Having been programming computers for over two decades now I can't express enough just how frustrating it is to be playing a game for five hours and have it crash on me. Now the game crashing is not what pisses me off. The fact that the game does not have autosave functionality does.

The game I am talking about is Spore. My brother bought a copy and I decided to install it and give it a try. It is not really the type of game I am interested in but I thought I would check it out and see what the big deal was.

So here I was playing the game. I got to the space stage with a level 3 warp drive and was almost to the center of the galaxy when the game crashes. I threw my hands in the air and with a sense of dread and dispair realised that I may have just spent the last five hours building up my race for nothing. I carfully started up the game again and sure enough the game did not autosave my progress, and I sat there staring at the screen in utter disgust.

How in the fuck, in this day and age does a game like this, as vast and as big as a game like this, not have an autosave feature.  It is at that point I started shaking my head in the realization that I would no longer be playing Spore. Can you hear me EA? Any chance of me buying my own copy of this game just went from a possibility to no fucking chance in hell. It also reminds me of another game that does not have an autosave feature. Doom3. Right there in the game manual for doom 3 it states "Save and save often" WTF? Have these people never heard of autosave checkpoints before? Christ! even Super Mario World for the SNES has mid-level checkpoints!

I just don't know what else to say about it, other then it's just flabergasting to me that AAA titles like Spore don't have autosave functionality. So now that I have finished venting I am going to uninstall Spore and free up a few gigs of space on my harddrive.

And for those who are wondering, yes that is all it takes for me to dismiss a game as crap, no matter how much fun I may have had playing it up to that point. Maybe I just have a higher level of expectation, because of my programming background but if there is one thing I absolutely hate more than anything is having to go back and repeat myself. Heck I have Visual Studio setup to auto save every 60 seconds. Yeah that's how much I hate having to repeat my self.

I am running out of time before I go mushroom picking to try and upload my new website. And rather then trying to do a rush job of getting it up and running I am going to delay it and take my time to do it right. So that means I will have to try and get the new site up and running some time in November.

Just finished unpacking from my trip to Enderby, BC for a family reunion. My aunt and her husband purchased some property along the Shuswap River, about halfway between enderby and Mabel lake.

I pretty much got the asp.net gallery web control complete and will be organizing my 1000+  4.0 megapixel images so that when I switch over to the new site the gallery will be full of various imagery.

Will be heading to Enderby, BC tomorrow for a family reunion. Should be there for about a week. I have finished porting all of this sites content over to my new BlogEngine.NET based website, but I am still fiddling with the code for the gallery. So with any luck in around a few weeks I will replace this site with the new one.

I just finished watching COCOON and COCOON: The Return and thought I would post a bit of a review.

COCOON ( NetFlix, Zip.ca)
COCOON: The return (NetFlix, Zip.ca)



Another review and another callback to 1985. Well maybe more of a heads up then a review. 

I don't know about you but the 80's seem to have some of the best and most memorable movies ever made. I don't think you could ever get a better cast to play in this movie. They are just so perfect and true for the roles that they play. Sadly many of the cast had passed away only a few years after the making of these movies.

*** BEGIN SPOILERS ***

If you have not seen these movies before the first movie involves a group of people (the aliens) renting a boat to go collect these large cocoons from the ocean that are covered in coral. They rent a house with a pool that is next to a old folks home. They use the pool to keep the cocoons in but they don't know that a few of the people from the old folks home have been sneaking in
and using the pool. The cocoons make the old people healthier more energetic and feel younger, and as such begin to behave younger. Eventually word gets out and everyone from the whole old folks home rush the pool where the cocoons are kept. This leads to everyone being kicked out of the pool by the aliens. The life force energy from the pool is thus drained and the aliens in the cocoons are not able to be returned to there planet, but the aliens tell the old people they can go with them to there planet where they will never die, get old, or get sick etc. And a bunch of the old people leave on the space ship at the end of the movie.

The second movie continues off the first movie, where the cocoons from the first movie were put back into the ocean and the aliens this time are back to pick them up. Some of the old people also return back to earth with them. This time when they are collecting the cocoons from the ocean they see a oceanographic institute retrieving one of the cocoons that they think is an meteor that landed but find out that it actually contains an alien. The aliens and old people get together to rescue the captured alien. Nearing the end of the film some of the old couples decide that they are not going to return to the alien planet and thus decide to stay on earth where they will eventually die of old age.

*** END SPOILERS ***

Those last two paragraphs gloss over much of the movies storyline points but you get the general idea.

If you have not seen them at all or have not seen them in a while I recommend checking them out. I give them both a 9/10. All round classic 80's movie experience. The first film was directed by Ron Howard and the second film was directed by Daniel Petrie.

OK this has got to be the last time I do this! I have ported over my website content to the new site and have added a few new pieces of content. I know I have said this before but I have got to stop doing this.

XNA

• Updated the Stream content reader/processor to support xna 2.0
• Updated the Text File reader/processor to support xna 2.0
• Updated the XMLDocument content reader/processor to support xna 2.0
• Added a new project called ZexMenu (See the videos section for a preview of my Zider engine)
• Added new project called Pluunty
• Added new project called zeeAni
• Added new project called CBXInputBindings
• Added new project called CBXInput4XNA
• Added new project called xCollectiveXNA
• Added new project called TiledBackground
• Added new project called XNAGameCodeKit
• Added new project called Waazly
• Added new project called AvatarDialogBoxes
• Added new project called XNAAchievers
• Added new example project Stenciling

Projects

• Added xDocs to the projects page - Blogengine.net/asp.net usercontrol
• Added xGallery to the projects page - Blogengine.net/asp.net usercontrol
• Added xImageLink to the projects page - Blogengine.net/asp.net usercontrol
• Added ADVBlogger to the projects page - Blogengine.net extention
• Added Simbegal to the projects page - Blogengine.net/asp.net usercontrol
• Added xPagePathNav to the projects page - Blogengine.net extention

Other Updates Include

• Added XML comments through out many of the Zider related projects
• Most if the projects I have now have documentation pages associated with them. The documentation pages are auto generated using xDocs
• My previously owned ScamInformation.com domain is now going for $14,500 :(
• Added ALL my pictures to the gallery page. But it could be organized better :P There are over 3000 pictures!

As well as various other additions and changes.  To many to remember them all. :P

 Firefox constanly crashing!!!  Geeze I upgraded to firefox 3.0 and it seems to crash constantly! It's like russian roulette web surfing you never know when it's going to crash. I must have submitted like 50 error reports so far.

Stupid asp.net password system got messed up some how and could not log in to this site. Grrr.

Anyhoo, just making a post cause I have not made any recently. I am still working on my zider project and am making progress but as usual progress is very slow going. I have not felt like programming this last week and have only wrote about a dozen lines of code.

I have also been working on moving the content from this site to a new site I am setting up. The new site will use Blogengine.net to power it.

I'm not going to review just any new fangled movie that has come out recently, oh no, I'm crankin the way back machine to the year 1986! Don't run away screaming just yet, you will defiantly want to check out Little Shop of Horrors!  Staring Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Vincent Gardenia, Steve Martin, James Belushi, John Candy, and Bill Murray to boot!

So unless you were born after 1978-ish you may not have seen this movie gem. To start off it's a musical! NO NO Don't run away! it's a musical comedy! Yeah thats right, this movie ain't no gone with the wind. It's funny and the songs get seriously stuck in your head big time.   

With such memorable lyrics as ...

• I'm just a mean green mother from outer space and I'm bad
• I'd find a pussycat and bash in its head
• Feed me, Seymour. Feed me all night long.

The movie starts off a little slow but continue to build and build to the climactic ending. It is just as good now as it was way back when it first came out. You should defiantly try to remember to pick it up next time you are in the video store or better yet netflix or zip.ca it.

This is the kind of movie they just cant make any more! (my opinion)  The acting is what you would expect from the cast except I found Ellen Greene's voice she played a bit out over the top but still good. 

But I think the best part of this movie is that there are no cgi effects just puppeteering! And dam is it good! It is hard to think of how they pulled off some of the puppeteering work in this movie cause it is very very well done and a testament to the fact the excellent work can be done through puppeteering instead of cgi all the time.

There is just so many great things going for this movie you should really check it out.  The steve martin and bill murray dentist scene, the alien plant trying to bite a ladies butt, steve martin snorting laughing gas, and the last musical number with the plant "I'm a big green mutha from outter space and i'm bad"!

If you have not seen it in a while it's worth watching again, if only to have the songs stuck in your head!   

I've got steve martins dentist song stuck in my head right now! I give this movie a 9/10!

My boy, I think someday
You'll find a way
To make your natural tendencies pay
You'll be a dentist

Have not had much time for coding since I have started helping my parents build there house. But I have written a few more lines for my Zider Game Engine project. You can get the new bits from the CodePlex site here. I have been thinking about making some videos showing off my progress so far, but have not gotten around to it yet.

I have also broken my wow addiction and have not played in like over two weeks. I swore up and down I would not buy that game, but then my brother bought it and con-ed me into getting it. The frigging thing cost my like $150+ CAD after I bought the game and then had to buy a six month subscription. Not to mention I had to buy the burning crusade expansion two months after my subscription started. Ridiculous amount of money for a game that you can only play online!

I'm kinda glad my account is expiring at the end of the month though, because it gives me more free time to work on my coding projects. WOW does so many things right but it totally spoils it by turning around and doing so many things horribly wrong. it was an intense six months of learning how NOT to make a game!

Any way just thought I would make a post so people know that I am still alive and kicking...

After seeing what Jonny Lee had done with the Wiimote desktopvr software I decided to write up a quick article on how to create your own wii headgear so you do not need to use the wii sensor bar. You can read the article here.