Personal Monthly Update #003

This is the month which I'm ashamed of. Basically, I just wasted time doing nothing. I was extremely depressed, so I would just sleep long hours, watch a lot of anime (cause they don't need "thinking", thinking makes my head ache), or just sit on the coach staring at T.V.

Legend: (GOOD, NORMAL, BAD)

6-STORY (3 hrs):
Thinking about my story.

SECRET?

5-Programming (1.5 days):
I updated my "Anime Watching Program", click here for it's source code if you are interested in it for some reason.

ANIME PROGRAM Written by gezegond.

4-Personal Miscellaneous (3 days):
Made an xls list out of all the anime I own, also downloaded wiki files for them.

MY ANIME LIST

3-Life Chores (5 days):
EATING, SLEEPING, ZZZzzz

Chores = Tea

2-HAVE FUN! (6 days):
1-Watched 65 anime episodes (Mostly Bleach, One Piece, and Dragon Ball).
2-Watched Heroes (Seasons 1-4) and Prison Break. (end of season 2).
3-Read 9 manga chapters (Best of them being Blame!).
4-Watched The Simpsons episodes 1-4.
5-Read 3 Comic issues (Best of them being The Sandman).

HEROES

1-Wasted Time (1.5 weeks):
Wasted time..., specially in the latter two weeks. As I said earlier, I was depressed, so I would just stare at the T.V., trying to forget all of my problems.

zzzzz

Conclusion:
This is where everything goes wrong. I didn't do anything at all. nice.

HAVE FUN!

Picture of the Day:
Naruto Databooks

Updated some older posts

Okay, here's a quick notification: I updated some of my older posts.

Firefox search engine: FILECROP
Karakuri One-shot manga by Masashi Kishimoto Scanlation
Start Reading Manga
3 in 1 One Piece, Naruto, Bleach Wallpaper

That's it! HAVE FUN!

Personal Monthly Update #002

Okay. This is not what happened last month. It's the data from 5 or 6 months ago. I haven't had much time to analyze my data either because I was really busy, or extremely depressed. Needless to say, I didn't do much in the last months. So don't expect anything big here. The truth is my life sucks..., big time. This month is way better than the following months.

Legend: (GOOD, NORMAL, BAD)

11-News & Reviews (2.5 hrs):
Got some gaming news...,what did you expect???

Gamespot lets you pick the games you wanna hear about...

10-Writing (3 hrs):
I posted some stuff on some forum. you can't consider that "writing", can you?

I POSTED! Yee-Haw!

9-Programming (3 hrs):
1-Learned to work with Yahoo! Pipes. Here's my sample pipe.
2-Made the Filecrop Firefox Search.

Yahoo! Pipes.

8-Game Design (3 hrs):
Found some Game Designing sites that would help me learn game design. Click here to see a list.

Start Here

7-STORY (4.5 hrs):
Making up stories for later use, 'nuff said.

SECRET?

6-Art (11.5 hrs):
Art??? not likely!
1-Made a karakuri scanlation.
2-Started sketching, it's my first time drawing since elementary school!
3-Found some texture sites, the best of them being environment textures.

Karakuri Scanlation

5-Game Develpment (1.5 days):
Remember the OFP map I was making? It's near completion!

Another shot

4-HAVE FUN! (5 days):
1-Played The Last Remnant, and a little bit of Quake 3 (4 player split-screen on PS2).
2-Watched 73 anime episodes (mostly Ranma ½, Gungrave, and One Piece).
3-Watched Prison Break (season 1 and most of season 2).
4-Read 10 Manga chapters (mostly Yu-Gi-Oh!).
5-Watched Kill Bill Vol.1.

Ahem, Prison Break.

3-Wasted Time (5.5 days):
I spent a week wasting time. Delightful...

Scaling Tiles...

2-Life Chores (6 days):
My PC fans were really noisy, so I had to change them. Besides that, everything has been the same, going to university, eating, sleeping... (yes, sleeping is a chore, why do humans need to sleep???)

Say hello to my fried fan.

1-Personal Miscellaneous (1 week):
1-Updated my manga list and selected some manga from it to read.
2-Archived my anime collection.
3-Created some google bookmarks lists.
4-Started using shared items on google reader.
5-Made some changes to my blog.
6-Got some information about games. (Fair Use, Final Fantasy, and Fullmetal Alchemist)

Check out my shared items.

Conclusion:
Well, I got sidetracked a bit this month, but besides that, everything was pretty O.K. The OFP Mission is not ready yet (But I worked hard on it). Instead I updated the manga list (I'll update it on the blog soon). So stay safe, and

HAVE FUN!

Picture of the Day:
Chrono Resurrection

Firefox search engine: FILECROP

FILECROP is a Rapidshare and MegaUpload search engine. It sounds really ordinary, since there are a lot of rapidshare search engines out there. But this one is different, in that, like google, it's an extremely easy to use search engine which returns accurate results in a short time.

This engine has proven to be an awesome alternative to google when I'm searching for files, since google searches for text, and sometimes ignores the "download" keyword.

I used this engine to an extent that I started to wish that I had this search engine next to google and wikipedia in my firefox search bar. I searched for a firefox addon, and even though I stumbled upon some rapidshare search addons, none of them were nearly as good as filecrop.

So, I decided to make my own filecrop search addon..., and I did! Now you can download it for use on your firefox!

DOWNLOAD

UPDATE: Instead of using this, you can simply use "Add to Search Bar" add-on for firefox. It's easier to use, and it supports all search engines.

Karakuri One-shot manga by Masashi Kishimoto Scanlation

Karakuri is Masashi Kishimoto's (Creator of NARUTO) first published manga. He sent it to Shueisha, and won the "Hop Step Award".

I always wanted to know how kishimoto's first work is like so I searched for this manga for a long time but I couldn't find any English translation. After I relized there's really no English translation I desperately contacted a MangaHelpers user, tethysdust, asking for a translation.

Surprisingly, she turned out to be a really nice person, and she translated it for me right away. I read it, and I liked it.

When I was searching for the translation, I noticed many people in forums and answer sites, requesting this manga. So when I got the translation, I thought I could scanlate it, and let all those people intrested in the manga, and generally in Masashi Kishimoto's work to read it.

This is my first scanltaion, so it's quality is not that good, and I may think I rushed some parts of it. If you like reading translation with the RAW manga, download the translation, if not read the scanlation.

HAVE FUN!

Note: The RAW is from RAW Paradise, which I believe is currently shut down.

Download:

Translation
Scanlation: (Mirror 1, Mirror 2)

UPDATE: The professional scanlation group "Red Hawk Scanlations" has scanlated Karakuri, and it's quality exceeds mine. (Original Post, Mirror 1, Mirror 2)

Personal Monthly Update #001

Okay. As I mentioned before, I'm using a new, more flexible daily program. One of the features of this program is that I write down everything I do. I add this data to my program later (It's a simple excel sheet), and use it as a feedback to decide what to do next, and also to improve the program itself.

Using this data, here's what I did last 4 weeks (GOOD, NORMAL,BAD):

9-Languages (1 hr):
I wanted to understand Japanese, so I could play Japanese games that aren't released in English. As much as I've learned, there's this huge barrier in the way of learning the language, and that's called Kanji. Fortunately, I've found some games that not only need no knowledge of Kanji, but they teach you how to read it. Like the sound of that? Here they are.

And Phantom Hourglass is one of 'em

8-Programming (3 hrs):
Time spent on any programming related work:
1- I learned about how emulators work (a tiny bit), also downloaded some emulator sources.
2-I've learned about FPS Engines.

Quake II shot

7-Game Misc. (13 hrs):
This is time I spent on miscellaneous stuff about gaming:
1-Downloaded some new Emulators.
2-Created a "Now Playing" list.
3-Downloaded some Reviews.

PSP Emulator, jpcsp

6-Writing (1 day):
Writing? You heard that right! I'm writing some kind of mini novel, and guess what? It's about games! The downside is that I'm writing it in my native language, so you're not gonna see it...

Yeah

5-STORY (1 day):
whas' dis? This is time I spent creating stories and stuff for a franchise I'm going to create a million years later... Well..., gotta be prepared.
I'm not gonna say anything about it for two reasons: It's a secret and it's pretty much formless right now...

SECRET

4-HAVE FUN! (3 days):
This is (obviously) time I spent having fun. Played "The Last Remnant" up to the third mission, plus a little bit of wii sports with one of my friends. Watched 36 anime episodes (mostly One Piece, Claymore, and Bleach), and read 7 manga chapters (best of them being 666 Satan).

Claymore

3-Game Develpment (4 days):
Finally! I started making some games..., or should I say some mods..., or maybe just simply missions? well, after all these years (2 I mean, 2 years), I gotta start from somewhere.

What am I designing? It's an "Operation Flashpoint" single mission. The game features an easy to use, yet hard to master mission editor. I created some missions 2 or 3 years before, but with this one, I'm creating a more complex mission while learning the basics. (The previous missions were really simple, really really simple missions, with no scripting at all)

It's not gonna be a real high quality mission, since I'm only beginning to learn how stuff work, but I can promise that high quality games WILL BE posted on this blog. Have patience..., patience.

OFP Mission Screenshot

2-Life Chores (1 week):
This is time I spend, doing stuff that I really don't want to do, but I just have to. That includes going to university, and of course, EATING!

My "Outfit"!

1-Personal Miscellaneous (1.5 week):
This is essentially time wasted. Let's see... 1.5 week??? that's 0.4 of my entire month. THIS IS NO GOOD!!!

To fix this, I have 2 plans for now:
1, is to reduce my sleeping time (it's about 8 hours a day now, I think I'll reduce that to 7 for now)
2, is to read a book called "TIME POWER", I found it on my dad's bookshelf, and thought it would be cool to read it.

Stuff I did in this time besides simply wasting times are these:
1-I got A LOT of info about animes, and created an excel chart to decide which ones to watch. You think I'm crazy? you just might be right...
2-Extracted some mp3s out of some anime openings.
3-Replaced my PC Fans. They were really noisy, really really noisy.

Anime!!!

Conclusion:
Even though I wasted almost half of my time, I'm still happy with the results. After all, these are all stuff that I haven't done in the past 2 years, so it's gonna get some time getting used to. The OFP mission should be ready in the next month, and that's it! No more fake promises.

Once I get efficient enough, I get to both play more, and also design more. So, See you until then,

HAVE FUN!

Picture of the Day:
RAGE

Who am I? What am I gonna do?

Hmmmm, It's been two months since i last blogged. I have to say, that most of my previous posts were complete utter BS. It was all about me doing something stupid and wasting time. Yeah, who wants to hear about that?

However, I thought that I could blog today, simply because a lot in my life has changed. Some of them are small, some of them are big. Some of them are good, some of them are bad.

First thing's first: let me re-introduce myself: I'm a sad guy ( a really, really sad guy) who just happens to lost his purpose of life. I lost it about 2 years ago. The only thing left for me to do in my life is to create a particular video-game. I've decided to make it when I was, like, four. First it was a cartoon (4) then it became a movie (10) then it became a video-game (15), and it has remained a video-game since.

The idea is simple: If I create this game sometime in my life, I've succeeded, and I'll die with a smile on my face. If I don't succeed in creating it, I've failed my whole life, and no other accomplishment is going to change that.

Now let's go on to the next part: All this time, I've been trying to learn how to create games. I started when I was 12 by creating scenarios for "Age of Empires 2" & "EMPIRE EARTH" (Awesome game). Then I made some maps with "Operation Flashpoint". At my highest point, I learned to make "Half-Life" mods. I learned mapping, texture-ing, and a little bit of modeling & programming. I did all that in just one year: One year of hard-work for someone like me that didn't know the meaning of such things as "vertex", "render", "texture", "bone", or "compile". In fact, all I knew was just a little bit of English.

Those were my glory days, days I remember with pride. However, they ended so quickly: Just one year after that, my parents thought that "computer is ruining my life". That was, because I was so obsessed with game design, I couldn't concentrate on studying anymore. To put my future "out of danger" my parents locked my PC in the basement, so I couldn't play/game design/do anything I like to do anymore. Then they said: "If you want to have a good future, stop wasting your time and start studying. I tried to explain that game design is not "wasting time" but they just wouldn't listen (and they still don't).

I didn't touch computer, games, and game design for 2 years. All I could do was to either waste time, or to study. "Studying" where I live is completely different from the meaning of studying in almost any other part of the world. Here, studying means: "try to memorize a particular test's answer, and then repeat what you just did another 1000 tests". We don't learn what a "node" in "graph" means. We just memorize a bunch of graph questions with their answer without having any idea what we're doing. I'M COMPLETELY SERIOUS.

Anyway, after the studying was finally done, I went to a university, just to realize that I've made one of the biggest mistakes in my life ( I had always thought that when we get in university, we start studying like the rest of the world. I got in and realized that it was the same BS studying as before. Learn unnecessary stuff, Memorize mathematics). Then something else happened that completely destroyed my life. (I'm not going to explain this one, I'll just say that this was the reason I lost my purpose of Life).

Here is hollow part of my life: I've lost all my goals, have no reason to live, no reason to wake up, no reason to walk, no reason to eat... I thought about suicide for a long time, to put myself out of this stupid misery. (If you really want to hear, it's the worst kind of pain, you feel "nothing", no happiness, no sadness, no anger, NOTHING. You just sit somewhere asking yourself: "when will all this end???") I quit the university I was accepted in, and started in a kinda worse university that was located in my home town. Just so I could skip all my classes, and sleep all day, so I wouldn't be thinking about my reason to exist, and what comes next.

And a whole year past just like that, I didn't really do anything, anything at all. Then comes the next and the final year (the one that just passed), I slowly recovered, and I decided that since I've lost the main reason for my life, I should be concentrating on my "other" reason to exist: DESIGNING GAMES! (I'm serious)

BUT, I was overly optimistic, I wanted to be the best of the best, So I said (I HAVE to play all the games that exist, so I would be a better designer. Obviously, I couldn't do that. So 1 whole year, I wasted time trying to become the most knowledgeable person in the gaming industry.

I would always believe that "It would only take an hour or two to read ALL the reviews of ALL the games that has been released in the past week; The truth was, it would take more than a week. But since I didn't want to accept defeat, I would always try to "READ THEM ALL" and after that, "PLAY THEM ALL".

Days passed by until one day (January 9, 2010 to be precise), I realized that I hadn't played ANY games at all for FIVE MONTHS. I've been "trying" to read game reviews instead. In that time, God knows how many games I could finish, and maybe even develop.

That, made me think "hey, obviously, you're doing something wrong". I decided to change my life-style and also my approach to reaching my goal (designing that particular game). My new daily program is centered around things that are important in my life, like gaming, and game designing, and other stuff.

I've used my program for a week now and it works perfectly, so from now on, you'll hear less BS and more actual posts, and they'll most likely be about the games I design. After all, that's the reason I created this blog.

So see you until then,
HAVE FUN!

PS:I fixed my X360, I'll probably upload an article about it. I also got FFXIII, hooray.

Picture of the Day:
Now Playing: The Last Remnant

Not reading reviews anymore, Change in my beliefs...

If you read my previous blogs, it's just about reading reviews... review this, review that, and so on...
It seemed like a good idea in the beginning (read reviews instead of playing them, conserve time), but as the time went by it became more & more stupid. Why? It was really time consuming, and no matter how I changed my plans it would take a lot of time to read a hell lot of game reviews. It was so time-consuming that it got in the way of actually playing games, let alone learning to design them...

Well, NO MORE! I just realized that it's been six months since I last played a game, and told myself: "hey! how much is this actually going to take???" and decided to overhaul my schedule.

That overhaul means that I will read at most 14 reviews per week. one in the morning, one in the afternoon. It doesn't matter that I won't be able to read all the reviews this way: they're not all that important. I've written a program fo myself, and I'll follow this program for the time being...

Changes in my beliefs:
(Red text represents further information, and you can skip it)

So what do you do when you want to reach a destinations?

Basic Belief: You move towards it, and you'll eventually get there.

My Belief: That's just too simplistic. Just when exactly is "eventually"? and what guarantees that you'll get there in the end?
I'm a logical guy (and a programmer), so when I want to get somewhere, I carefully plan my approach to it, I make a plan, and then follow it. I'll use facts (ie: the place you want to reach is 4 meters away), and logic (to make it there in 4 seconds, you have to move at a speed of 4 m/s) to create my plan.
I used to put a lot of thought into my plans, and then carefully follow them, I thought it's the best way to reach your destination, since it's based on facts & logic. (both of them are absolute, so you'll get an a plan that's "absolutely" the best)

However, I have to correct myself. Having a plan is absolutely better than not having one, But this approach is not efficient enough for me. So I have to modify it, in two ways.

01-Prioritize: This comes in handy when your plan is made up of different elements. In order to make the plan efficient, instead of following the plan instructions one by one, you'll have to choose which part of the plan plays a more major role in getting to your destination, and spend more time & attention on it.

Example: You want to go to a mall in a snowy day, the best logical plan is to wear something warm, get a car, use geometry to find the fastest route, and then move in the said route. This plan is made of three different elements. 1-warm clothing, 2-a car, 3-moving towards the mall. If you start following this plan, you need to put on some warm clothing. Now if somehow you couldn't find something warm enough, you wouldn't be able to follow your plan, and it will be useless. That's the same if you find out that your car doesn't start. That's when prioritizing comes into the picture: Your goal is reaching the mall, so moving towards it has the highest priority. Now while moving towards it, you'll want to stay healthy, so warm clothing comes next, and after that you'll want to save time so the car comes last. "Priority: reaching your goal> staying healthy > saving time". So if you really want to go to the mall, the most important thing you have to do is moving towards it so it has the highest priority. The next is keeping warm, so you'll look for warm clothing, and wear it "if you found it". If you didn't, you have to go outside without wearing something warm, since moving has a higher priority. The same goes to the car: you use it if you can, and if you can't you just walk there. Because this example plan was so simple (made of 3 elements), you can unconsciously plan something without putting much thought to it. However if your plans get more & more complex (a plan that's made of 50 elements), prioritizing plays a major role in it...

02-Feedback: By "Feedback" I mean "use a streaming input to continuously correct your output."
You use feed back in your everyday life: use this experiment to understand what I mean: put an object on a table, stay 1 meters away, and look where the object is. Now close your eyes and try to grab it. You'll most likely fail, and hit somewhere near the object, instead of grabbing it the way you intended.
So what does this mean? You know where the object is, so you create a plan for grabbing it. (stretch you arm about 1 meter, then put it down) You then execute your plan, but because your arms and brain have some faults, you are not able to execute your plan the way you intended to.
However when you normally want to grab something, you stretch your arm, your eyes see your hand, and give the input to the brain. your brain analyzes the picture and if you're moving your arm in the wrong direction, it will reconsider your arm's approach and send the new signals to your arm. This happens continuously, so you reform your plan continuously before you reach the object.
(You see the placement of your hands and the object, you create a route, move your hand in the direction you want for a very little bit, then you use the new picture captured by your eyes to create another route and move your hand in the new route for another little bit, when these actions are strung together, it seems like your hands are moving straight towards the object.

In this case, output is your plan, and input is your surrounding's events. so you constantly reform your plan based on current conditions. (Example: you're going to mall, you see that there's heavy traffic on your desired route, you change your plan and decide to go there from another route)

My Current Belief: So what do I do if my "destination" is "game designer"? I create a plan. I prioritize the important elements (it's designing mods for now), and I use the info I get from internet using reviews, news, game sales and popularity, and other info, as a feedback to continuously correct my plan's faults.

This approach certainly has it's faults, as I'm just a normal human and humans make a lot of mistakes. However I'll use this approach until I find a better one...

Picture of the day:
E74 has infected my X360, again

My problem with game reviews!

Okay, I skipped a week not blogging. It was because I was testing my anime watching program and it works awsome... It's just a program which tells you how many episodes of a particular anime you should watch based on date, but it has 3 major pros:
1- It makes sure that I won't run out of anime (for at least 4 years)
2- It makes sure that I have something new to do every 5 hours, so I will never get bored!
3- It makes sure that I won't spend a whole week just watching anime and not doing anything else (which happenned for Naruto & One Piece)

My plan to read "Game Reviews"

I wanted to become a game developer, so I figured playing lots of games might help me to have plenty of ideas, but I didn't have time to play all the games! So I decided to read game reviews instead of playing them to save time. However that proved to be impossible: The amount of games released each week is far more than I can handle!

I originally thought each review would take me 10 to 15 minutes to read (which it should) but instead, It usually takes me about an hour to read each review! This was because when I'm reading a review I also do three more things:
1- I Imagine the game in my mind.
2- I Think about the good aspects of each game and try to grasp the way they were created (what was the designer thinking when putting this particular feature into this game?)
3- I Try to find ways to improve the bad aspects of each game (what would I do to avoid the game's problems?)
Doing these were essential, because if I were not to do these, the whole "Read other game's reviews to improve yourself" idea would become nonsense.

After I relized that I can't read all the reviews of the games that are released,I decided to only read the reviews of the games that had an score more than 85% (gamerankings & gamespot).
I followed that plan for some time, but that plan had a major downside: I've originally planned to force myself to read the reviews of games with a score over 85, and then read other reviews however I liked. That turned into a "read more than 85s and let the rest pile up over each other" program, and It would stop me from reading reviews with scores below 85. I couldn't do that, because after all those reviews that I read, I relized that many awsome games get scores between 65 to 85 because of stuff I don't count as a game's downside, like "They're difficult for newcomers", "They're difficult to control", or "they have graphical glitches" (which will be fixed when you install the game's patches). On the other hand there were game that would get scores more than 90 that didn't deserve anything more than 75 or 80 (they get scores because they were "popular")

This made me take another approach: I would read all the game's reviews with scores more than 80, and I would read the rest compared to the amount of reviews I've read for the games with scores more than 80 (Example: for every 5 reviews with scores more than 80, I would force myself to read 3 reviews for games with scores over 75).
I followed that program for some weeks, but that program is also taking too much time.

Now, that anime program i wrote in c++ for myself, gave me an idea: I would write a program that would make sure i would read all kinds of reviews in a week, but would also make sure that I have time to do other stuff:
I know that it takes 1 hour for me to read each review, so I plan to read about 10 reviews a week. The program will ask how many new reviews I've downloaded this week, the total amount of reviews that I have stored on my computer, and today's date. Then the program will calculate how many new reviews I have to read, it would also devide these 10 reviews in different intervasl (how many revs more than 80? how many between 75 and 80 and so on...).
This program has 3 pros:
1- It makes sure that I efficiently choose what reviews to read
2- It would stay the same whether the week was crowded with games or it had 3 to 4 new games (like this week)
3- It makes sure that I have time to do other stuff while reading game reviews.

The program would probably be done in two weeks (I can't spend time on it this week, since I have other stuff ta do). I hope it helps me to make time for other things i want to do.

Reading reviews is important, but playing them is even more important, and designing them is way, way more important, for becoming a game developer.

That's all I have to say for now...
HAVE FUN!

Picture of the day:
Just read Psyren chapter 1

Dreamcast!!! YEAH!!!

Well, I didn't blog for two weeks (or more?).
It was probably because I had no time or that I didn't have access to internet.
Anyway I want to make this short so here it goes:
I got sick, I got better and went to a trip, then I found a good deal on a dreamcast and bought it (YEAH, finally. Wanted one for more than ... 10 years!). Then I found a hell lot of anime and bought them all. found a site to download manga from. Created a very dense anime watching, manga reading weekly program, then wrote a c++ program to tell me what anime and manga I am able to see\read. Then went to internet, got new games (fortunetely they were few due to holidays) and now I'm back on my stupid program. (Which becomes more stupid each time I fail to finally complete it. I haven't played video games for 5 months! That does it, I'm gonna finish this thing no matter what in approx 1 month.)
Needless to say, I also did a hell lot of other stuff in this time, but I don't feel like blogging about it right now.
Stay Safe &
HAVE FUN!

Picture of the day:
I got a Dreamcast!