www.maestrosync.com

My latest mini-project, aftcast, generates random graphics based on a parameters. It reminds me of writing little programs on graphics calculators back in high school. Anyway, I’m no good at describing these things, so you’ll have to have a look at it yourself.

Had a go at a little World War II propaganda. The rhyme is original (hopefully) and the blur is deliberate (because I drew it roughly).

Acid Assault. Last updated, late 2006. Will I ever work on it further? Perhaps. Perhaps not. For now:

aa.zip (721 KB)

Some notes

You control the cannon with the left and right arrow keys.

From the sky come chemicals, threatening the balanced pH of precious lake. The green ones are acids; the purple ones, bases.

The aim of the game is to neutralise the falling chemicals. To neutralise an acid, press ‘Z’ to fire a base. To neutralise a base, press ‘A’ to fire an acid.

Sometimes the chemicals will fall in sets of more than one. You can neutralise these by firing out your own composite super-chemicals. To fire multiple bases (for neutralising acids), use the X (2x), C (3x), and V (4x) keys. To fire multiple acids (for neutralising bases), use the S (2x), D (3x), and F (4x) keys.

You can also neutralise these super-chemicals by shooting multiple single shots at it. If I do ever work more on Acid Assault, I will remove this option.

Occasionally some aluminium will also come falling down. You can pick it up with your cannon (by moving into place so it hits you) to gain levels. These don’t really do anything in the current version.

As mentioned, the levelling and scoring system isn’t particularly good. It will be improved maybe.

Now featuring an administration panel and proper user management things. Also, some extra tweaks here and there. Opinionated is still very basic, but it’s quite usable.

Download

• Source (zip) — 29.9KB (updated 2007-12-27)

This is the latest version of Opinionated, my hyper-basic democratic idea sharing and ranking web application. I believe this version adds minor cosmetic tweaks and the ‘change password’ feature (yes, it’s that basic). I could add more features like moderation but I feel that would go against the spirit of free democratic discourse (although perhaps it could use an “exile user” feature). The code’s there, so if anyone did want such a feature they should be able to add it themselves (or ask me nicely to do it).

Download

• Source (zip) — 25.8KB

Absolutely! Many of them relate to the 2007 Australian federal election.

More evidence of Authority progress, y’all. Authority uses a new, different algorithm to check for connections compared to the method used in Territory (the concept of ‘connected territory’ is present in Authority as well, although it’s completely different to the way it works in Territory). It doesn’t have a name, since I wrote it myself, but I’m sure there is an essentially identical one out there that does have a name; it’s about as simple as you can get (since we’re not trying to find the shortest path to something, the distance travelled is irrelevant) and I imagine it’s prototypical of all the fancier searching algorithms (Dijkstra’s/BFS/A* et al.). Anyway, it’s faster and far less complex than the old one, which is good because in Authority there’s going to be a lot more of connection checking going on.

Now, it’s not terribly exciting, but nevertheless you can try it out for yourself (text-based; no pretty graphics here).

The whole interface is more or less totally polished and working—that is, all of the other bits of the site apart from the actual game map part itself. As for that, you can select units/improvements, select actions, queue up moves, etc. So, the only part left to be completed is the actual execution and calculation of turns and moves. A rather critical part, yes, which will take a bit of work to get going, but then that’s it.

Stay tuned (but not too tuned), Authority fans!

Musical offcuts, that is. Now, the term ‘offcut’ implies that these have been cut from a greater project, and indeed they have been; that greater project is upcoming and is totally different to what these rather experimental offcuts might suggest.

Download

• Find Me (mp3) — 1760KB
• Hideout (mp3) — 1864KB
• O! Escape (mp3) — 365KB
• Running Into Walls (mp3) — 1362KB
• Scattered Applause (mp3) — 845KB