World of Darkness session 6 overview

Well the fight went alright barring the fact that our Mage with the life magic was basically glued to the Giest healing him. Course that is partly our fault seeing as if he would die then he just comes right back so we send him through the doors first. The big fun was the boss fight though. This guy had stolen a giant hammer artifact the Vamp prince had locked away to protect people from it. It basically created paradoxes almost constantly. Lucky for us though one of the things that happened was it shorted out the magic shield the guy had on so we could finally attack him with some chance of success. My gun did some decent damage after that and we managed to take the guy down.

World of Darkness session 5 overview

Tomorrow is going to be the 6th session so I guess I should overview last weeks session. In short nothing happened. Sure the local Vamp Prince's stronghold was taken and sure we learned that the Prince is a mind controlling type of Vamp but tomorrow we actually go in and clear the stronghold of who ever is there. Last week we acquired a quest this week we do things.

Where has all my time gone?

Over the week not only have I not started learning C yet but I have also not slept for a majority of it. First its hunting season then  Every Single Class in school has decided I need to have big projects due soon. I have C scheduled in for tomorrow I think but that's not for sure then on Sunday once again I will be playing World of Darkness. Tomorrow meaning after I get to bed then wake up so I may end up in Sunday being tomorrow but whatever.

World of Darkness session 4 overview

     Today not much got done. The one player that had a cop character did not show up today and all that happened was we met the guy who founded the Mage group we are a part of. The dude used to be a scientist that studied DNA. He had found the part that represented a person being a Mage and made a device to find it before he knew what it meant. One night Vamps stole it and later on he Awakened and realized what that meant so gather some other Mages and made a new device so they could stop the Vamps. Other than learning this and some work on a few things not much else happened. Next week we have the promise of combat and other exciting things to do.

Why my sleep has suffered

     I just finished reading all of Ascii Dreams archive up to present. I accomplished this in a relatively short time span by not sleeping when I should be so now maybe I can get some shut eye. Anyway Ascii Dreams is the blog of Andrew Doull the creater of the Angband variant Unangband which I gladly encourage anyone who likes roguelikes to play. The blog itself contains many articles which are of great use to any aspiring roguelike creator along with various other interesting tidbits.

GROGNARDIA: A Chainmail Oddity

Over at Grognardia today James Maliszewski posted about how in Chainmail, magic weapons where listed under Law but not under any of the other alignments. I made a comment though now that I look it over it seems a little disjointed. My main point though is that Law and Chaos are not Good and Evil in the days before there was Good and Evil alignments. Law is just another way of saying order and I say it takes order to make objects. The example I use in my comment is "I can hit iron with a hammer all day but that wont make a sword let alone a Damascus steel blade." and I stand by it. It takes more then a chaotic force can provide to make quality items.
Another thing is that a Magic weapon takes time to make. A good blade is not a day long project, the now famous Japanese swords could take between two weeks to many months to make and required multiple people just to forge them. If it took that much just for a single high quality sword to be made what must it take for a truly magical blade to be made? Do you really think that a group of chaotic people could truly stay focused on a sword long enough and not squabble with each other to complete such a weapon when we may be talking years of time to complete just one sword?

I will try to learn C

Either this week or early next I will start learning C. I have learned some C# in the past but from what I have read about the different languages I think that I would benefit from learning plain old C. Also a lot of Roguelikes are made using C and many of the tutorials use C so it will help me because of all the resources for it. Now this may not seem like exciting news or something that needs me blogging about it but by doing this I can not just put it off till "next week" over and over again which I may have done because I am an epic level procrastinator.

World of Darkness session 3 overview

    This weeks session went well. Not much got done though we where able to go and see the 2 Vamp's trial by the local Prince who is apparently the one who met us and took them away after the giant sword Vamp guy beat them up. The 2 criminals where hung upside down and gagged then their crimes where read to them and once they where all read the prince asked them if they had anything to say...   being gagged of course made the chances of that nil. Then they where tortured for a couple hours until everyone but my group and the Prince and bodyguard left. The Prince went to an alcove that would not be in the sun to witness the death by sun of the 2 criminals.
    Not much other than that happened though somehow we all ended up making sandwiches to see who did better in the time before the trial. I only had 2 success but was better then some, though the winner was  5 success. The session was fun and many jokes where had out of character but most where in jokes or situational and we did a lot of Magic the gathering in between it all.

Its not Dungeons and Dragons but...

    So tomorrow  I am playing World of Darkness as a Mage. Now I personally tend towards Dungeons and Dragons but I can never find a campaign that I can join. Its actually ironic because I was able to join the WoD campaign because they where just starting it after finishing a D&D campaign. My group consists of 3 Mages and a Geist for some reason not that I am complaining.
    I was not originally going to be able to join it but circumstances  allowed me to slip in. They had already done the first game session. Two of them went to a bar with the usual background color plus a very well described npc(Very well described, as if she had stats or something!). The third was a cop who was just off giving tickets or something. The action started when a Vamp appeared in the corner of the bar and another came in the front and promptly plugged the pre-Geist in the back of the head with some bullets. The Very well described npc then shot that vamp and managed to be incredibly lucky for the whole of the fight. The Vamp from the corner preceded to gut the pre-Geist with his claws while the pre-Mage found out stun guns do not work on Vamps. The Cop shows up then with another npc who is also Very well described and decked out in full riot gear. The Very well described cop then preceded to kill steal knocking both the Vamps out with his baton even though he only did maybe 2-3 bashing each.
    Before this I had not even known any of the rules or anything about WoD but it seemed fun so over the intervening week I learned how to play by reading through not only the base settings book but also the Mage and the Geist books as well. Last Sunday I went back to listen in on them playing again but the player with a cop was going to be late so they let me use the Mage character I had made for fun till he got there but when he got there no one said anything and now I am in the group.
    For those wondering how last weeks game went, what happened was I started as a Forest Ranger and was attacked by Vamp Minions but the other players showed up at the scene right when I got knocked out. They where doing good till a couple of Vamps showed up, one with a gun and another with an axe. Things where not going so well though the healer was able to get me back up on my feet till Another Vamp showed up who was giant sized with some weird sword called a Zweihander and started cleaving the enemy Vamps. The fight ended and another Vamp showed up who persuaded us to let them take the 2 knocked out Vamps so they could be properly "dealt with" for going against them.
    A specific group of Vamps are the bad guys and the plot is that this group of Mages that me and the other players joined as well as the bad Vamps have devices that let them detect Mages about to awaken so the Vamps try to kill them while we try to save them.  Also the 2 vamps in the first session and the second are the same ones, they had just managed to disappear when our backs where turned in the bar.

Because I had nothing better to do

I started rereading the webcomic Angband - Tales from the Pit a couple hours ago...


I'm still reading now and probably won't stop till I finish it. Good comic about Angband, I just need to learn to stop starting these things so late.

Bitmaps in VB.Net or What I threw together in a couple minutes

I have been playing a game called Illyriad lately. Now what does this have to do with VB.Net you ask? Not much until you get to the map. In-game you can only see a 13 by  13 chunk of the map at a time so I collected all the data needed and made my own map of the Island my Alliance controls. The map works fine but I wanted to make one big image instead of a lot of tiles put together so I threw something together in Visual Basic 2010.

First I needed to get the separate pictures into the program as bitmaps and make the background color(white) transparent. Because there where a lot I thew them all in an array called Img(). For my example I will have only 2 for simplicity.

        Dim Img(2) as Bitmap
        Img(0) = Image.FromFile("C:\wherever\image\stored.png")
        Img(1) = Image.FromFile("C:\wherever\image\stored2.png")
        Img(0).MakeTransparent(Color.White)
        Img(1).MakeTransparent(Color.White)

Then I put together the map data and stuck that in another array as well. This one called map(,)

        Dim map(,) As Integer = New Integer(2, 2) {{0,1,0,1},{1,0,1,0}}

Now I made some variables that would be needed, including a new bitmap, mapimg, to contain the final image as well as a new Graphics called gra.

        Dim x As Integer
        Dim y As Integer
        Dim mapimg As New Bitmap(200, 100)
        Dim gra As Graphics = Graphics.FromImage(mapimg)

Finally I use some For loops to cycle through all of the map positions, saved the mapimg as map.png, and made it display a message to denote that it was finished seeing as my actual code took a lot longer than the example would.

        For x = 0 To 1
            For y = 0 To 3
                gra.DrawImage(Img(map(x, y)), y * 50, x * 50)
            Next
        Next
        mapimg.Save("C:\whereever\youwant\map.png")
        MessageBox.Show("Done!")

Now you can not tell from the example but the images overlap in my map slightly. The final product of this code ended up as one big picture all together: My Map Complete

How it all began

I have been thinking of starting a blog for a while. This is the crystallization of many events leading up to this moment and I hope that it does not end up failing. The big events are simple though.

1. I needed somewhere ostensibly public to put things I plan to do so that I stop procrastinating about them and feel that I need to do them because "others" would know
2. If I do not write stuff now when I need to write something I would be out of practice because writing is a skill and practice makes perfect
3. People who know stuff may find my blog when I post a problem and answer it
4. My attention span for stuff on the average is maybe a week so I hope this ends up allowing me to keep at things till completion
5. Finally Why Not? 

Anyway I guess this is the first step on a long road and as Yoda said "Do or Do not, There is no Try!".