I have finally decided to release Time Rift as a final version. It's had it's music converted to Ogg, and a few small changes here and there. Not too much changed from the previous version.
In this day and age, everybody wants you to use their stuff, and will advertise and cut prices as much and as low as possible to convince you to use their product. This includes Operating System makers and Browser developers. You may think it would be better if we all used the same browser and all used the same OS, but the only people who should think that are the companies who make them. You are given a choice, and this is a good thing.
I have been slowly but surely working on Time Rift, being distracted at times by my other project, Pointed Games, and now development is nearing the end. I have a new build for testing, build 13.
I haven't posted in a while, as I haven't had much to say. I have been working on two games, TimeRift and Avoid the Robots (working title), with an idea for a third. Work on Pointed has been going steady, with a login and points system set up (allowing you to login with a Google, Yahoo!, AIM or OpenID account), and much of a site created. The underlying points transfer system is the biggest hurdle to go, although I have a few ideas. The last one was too easy to hack, so I will try to make this a little more secure .
I have spent the last few days working on a new build of TimeRift. There are more new sprites, new effects and even a cutscene at the start of the game.
The much anticipated, non-random city by night, partially hand crafted theme is finally here.
I would like to think of it as a work in progress, I may change buttons, update images, rearrange things or decide I hate it and go back to a factory made theme at any time.
I could have written this post about the Game Maker 8 beta, but I have barely touched it. All I have done is tested out Time Rift, and Game Maker 8 appears to give the protagonist lead feet. It's hard to describe, so I wont bother. I could have written this post about the new Opera snapshot release, but the only real change is that the awesome skin has been ditched in favour of a blander one. I actually copied over the old skin into the new Opera so as not to lose it. I could have written about Michael Jacksons death, and about my opinion of the site that first reported it.
But I haven't, and I wont. This post is about a special kind of advertising.
For the past two days I have been looking into installing Ubuntu on a USB flash drive. I also watched an absolutely awful news article last night, where they did a study where they gave one group of kids bottles of carbonated high sugar drinks and bags of lollies, and another group fresh fruit. They ate their respective piles of food, and for some reason the kids with the piles of sugar in them got hyper active and the ones eating fruit didn't. That's fine, it's what you would expect. But then they claimed that it was the colouring in the food that caused their hyperactivity. Least. Scientific. Study. Ever.
I could complain all day about that, but I'd rather write a post that would cater to more people. So this one will be about installing Ubuntu 9.04 on a Flash drive to be bootable by a MacBook 3,1 (though it may work for others too). It also requires Windows, since the technique I used was for Windows (I couldn't find anyone who had managed it and written down what they did, so I had to use Windows instructions). This will also leave the flash drive persistent, rather than a live boot which is much easier to set up. A persistent install means that when you install something, change a setting or create a file, it will remain the next time you reboot. A live install wipes each time it is booted (changes are stored in RAM).
WIDGETIZE