wasn't actually coding). His game's visuals are also far superior to mine, so be a dear and check it out as well (some Windows and DirectX are required).
