I went on Spring Break as of Saturday last week, and last Monday I got my wisdom teeth out. The operation was way easy - I didn't know I'd be unconscious the whole time! I was hopped up on meds and didn't really get any work done till Wednesday. I'm still on meds, but I got a good chunk of the art/animation done over the second half of my break. I'm confident about a May release date for the game.

I am now requesting some original music to feature in the game. I have someone working on items already *achem*, but there are still other spots to fill - Please PM me if you're interested. Among the many awesome songs I found while searching for music on NG, is THIS - it's quite good.

New song by Hania

There's a fire burning dangerously close to our house.

-Richie

I do still have a ways to go on some art for the game (intro, enemies, scenery, credits) and some auxiliary programming (NG API once I get my hands on the most recent version), but the core of the game is nearing completion.
I'll find out just how near once I get feedback from the beta testers. I've sent out some instructions to a few people to play and review the game in order to gather critiques.

After I address any issues that arise, I'll focus on the remaining art. I'll probably have a final beta test before the release once I think everything is ready to go. As another guess at a completion date: May. Check out the loading-game screenshot below.

A major problem I ran into a while ago was Flash throwing a meaningless compile error - I eventually found out this is an error caused by the JAVA compiler running out of memory (cause my game is huge). I found the solution (to give JAVA more memory) here: swf does not contain AS. Thank you internet.

I turned my NG Calendar to March with artwork by sucho.

I have Midterms coming up and I'll be getting my Wisdom Teeth out over Spring Break. This will likely put a hole in my schedule.

If you missed it, Tom posted a picture of the site redesign: HERE

-Richie

Electric and Magnetic Fields (E+B) of an EM Wave must be pi/2 radians (90 deg) out of phase:
The primary reason for this is Conservation of Mass/Energy. If the waves are in phase-or directly out of phase- as shown to be a correct waveform all over the internet, you get a graphs like the two in the top row of the below picture. (Tiny as hell, I know)

The red and blue lines represent the E and B fields, and the green lines represent the total energy which is proportional to the sum of the two fields after being squared (Energy = c1*E*E + c2*B*B).

The only way for energy to remain constant is if the two fields are offset by pi/2 radians, as shown in the graph at the bottom, where the green energy line is constant.

Obtained in Octave:
t=[0:.01:1];
w=10;
s1=sin(t*w);
s2=cos(t*w);
s3=s1.*s1+s2.*s2;
hold off;
plot(t,s1,'b');
hold on;
plot(t,s2,'r');
plot(t,s3,'g');

Pictures all over the Internet appear to glaze over this...
Incorrect Examples
This guy has more details if my graphs don't satisfy you:
Play-Hookey

I've definitely noticed over the years people who teach material I find out later to be wrong. Everyone makes mistakes but it disappoints me that this leads to widespread accepted misinformation...

Good News:
What I'll call 'Alpha Testing' has begun on my game. Soon after the most major problems are found (and fixed), I'll begin Beta Testing. Hoping for early March. Mostly just art is left... A lot of art.

Bad News:
I'll be getting my wisdom teeth out during my spring break, so there won't be much chance for me to work on the game during that time :/

300 miles per charge Tesla Model S

-Richie

Three more weeks of work, and currently:
over 10,000 lines of code (yes, that includes {,})
141 .as files
164 texture files
1 16MB .swf file
1 kinky outfit
~90% complete

After using Flash for a while, I've started getting weird errors like: "unknown error optimizing byte code" which prevents me from testing the game. This seems to be related to CS3 memory usage, because after I restart the program, it goes away... for a while. The coding for the game is near-complete... other than odds/ends and administrative-type menu, preloading, and saving code. The major parts I have left to do are in-game ART and the intro animation. I should be able to start beta testing in ~month. I have a week off in March I'm hoping to use for final coding and have the game out soon after. It's pretty hard getting anywhere doing this on my own time... Back to school.

Below are some more in-game screenshots. I don't wanna give anything else away as to what the game is about tho.

-Richie

If you are experiencing problems when trying to view the NiN10Doh: ToThe64thPower collab, you're not alone (the file loads 40MB of external assets). This appears to only be occurring with a select few people, but below is what I know so far:

1) The entire menu file (827KB) must be loaded before you see a progress bar - sadly I was unable to get a pre-menu preloader working in time. For the duration of this loading, you WILL SEE a blank white screen (then you'll see the 40MB loading progress bar).
2) It seems people with fast connections load the file quickly, but may see a blank screen. Speaking with Mike (of NG), this may be due to Newgrounds throttling of the requested (18) files. Reloading the page should load any missing files (others stored in cache), then it should play.
3) People with slow connections (like myself) may experience the loading stop at some percentage and not continue. If reloading the page does not work, you may have to resort to clearing your cache, then reload the page.

I apologize for the problems people may be having, and if I can find a solution, we will try to get up a newer version of the file when possible.
--------------------------------------
-----------------------------------

Thank you to Tom and Mike who helped Kirbopher and I with the frustrating trial test runs.

I was very surprised to see the professional-level animations from the contributors of this collab. Seeing how well some people did, it is no surprise it took them a long time to complete. Not being much of a gamer myself, I missed some jokes, but I found it all entertaining. Thank you to the artists for contributing your time and effort to make a successful collab.

I am exhausted from dealing with all the problems that come up with working on large files in Flash. I don't expect I'll work on another collab for a long time - NO to NiN128. I first tried to create the main/menu file in July, when Kirbopher was gathering -what I thought then was- the final collab pieces. I was at NG at the time, and Bob was nice enough to let me use his computer to compile it, as he had the best computer available to me. With not even half the segments in the file, it crashed over and over. This became a dead end. I gathered our last resort was to load all the segments externally, and let Flash runtime deal with the problems.

About a month ago, I finally had an implementation working that would load all the segments from external locations and treat them as originally planned. After many loading problems - like non-AS3 compatibility of segments, audio hemorrhaging, random compile phantoms, file-referencing errors, and hours of testing on newgrounds.com/dump, Kirbopher had gathered the last piece and we had something we thought was ready to submit on Tuesday. We submitted it to NG to found that the menu behaved unexpectedly and incorrectly - it was quickly blammed. After regrouping and hosting the files directly on the ungrounded server, we appear to be in business - minus some glitches as stated earlier.

I submitted a NiN64 background for to the art portal here:
http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/pik anjo/nin10doh64-controllers
AND when I was originally doing concept art for the menu, I tried out a new teacher/student pair. Kirb said to keep with the previous themes instead, so they were dropped, but you can see what they would have been here:
http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/pik anjo/nin10doh64-rejects

If you missed the submission of the first failed version, below is an excerpt of what NG members had to say.
Let the furry hating begin.

In the three months since I declared my game being at ~60%, I am now at ~80%. At this rate, I wont have it done till after the new year has come :/ I've been averaging about 8 hours a week since I've been back at school. The good news is that after finals in the next 2 weeks, I'll have winter break to dedicate to it. [check out awesome screenshots below]

In other news, Kirbopher is finally getting the remaining pieces for the NiN10Doh!64 collab. I was assigned compiling the collab - which I attempted over the summer - but Flash exploded after only half the files made it in, even when using Bob's computer [which froze]. I've since started on a new method for putting the collab together - importing the various entries at runtime. We expect it to be out ~beginning of December.

Happy Thanksgiving
-Richie

I had a great 2 months working at the NG office in PA this summer. Met lots of great people, and did awesome stuff constantly. I hope to do something similar next summer. Tom let me work on my own project while I was there. I started off with the general idea of creating a game with the 3D engine I've been working on, and Tom helped me flesh out a game plot. It turned into a pretty large game, and I'm now only ~60% done. With school starting earlier this week, I'll have additional priorities, but I'm aiming for an early November release. Bob doesn't think I'll finish it-so I invite you to heckle him when it comes out.

To give you a taste of fun yet to come:

To kick off NG's first Robot Day, I went ahead and made THIS entry for the Robot Day Art Contest.

I'm working for Newgrounds at the Office in Glenside, PA for two months this summer. My project is working on a short 3D game. I'm only here to mid-August, so I need to haul ass to get done by then. Then the plan is graduate school. I'm aiming to do everything myself, but I might be looking for voice actors and original music later on.

I've been having a great time in PA, everyone at NG is awesome. If you have the opportunity, try and stop by (you probly wanna check with a staff member ahead of time tho).

I'm attending my last undergraduate semester at the Colorado School of Mines (CS and EE double major), some interesting classes I'm taking: Computer Networks, Dynamics, Electromagnetism and Senior Design. In my Senior Design class, I'm working on a team of eleven to compete in the NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition. We have to excavate as much regolith as possible using a wirelessly controlled robot.

I'm currently working on a few projects, including:
A short collab piece for LegendaryFrog's RE Collab: Biohazard Chronicles.
A short piece for Kirbopher.
Something with Renaenae.
Power of Three Game.

This game has taken a lot of time and work, and is pretty much what I do with any spare time I have-so I can finally contribute something substantial to NG again.

I learned a lot about 3D programming in my Graphics class. The biggest project I had required me to create a raytracer, of which I made a report, available here: http://www.johnrichie.com/V2/richie/ra ytrace/raytrace_report.html
When I finished that class, I went right on creating an engine in Flash using AS3, and wrote another report describing my methods: http://www.johnrichie.com/V2/richie/3D Flash/flash3d.html
I started working on this engine In November 2008, and its been a bit over a year since I began. Once I had a substantial game going, I asked JohnnyUtah if he would like to work on a 3D Flash Tankmen game, to which he said yes. However due to his busy schedule this never surfaced. The 'Power of Three Summer Event' popped up and Kirbopher asked me if I would like to make a game with him-As a perfect chance to apply my hard work, I said yes, and we've been working on it for almost a year now.

I have hundreds of thousands of lines of code written so far for this game and I'm sure I'll go past a million by the time it's done (Yes, that includes '}' lines). At the bottom of this page is a picture of some in-game content, we don't want to give too much of the game away (theres a stick-figure in place of the main character), but we would like to get some interest going:

I finally got the chance to turn my NG 2009 Calendar to the Month featuring my TANKMEN pic.
TANKMEN PIC HERE

The Power of Three Game Kirbopher and I started months ago hasn't gotten too far. I've got over 50% of the game code done (I'd say over 10,000 lines of code so far), but the animations and textures aren't far and as always there are other issues. I'm very excited about it tho, and I'm determined to get it out this year...3 months and counting...

I'm also about half-way done on my piece for LegendaryFrog's RE collab.

Quick plug: I made this page & this corresponding picture to host the pictures we took at AX2009.

On a discussion note, my sister is in an English class, and for whatever reason, they were discussing Disney and how their movies are 'sexist & racist,' citing specific instances. I have my own opinions on the subject, but what do you guys think? Are the Disney movies prone to sexism and racism?

Also, I have the flu.

-Richie