Aegir’s Rantings

I’m getting sick of comment spam. I’m getting sick of Wordpress. I’m going to soon be removing wordpress and swapping to a hand-written format. Something that an RSS reader can read aswell…

School is over. I’m 18. I’m working at the Adelaide University starting January 2nd. My hair is long and in a half-arsed pony-tail.

And now, for the more verbose version.

I haven’t really blogged about my life in a bloody long while, so I’m here to rectify that.

School has finally finished, 13 years of my compulsory education (Wasn’t legally compulsory after year 9, but tell that to my parents) over. And what do I have to show for it? an 8 out of 20 in Politics (Skipped the major project), an 11 out of 20 for CCNA3/4 (I’m FUCKING PISSED OFF about that, I was one of three in the entire class who consistantly scored higher than a C the entire year, my reports and practicals were a fuck load better than a good deal of the class aswell, and I actually DID all the work unlike other students. To have an ‘11′ thrown back at me is a fucking joke.), and a 9 out of 20 for IT Studies (Skipped the major project for fun and profit). Atleast I got all the SACE points for my yr12 subjects, but LO AND BEHOLD, none of the sace points went in this year for the seccond year of my traineeship (Should be two subjects worth of Group 3 VET/Embedded sace points), and I’m STILL missing a point from last year. So technically while I’ve passed my subjects at the ASMS to a degree that’ll get me my SACE (Oh, I got a D for politics for the school assessment, C for IT and B for CCNA3/4, so I’m fine there), the sheer fucking inability for Hamilton High, the ASMS and PEER to liason between each other and handle things has resulted in me not getting those points I am entitled to, that I worked my fucking arse off for. So now next year I’m going to have to, after work hours, chase down various twits and get my sace points so I can get my fricking certificate to say that I have actually FINISHED Year 11 and 12.

Useless mob of fuck puppets.

On the other hand my traineeship has gone bitchingly well, I’m up for my last work placement of the traineeship, which starts January the 2nd, my last placement before my full apprenticeship starts. Someone from Adelaide University ITS rang up the placements lady from PEER asking for a third year apprentice, she told them that would be impossible. I can only imagine that would be since most third year apprentices would be settled in at a company now for the long haul. She did however manage to sell me to him, explaining my traineeship and also telling him that I have experiance with Cisco devices. That certainly paid off, I rang the guy at the Uni back and organized an interview time with him. Printed off my CV and my CCNA1/2 certificates and went in for the interview, which went quite well. The guy was looking for someone for 4-6 months, possibly longer. They handle all sorts of stuff over at the uni, and are mostly involved with configuration and moving equipment around, fixing it when it breaks, setting up things after the data contractors have run all their copper cabling. So it looks like I’ll get some good exposure to the other end of the biz. Oh, and yeah, I got the position, I start after new years. So despite yr12 and SACE going sour, not managing to fit in time to finish CCNA3/4, I’ve still landed a job in the field I want.

Screw school, I win teh game anyway.

Had my 18th birthday on the 9th of December, was incredibly rocking, and that’s erm, about all I have to really say. Had some friends over, watched some anime, listened to music, laughed at Dimmu Borgir music videos, did a lot of staff twirling and showing my friends who were all very curious about it. Drank alcohol, the usual kind of thing for me.

Except now I have to fricking well buy Callum an expensive birthday present, he bought me a fucking $80 bottle of whiskey and a set of glasses which would have been about 20 or 30 dollars. Screw it, I’ve got a gift in mind for his 18th this month, but it’ll have to be late, I won’t have money till I start working again.

I’ve been on my L plates for a while now, I’m pretty much on track to get my P’s by late january, so that’s awesomeness for me. This also has the side effect of working in Adelaide where public transport is easy and I’m not expected to drive myself, that I can start my apprenticeship immediatly after my traineeship finishes, instead of right after I get my P plates.

Looks like I won’t be working for Diverse Data straight off, I might be with them later on down the track, but right now I’ve picked the more appealing of two companies to work for, for the moment. Unfortunatly the pay is most likely going to be less at the Uni, Diverse Data had their EBA’s go through and even apprentices through PEER benefited from it quite handsomly.

Ohwell, I still win.

I’ve decided I’m going to a bit of a developer diary type entries as I work on my various projects, just to keep people in the loop and show off some of the things I’m doing.

Japanset bridges
On the Japanset front I’ve been tinkering around with a few things, mostly in regards to bridges. Northfolksouthern_37 a good long time ago made a modification of the default TTD bridges for his US roadset, for some reason they were never integrated into the US Set, and eventually fell into the deep dark crevices of the internet and were assumed to be all but lost. After some prompting and a bit of digging I managed to find them amongst an old test-version of the USSet roads from a helluva long time ago. Not wanting to inherit an entire bridge set, I quickly set to work on modifying them for use in the Japanset’s landscape .grf, which already had a killer set of new road graphics, but was still using the original TTD bridges (Which, mind you, still work quite well and are at a level of graphical excellence that no other full bridge set released has managed to reach).

It didn’t take too long to make the necessary modifications to the japanset landscape to use ns_37’s bridges, which mostly required a few small modifications to fix some bugs, and the road textures swapped around. My main complaint about ns_37’s original bridge set though was the bridge heads. I’m guessing that he thought, that since the TTD road bridge heads feature sprite recolouring, that it should work with those colours on the train bridge heads. He produced some awesome graphics for them which fit in perfectly with his bridges (That featured extensive modifications to the TTD bridges decking), problem is they didn’t recolour. At all.

I had the idea to replace all the bridge heads with cut out pieces of land with the tracks plopped over them and foundation graphics all nicely merged, which I implemented as an replacement initially for ns_37’s bridge heads, but they just didn’t look right, and I jumped headfirst into drawing a set of bridge heads myself using existing graphics being used for the Japanset. These would sit perfectly against TTD land, but slope up to the track bedding and rails. After extensive fiddling, they came out quite nicely.

Evil Cantilevers
One thing that always shat me off about the cantilever bridges included with TTDPatch, was that, while looking cool and chunky and metal out the wazoo (rawr metal \m/), was that when Oskar went and wrote higherbridges, it had the unfortunate side-effect of every bridge apart from the cantilever looking awesome constructed at heights greater than normal. All the other bridge heads featured rather simple pylon graphics, but the cantilevers featured part of the bridges structural frame as the pylon. Bits that werent symetrical. Since higherbridges worked graphically by repeating the pylon graphics over as the bridge got higher, that resulted in a rather awesomely crap looking bridge.

I had the idea somewhere down the line as I was working on the japanset bridges to try my hand at fixing those issues. Theoreticly all that would need doing is merging parts of the pylon graphics back with the frame of the bridge, and then splitting the symetrical parts of the construction back into the pylons again.

Thankfully my theory was correct. Except for the occasional clipping glitch and a bit of graphical oddity in parts, it worked perfectly.

Japanset Building placement.
Recently, armed with supperior knowledge of TTD city zoning, I went right through the Japanset buildings .grf and redid all the placements. It occurred to me to do this since, while I originally thought zones just expanded from the centre with even spacing, from zone 4 in the centre to zone 0 in the outskirts, it didn’t occur to me that the road graphics related directly to the town zone. Country roads in zones 0 and 1, paved in zone 2, trees in zone 3, street-lighted city areas in zone 4. Looking back on cities, zone 4 was often quite large, zone 3 was tiny, expanding radially outwards, and zones 2, 1 and 0 expaned out but in quite different shapes from the rest of the city in some cases. So, off I went and shuffled everything around again.

While I was at it I replaced the graphics for the Kakihara and Nishikawa houses, which had its multi-coloured nature revoked and a much more sensible cement rendering job done on it, beigeish for the Nishikawa and dark green for the Kakihara. These much nicer homes, sitting closer to the city centre, the mansions compared to the high-density housing further in the suburbs and slums, I always thought were always under-represented in towns. I think now they finally generate a helluva lot nicer than before.

Additionally the city centres are much nicer in later years, I managed to avoid the nice mansion like houses which generate in the centre of towns in earlier years from getting in the way of the skyrises in later years by using the probabilities in a bit different fashion than I normally would.

And other things…
I think it’s safe to say that anyone who hasn’t seen SAC’s artwork for TTD lately would have to be living in a cave without an internet connection, so I won’t waste words on lengthy introductions to it. Looks like I’ve gotten myself into a position as coder for some of her various projects. At the moment I’ve got a few things to cook up so she can keep drawing and testing her artwork until the newobjects feature is finished. Currently extra items have to be rather clumsilly coded as station tiles, which isn’t really a sollution I like, but it’s better than nothing.

And then the todo list…
My todo list is horrible, I have too many projects. In the short term I’ve got the following (in no particular order):

• Code up blank station tiles .grf for SAC
• Implement monorail in JPSet land and support Maglev and Monorail properly with bridges
• Implement both varieties of shinkansen tracks in the JPSet land and figure out how the hell to do it all while retaining some form of sanity. Don’t get me started on parameters and detecting other .grf’s and contacting Szappy to remove the old graphics from the trains .grf.
• Fix food acceptancy in NABS
• Get NABS towards release.
• Fix website and finish creating pages for it.
• Package up all the japanset stuff for Sanchimaru.
• Code my hand-drawn goods stations and marvel in their kickarsery
• Get a life^W^W^WDo something else productive

Ugh, I’m going to crawl up over there in the corner and die :(.