Hello and Happy New Year
ByJanuary 1st, 2006
Let me start by saying Hello again. It, of course, has been a while
since I've posted anything here or on the message boards. Now that
the holiday season has passed us once again, I will hopefully have
a little more free time. I'm not saying that I'll spend said free
time updating this website, but at least there will be more free
time :).
The reason I'm posting today is because although at work we don't have the day off, I have been fighting a crappy cold since Friday, so I took the day off to rest. I'm now extremely bored, yet don't feel like doing anything. I don't even want to sleep. I do have this crazy pain reliever from when I had my wisdom teeth taken out that I'm sure would make the sleeping process much easier. However, I think I'll hold off for something like unbearable back pain.
I visited ArsTechnica for the first time in a long time today. The first article on the page was about Coldplay's new album and it's advanced copy protection software. I'll admit that I own a Coldplay CD, but I'll simply do without for this one.
Ok I'm bored again, good luck on your next search for something to do. Ohhh! Check this site out, it will make you laugh! Thank Willow for that one.
The reason I'm posting today is because although at work we don't have the day off, I have been fighting a crappy cold since Friday, so I took the day off to rest. I'm now extremely bored, yet don't feel like doing anything. I don't even want to sleep. I do have this crazy pain reliever from when I had my wisdom teeth taken out that I'm sure would make the sleeping process much easier. However, I think I'll hold off for something like unbearable back pain.
I visited ArsTechnica for the first time in a long time today. The first article on the page was about Coldplay's new album and it's advanced copy protection software. I'll admit that I own a Coldplay CD, but I'll simply do without for this one.
Ok I'm bored again, good luck on your next search for something to do. Ohhh! Check this site out, it will make you laugh! Thank Willow for that one.
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New Gallery Page!
ByJanuary 7th, 2006
After many sessions of whining from Willow, I finally made the time
to fix the gallery page. You may remember that a while back I
introduced Dueling Monkeys Galleries 2.0, a custom built gallery
based on XML that I wrote in an effort to better familarize myself
with XML and it's various applications. Geek talk aside, I just
didn't finish it. I really hate doing that, but I'm awful good at
it (gallery, movie exchange, im client, message board upgrades,
etc.).
So, for the galleries, I decided to go with the very popular yet horribly unoriginally named Gallery (version 2). It works great, and allows for captions, comments, easy management, searching, and a whole lot more features. I spent today trimming out most of those cool features, but we may or may not add some in on a per request basis. I did a fairly quick yet very ugly hack on the default theme to make it fit our Dueling Monkeys theme.
Those that use Firefox should be good to go, but unfortunately people who are forced (or for some reason still use) Internet Explorer, things aren't going to be perfect. Because of the nature of our site design, we have a limited viewing area for images. Most of the photos we have will fit in our window, but Internet Explorer decides to put scrollbars around the photos if they are even slightly too big to fit, even if they appear otherwise. It beats the alternative, trust me. Just click that previous link and save yourself. I don't have access to a Mac, so if it looks absolutely horrible in Safari, please let me know and I'm sorry.
Bare with us as we migrate our images to the new gallery, as well as clean up some things that just don't belong on the site.
So, for the galleries, I decided to go with the very popular yet horribly unoriginally named Gallery (version 2). It works great, and allows for captions, comments, easy management, searching, and a whole lot more features. I spent today trimming out most of those cool features, but we may or may not add some in on a per request basis. I did a fairly quick yet very ugly hack on the default theme to make it fit our Dueling Monkeys theme.
Those that use Firefox should be good to go, but unfortunately people who are forced (or for some reason still use) Internet Explorer, things aren't going to be perfect. Because of the nature of our site design, we have a limited viewing area for images. Most of the photos we have will fit in our window, but Internet Explorer decides to put scrollbars around the photos if they are even slightly too big to fit, even if they appear otherwise. It beats the alternative, trust me. Just click that previous link and save yourself. I don't have access to a Mac, so if it looks absolutely horrible in Safari, please let me know and I'm sorry.
Bare with us as we migrate our images to the new gallery, as well as clean up some things that just don't belong on the site.
New Gallery Page
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Look, I can doodle
By Mike DalyJanuary 28th, 2006
It's getting close to my bedtime, so I'll try to make this
quick.
The recent Halo party was some good times. Of course we forgot to take pictures, but at least we have some record of what went down. Take a look for yourself. Needless to say, we drank a lot of beer.
I've actually been doing a little bit of modeling and texture work at work, but I don't have the time to organize it such that it would make a presentable screenshot. Textures don't really make for interesting pictures to fill a gallery with, if you know what I mean. However, I did play around with a few things at home that I can show screenshots of. Check these out:
Unfortunately, these don't look like much on their own in screenshots. These are effects I made to try out with the level editor I'm working on at work. In order to see them in their full glory, you really need to see them animated and against a more interesting background but that is not really possible to just throw up in the gallery. Oh well, I do what I can.
Also, I sat down at the tablet today and did some doodling. I wanted to create a simplistic and generic bipedal character that I could model and animate for use at work. Obviously I didn't get to the modeling part, but at least I have some fun doodles to show for it. Check it out. My favorite part is the mischevious devil head at the top.
I also went through and rearranged some of the galleries today. I hadn't realized that we still had a bunch of pictures laying around that were only in the old galleries and hadn't been added to the new system yet, so I took it upon myself to set them up. Also, the paintbrush link at the top of the page now finally links to the art gallery instead of the gallery root directory. If you've got a little free time, why don't you poke around and see if you find anything interesting?
On one final note, I'm sorry I don't make updates with pictures and stuff more often. I really would like to see the site being more active like it used to. I would at least like to see myself write more stuff just for the purpose of archiving what is going on in my life. In order to fulfill the latter desire and to give a lame excuse for the infrequency of my updates, I'd like to point out that I'm very very busy at work these days. Most of the time, my workplace is able to avoid the stereotypical work hours you hear about from the game industry, but lately, I haven't been so lucky. The hours are really starting to add up, and I'm going in on weekends pretty frequently. It probably won't let up for another two months or so either.
On the bright side, I am able to fit in a few games every once in a while. I played Mutant Storm Reloaded one day and got a score in single player adventure mode that ranked me at 91 in the world! I've already dropped to 121 by now, but still, I'm pretty proud of that.
Here is your random link of the day: the beautiful Portfolio of Art Director and Matte Painter Raphael Lacoste.
The recent Halo party was some good times. Of course we forgot to take pictures, but at least we have some record of what went down. Take a look for yourself. Needless to say, we drank a lot of beer.
I've actually been doing a little bit of modeling and texture work at work, but I don't have the time to organize it such that it would make a presentable screenshot. Textures don't really make for interesting pictures to fill a gallery with, if you know what I mean. However, I did play around with a few things at home that I can show screenshots of. Check these out:
Unfortunately, these don't look like much on their own in screenshots. These are effects I made to try out with the level editor I'm working on at work. In order to see them in their full glory, you really need to see them animated and against a more interesting background but that is not really possible to just throw up in the gallery. Oh well, I do what I can.
Also, I sat down at the tablet today and did some doodling. I wanted to create a simplistic and generic bipedal character that I could model and animate for use at work. Obviously I didn't get to the modeling part, but at least I have some fun doodles to show for it. Check it out. My favorite part is the mischevious devil head at the top.
I also went through and rearranged some of the galleries today. I hadn't realized that we still had a bunch of pictures laying around that were only in the old galleries and hadn't been added to the new system yet, so I took it upon myself to set them up. Also, the paintbrush link at the top of the page now finally links to the art gallery instead of the gallery root directory. If you've got a little free time, why don't you poke around and see if you find anything interesting?
On one final note, I'm sorry I don't make updates with pictures and stuff more often. I really would like to see the site being more active like it used to. I would at least like to see myself write more stuff just for the purpose of archiving what is going on in my life. In order to fulfill the latter desire and to give a lame excuse for the infrequency of my updates, I'd like to point out that I'm very very busy at work these days. Most of the time, my workplace is able to avoid the stereotypical work hours you hear about from the game industry, but lately, I haven't been so lucky. The hours are really starting to add up, and I'm going in on weekends pretty frequently. It probably won't let up for another two months or so either.
On the bright side, I am able to fit in a few games every once in a while. I played Mutant Storm Reloaded one day and got a score in single player adventure mode that ranked me at 91 in the world! I've already dropped to 121 by now, but still, I'm pretty proud of that.
Here is your random link of the day: the beautiful Portfolio of Art Director and Matte Painter Raphael Lacoste.
Comments