Long time no see. I promised a page a day for 40 days and I stopped. Well, I didn't stop on purpose. My server died. It's back up as of 11:15 AM Saturday Jan 31, 2004. In fact, javantea.com was up before keenspace.com was. Funny, isn't it? Well, not extremely funny. I don't like laughing at others' misfortune in light of my own and my dependence on those people. I've been hosting javantea.com on Keenspace for a few years, but it has been more my secondary rather than my primary until just a few months ago. A few months ago, I lost my free primary site at students.washington.edu since I graduated. So I have been happily using Keenspace until a few days ago. My best wishes to the Keenspace crew as they work hard to fix this as fast they can. In fact, until they get the FTP working, you won't see this or yesterday's post. I was thinking of making a big manifesto about how we community members should take up our position as supporters of the service we use. But I decided that my budget is a bit tight for that. I can't exactly spend $60 here and $60 there and expect to survive the coming months. I know that one must spend money to make money, but it's silly to go on a spending spree when I am broke. But when I am less broke, I'll donate some cash to Keenspace. They may advertise on my site, but the service is worth quite a lot more to me. In fact, I have about 50MB of stuff here at JF. You may not notice, but this site has 321*2 + 5*5 pages with an decent sized image each (10-80kB each).

Today, I'm working on things that need to be done. I scheduled for my Hack Mars Demo 1 (Mission 1) to be done tonight. Well, it won't happen no matter how short my rant here is. But that doesn't mean that my schedule is totally broken. I'm going to continue to work on it and hopefully I'll get Demo 2 (Mission 2) done by next Saturday. This is a ramshackle, crash and burn, lightening development process. But I gave myself nearly enough time. That is how it will always be. I give myself a day to do one thing and I don't get it done. Three days later, I finish it. A day for another thing, two days later it's done. Few things go by schedule with hard work. But that is okay. As long as the end result happens, there's no deadline that can't be extended. But there is a deadline that I want to miss nearly: March 1 release of Hack Mars. It'll involve a lot of work between now and then, but I'm up for it. If I keep my short term goals very short, I can keep myself so busy that I get a lot of stuff done. Is this the defeat of the rush/slump cycle that I seem to always be on? Let's not question and just run with it. Last night was almost the start of a huge slump. I took a 4 hour break and looked around at some new games out there. My spirits took a nose dive. The screenshots totally blew me away. I'm not going to send you there or you'll buy the game instead of Hack Mars. ^_^ But I'm going to attempt to benchmark them and surpass their graphical style. I can do it with some work. See below:

You probably wouldn't guess, but there's a lot of room for improvement in the model. I use a 512x512 texture on the model (256x256 for the face), so most of it is flat color. A bit of work in The GIMP will give this kid shading like you wouldn't believe. So don't give up hope on HM. It may not look like much, but I have a month and a little leeway on that. Also, you cannot see the triangles, vertices and bones I gave this kid's face which will allow him to speak, and show emotions in many different ways. You'll get to see him and other characters cringe as someone says something nasty. You'll see a lot of broad smiles and horrible snarls in the game. That is what will replace the bullets you find in Counterstrike and swords in Everquest. Hack Mars will attempt to use the art of human emotion to win the real war, the war that everyone here is fighting. The war for control of our minds. But don't let that scare you off. You've been fighting that war since before you know and you're still fighting if you are reading this.