After a long nothing-to-report period, I've finally got a new space wallpaper to show for it. It's not trying to be a complicated one like previous wallpapers, and it's more of another shot at using Terragen than anything else. So it's simplicity just means that there's less of a chance of me to screw it up :)

• Wallpapers - A Tear In The Night Sky

Aside from that, development on Red Horizon has been pretty slow these passed months. Just recently, I've been helping one of the JOAL (Java bindings for OpenAL) developers try to figure-out an issue in the framework, which was preventing Java programmers from using OpenAL's EFX extensions (think advanced mixing and effects for OpenAL). The results of which have been positive, and I hope my assistance can help other Java programmers be able to use this feature in the future.

There was also C&C3, which kept me away from making updates to Red Horizon. Nothing like a good sidetrack to keep you going eh?

Bah, only now did I find-out that the link to e-mail me on the left-hand side wasn't working! Thanks to JG from Florida for letting me know that there were no e-mail links on my website :) (if you're reading this now JG, I'm creating those savegames you requested, and will have them ready for you sometime this weekend)

So that link is obviously fixed now, what else is there to say? Oh yeah, Nyerguds, the one responsible for several great C&C patches/fixes for The First Decade - has requested I make a Dune II SHP converter (create Dune II SHPs from, say, a PCX file). What use is a SHP converter for such an old game? Well, the original C&C's mouse cursors were built on that format, and he hopes to use such a tool to create custom cursors for his C&C total conversion.

I was very surprised to find-out that nobody else has done this before, so I decided to step-up to the challenge. It's bit of a sidetrack from the current stream of Red Horizon development, but I always did intend to provide a small toolset as a part of the overall project.

From a program design perspective, I welcome the addition because it then forces me to develop more separation between what used to be such tightly-coupled program modules. And so far, it has helped me to create a more robust set of file objects; ones that support both saving and loading, which will be of great help in the future.

Now I've managed to get units to show-up on the screen, and to make them selectable (pics). Doing so has raised some challenges (not surprising, since I've never programmed a game before), but it's becoming more of a test of my aspect/object-oriented design skills, rather than programming sounds and graphics.

One thing I've been seeing a lot of recently is blog sites. I've even included a few of my friends' blogs to the links on the right. As well as reading their content, I've been checking-out how they're structured because I've been considering expanding this site's program to restructure the news portion in a similar way. It won't be too hard as my web host - interAdvantage, who have been very good to me considering my slightly different website requirements - includes several features in their standard plans which I can use. It would be kinda cool to finally use some more of what I pay for too. My only worry is that it'll detract from the rest of my free time, and I'll admit right now that I don't have a lot of that.

Another free-time killer on the horizon is a new space pic. I'm aiming to create something along the lines of an aurora, which will give me some reason to start using Terragen again.

Lastly, I'll need to expand the Stuff section to include some e-mails that I've been writing. Sounds rather mundane (I mean, e-mails, c'mon), but I've been writing them in a manner consistent with some of the books I've been reading during my commute between work and home (it's a long train ride otherwise). The recipients have been pretty happy with their narrative style and content, so I'll be putting them up here to archive them, and for future reference.

Happy New Year everyone! To welcome 2007, I'm half-way through my Christmas / New Year holiday, and enjoying every little bit of being able to do nothing at all. Not that I'm sitting on my ass eating chips all day, but it just feels good to not do anything which might have adverse consequences.

On the Red Horizon front, I've managed to get streaming animations and sounds (and thus, videos), so watching/playing any of the vids/sounds doesn't suck-up 200+ MB of RAM like it used to. So if you were to run this program and expect it to play C&C Red Alert, it would:

• display the title screen
• play the intro video
• play the 'select a mission' animation
• play the first mission briefing video
• display the first mission map

And that's it.

The maps are only what I had in the last screenshot I posted: terrain, ore/gems, fences, trees. I haven't yet got around to creating an actual unit you can move around. And to think that when I started out, I thought I'd have a moving unit within a few months...

I'm also thinking of making whatever source code I have available for download sometime this week, before I finish my holiday and have to go back to work. When I first announced this project, some of you expressed interest in getting the source, if even just to see how I write my Java code.

I've now got animations working as a part of actual game engine (I've had animations working for some months outside of normal gameplay circumstances) and am now debating how I'm going to present them. I mean, I could take screenshots, but still shots of animations and/or videos kinda defeats the purpose of showing them off. If I do decide to make little video screen captures, I'll also have to up my hosting to the next level; I'm almost out of space :(

Minor issues aside, I hope everyone has a good Christmas this year. I know I will; no work for a couple of weeks!

Although work has still been hectic, I've managed to find time again for Red Horizon. So I'm starting to build the screenshots section for it, and then I'll add some more recent pictures of development progress.

In Red Alert related news, I've been helping-out with some of the graphical aspects of someone's mod. I've mainly been converting icon pictures into useable icons for in-game, but just recently I've also created a title screen. The mod's thread can be found here (my picture can be found on the last pages of that thread).

Whoa! WTF?! I just got the notice that my old hosting plan (the one I had before moving to where I am now) has been terminated. About time too, 'cause I stopped paying for it and asked to close that account several months ago! Anyway, I thought I'd make sure that it was just the hosting, not the domain name part, that was cancelled, and made a trip to my site. And what should I get but some error saying that ultraq.net.nz cannot be found! So I went to check-up on my domain name account (which is still managed by the guys who just terminated my hosting account), and the entries pointing to name servers, and other things were all gone!

Sorry to get all technical on you, but I had to re-create all those NS, CNAME, and A records so that people can once again find my site. In summary, everything's back to normal, but I'm just a little bit more pissed-off than I was a few days ago >:|

Another small update, but this time on the state of Red Horizon. The small subsection dedicated to this project is pretty much done, but will only be a (very long lived) temporary home. It really is a mess, especially the progress section. For something of this magnitude, I should create a whole new look-and-feel subsite using that 1 subdomain I get with my hosting plan :P

As for progress on the program, I've got pretty much everything done EXCEPT gameplay! So it installs, starts, shows some options, but when you hit play... nothing happens! When you hit the close button of that 'nothing happens' phase, it shuts-down, hopefully taking with it all of the resources that it took. I'm pretty confident that it does, but I should write some small aspect profiler to verify that.

In other news, my entry for the art competition didn't receive a pedestal position, so I guess that's that :(

Still working on Red Horizon and the section for it. Firstly, I want to get the first milestone release done: a showcase of my ability to display the old file formats of Red Alert & Tiberium Dawn.

All of the file formats are now readable and playable, but I want to add some optimizations, especially the videos. Just yesterday, a 4MB VQA video file took 200MB of memory to play it! While I had a good laugh at that, I know that is totally unacceptable and so have begun to work on it. As of today, that same video now takes 100MB of memory. Hopefully, after implementing some sort of 'streaming-content' system, the memory usage should drop to somewhere in the order of less-than 20MB.

And when that's done, I'll put the project on hold to start work on my entry for that art competition I wanted to enter (link on the right). It's about time I created a new picture anyway :)

I've been working on the new Red Horizon addition to my website, as made evident by the new links in the navigation bar to the left. If you investigate these new pages, you'll soon see that lots of it is still to be completed.

As well as these new links on the left, I'm trialing a to-do list and current progress list in the Stuff bar on the right. People keep asking me what I'm doing now, or if there are any updates on this or that, so hopefully this will answer that question. If it doesn't, well I'm at least hoping that it will inform others that I'm only a 1-person shop spending little time on his hobbies and more time getting distracted by other things, like Halo ;)

Woohoo! Graduation ceremony just last night :)

In website and project related news, I've made some more progress with my Red Alert revival project (under the working title of 'Red Horizon'). As well as being able to read content from the MIX files that contain most of the game's sounds and graphics, I've also been able to display the graphics of units and structures to a rendering context using OpenGL.

A section of my website dedicated to Red Horizon info and progress is still in the works.

I wanted to announce my latest Command & Conquer related project, but didn't yet have a section of my site dedicated to it. So I made a post here about it until I can get around to creating a small 'about' page for it. In short, it's a programming project with goals very similar to the now defunct FreeCNC, but if you haven't heard of that either, then go to the forum post I made about it to get an understanding.

With PlanetCNC's recent facelift, the Red Alert Tech Center is currently in a little transitional phase with regards to hosting. Even the link I used in the last news post to the RATC is already old! So at the moment, the only place serving Campaign Ultraq 2.0b, is, err, right here.

I've also got a new space picture to add to my gallery. I get the feeling that it's not as 'in-your-face spectacular' as the other ones, but I'll still put it up anyway:

• Wallpapers - Safety In Light

I'll upload this picture to my deviantArt gallery sometime soon, and I'll upload a print version of another of my earlier pictures at around the same time.

If you're reading this, then your DNS has been updated and now points to my latest host for my website :)

After the debacle with my previous host and their JSP hosting issues (their short answer about whether I can get JSP hosting fixed: NO!), I've finally moved on to a host that can supply those services. But what does that mean for you? Probably nothing at all :P

This whole migration to JSPs was both a learning experience, and to make maintaining my website much easier for me. But that doesn't mean you've gained nothing out of it. Firstly, the space wallpapers are now available at maximum JPG quality (the ones via the links to the various resolutions, not the display image). Secondly, I've been working on adding a few walkthroughs for some of the more difficult missions in my campaign. If you go to the Campaign - Missions page, you can now find that some of those missions names have become links! Give 'em a click, you know you want to ;)

(I've used 3 smileys in this news post alone; I must be in a good mood)

Looks like I'll have to wait a bit for my hosts to fix their Tomcat/JSPs problem. In all honesty, I didn't expect instant results 'cause it is Christmas; everyone is entitled to their holiday. But after that, then I go medieval on them ;) So I'll have to maintain ye olde HTML files for just a little bit longer. Either way, welcome to the new home for my website. To celebrate, I've got another space wallpaper to share with y'all:

• Wallpapers - The Path Of Angels

OK, so I didn't make this wallpaper to celebrate the move to my new domain, it just happened to be finished now. Once again, it was inspired by very strong elements in my life. But worry not, the theme isn't sad or emo this time.

I've also got myself a deviantArt account. To visit it, you can click on the link to the right under the 'More of me' header. Alternatively, you can type ultraq.deviantart.com into your browser.

Merry Christmas everybody! :D

Mwuahahah, HOT domain name ACTION! http://www.ultraq.net.nz/

There's nothing there yet, just the front page acting as a place holder until I sort every other little detail out. Apart from just a domain name and hosting, I've been given a tonne of other technologies to play around with, the most interesting one for me probably being JSPs. With the extra space, processing power, and general stuff, I'm gonna investigate the extra things I've always wanted to do, before making the final move to my new home.

I've just been re-arranging some content on this site as the stuff for me to watch over just becomes more numerous. The most noticeable change is the assigning of the Wallpapers section to be a subgroup of Artwork. The most un-noticeable change is the biggest one: the re-writing of the JavaScript that is used to display the content. Hopefully there shouldn't be any broken links, and any that were caused by the new scripts I have caught. If there are some dead links leading to pages that look like there should be something going on, it would be really nice if you would let me know. Contact e-mail address is on the left, where it has always been :)

Keeping everything at Brinkster in-synch with my local copy has always been difficult. Trying to get by without FTP isn't easy, and that upload interface of Brinkster's isn't top-notch either. But hey, it was all free.

So, as a Christmas present to myself, I'll be moving the site on to bigger things (ie: a paid service). Goodbye ads, and hello convenience!

After seeing my friend update his own website (Jandal's Webpage), his layout reminded me to finally put up links on my page. Just like him, I thought I'd just dedicate my right sidebar to the links instead of making a page for it. I'm really not sure what the hell to put up there, so I just found myself adding links to places that I find myself in quite often. Although, if I truly continued along that path, I'd end up putting links to several - other - random - places, as well one to where you can find the new Netscape Browser.

(was that too obvious? lol?)

So in amongst all the reading, the playing computer games, and free time, I've managed to create another drawing. Loosely inspired by a view from a balcony and some shiny lights, it's a huge departure from my usual drawings of people:

• Coloured - Boundaries Of Heaven

In other stuff, a computer game I'm playing nowadays is a combat flight simulator (my first since 1993's Strike Commander, yikes!) called Falcon 4.0: Allied Force. Can you believe: 30 training missions and a 700+ page manual? I'm not kidding, but seeing at how realistic this game is made, I'm not all that surprised now. There really is a lot to learn, and all I've learnt with arcade-style action games (FPS anyone?) has no place in this game: I'm a total n00b here. It's graphics are pretty sub-par by today's standards, but it's not a game you buy for the pretty textures.

And I've also gone and got myself a Myspace profile, lol. If I'm going to continue along these lines, I may find myself a deviantART profile too; that place is primarily for artists.

Only a weekend has passed, but already I'm taking full advantage of my free time. A drawing I've been sitting on for a few months (but put on hold due to priority university commitments) has finally been completed:

• Coloured - The Red Head

With only 3 weeks until I start some HOT full-time work ACTION, I'm already filling my available time with some of my old hobbies. Reading books, playing some downloaded mods of computer games I already have, maybe even learning another tune on that guitar or piano. I've also got a couple more drawings, except most of them are still ideas, not just put-on-hold sketches like the one above. Oh yeah, and without the stress of classes, I've actually been able to remember my dreams again! Hahaha, oh wonderful days.

As promised, an update to my Red Alert campaign: links to the forum thread for support and downloads have been updated in all places in this website. There's not a helluva lot new with it, and if you've already finished Campaign Ultraq 2.0, then you're not missing-out on anything new by skipping this download. But this will be the version that I'll submit to PlanetCNC, and the one I'll support from now on.

In other news, 4 years of university has finally come to a close. w00t! ;)