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	<title>Gwynne&#039;s Blog</title>
	<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org</link>
	<description>Sa souvraya niende misain ye</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:13:33 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: You&#8217;ve got to know why things work on a starship.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I finally worked out the major design issues blocking the way for the command input console (also known as that tiny rectangle in the bottom right you see short messages and crew commands in) to exist. Long story short, a lot of things were being handled by the player object and the crew objects that [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-youve-got-to-know-why-things-work-on-a-starship/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Why the bridge is an easy target at the top of the saucer section is something I never understood.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ll give you this one, Star Trek fans. It&#8217;s a shortening of a quote from the Captain&#8217;s Table series of books, specifically book five, &#8220;Once Burned&#8221;, by Peter David: &#8220;Why in God&#8217;s name the bridge, arguably the most important strategic point of the vessel, is an easy target at the top of the saucer section [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-why-the-bridge-is-an-easy-target-at-the-top-of-the-saucer-section-is-something-i-never-understood/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: We have high hopes that this will, if successful, generate power to keep us alive</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The viewscreen &#8220;system&#8221; is implemented, or more exactly the source code needed to do more interesting things with it is in place. It can&#8217;t currently take damage or go offline, so there&#8217;s no functional change. It&#8217;s a bit of code work that needed doing for the sake of correctness and to ease later improvements. Life [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-we-have-high-hopes-that-this-will-if-successful-generate-power-to-keep-us-alive/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Scanning. Indications negative at this time.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Today&#8217;s list of completed tasks: Made the torpedos work the old way. You&#8217;d think that was simple, but nope&#8230; Implemented long range scanners as a ship&#8217;s system (can take damage and go offline, can be repaired, code isn&#8217;t special-cased anymore) Implemented sector scanners similarly Fixed a long-standing issue with the way explosions were being handled [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-scanning-indications-negative-at-this-time/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Why having two coordinate spaces is a problem.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The best laid schemes o&#8217; mice an&#8217; men / Gang aft agley - Robert Burns, &#8220;To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plough&#8221; The torpedos do work, there&#8217;s no doubt about that. There&#8217;s just one problem: Due to the fact that velocity in my code is expressed in terms of [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/why-having-two-coordinate-spaces-is-a-problem/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Belay that phaser order! Arm photon torpedos!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Torpedos now work. There are some minor glitches, mainly that it should only take two torpedos to destroy a fighter on easy difficulty, not six, but that&#8217;s the only remaining issue with the torpedos themselves. I already know the cause (the damage factor is randomized twice, which produces completely wrong numbers) and I&#8217;ll fix it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-belay-that-phaser-order-arm-photon-torpedos/</link>
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		<title>Tic-Tacs</title>
		<description><![CDATA[With apologies to Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds&#8230; Little Tic-Tacs in the boxes Little Tic-Tacs made of sugar gum Little Tic-Tacs, little Tic-Tacs, little Tic-Tacs all the same There&#8217;s a white one, and a white one, and a white one, and a white one And they&#8217;re all made out of Ticky-Tacky And they all look [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/tic-tacs/</link>
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		<title>Slow going</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Just want to apologize to all for the lack of recent progress and to assure you that I am still working on the game. Don&#8217;t lose hope! Stay tuned for an update soon.]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/slow-going/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Reconfiguring torpedos</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A large number of nagging little issues have been fixed and some underlying design flaws have been fixed. Torpedo hold and torpedo launchers are fully implemented, torpedos themselves are in progress. More coming soon.]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-reconfiguring-torpedos/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: We&#8217;re down to only 40 torpedos.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Torpedo hold now implemented and functional. More to come!]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-were-down-to-only-40-torpedos/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: All hands, abandon ship, I repeat, all hands-</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The laser cannon now works, and can destroy fighters. The sound playback is still just slightly off, but otherwise all is good. The display issues with the laser and target scanner are fixed, the damage coefficients are corrected (the only reason the laser works too well right now is the fighters haven&#8217;t had their shields [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-all-hands-abandon-ship-i-repeat-all-hands/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Too late. Hang on!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Reliant&#8217;s laser cannon is now functional. It fires from the wrong spot on the ship, hits the wrong spot on the enemy ships, has the wrong idea about when the enemy ships are in and out of range, plays its sound incorrectly, and doesn&#8217;t look quite like the original game&#8217;s laser, but it does [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-too-late-hang-on/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Engine room, flight recorder visual, fifty-one point nine one zero</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A QTKit-based video recorder is now integrated into the code. I tried about twenty ways to get it to record audio too, but between CoreAudio&#8217;s failings and QTKit&#8217;s limitations, nothing both sounded correct and remained correctly synchronized. Capture the sound output of the game and add it as a sound track to the video. Failure [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-engine-room-flight-recorder-visual-fifty-one-point-nine-one-zero/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Their coil emissions are normal.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[More status! The radar is implemented and functioning. A whole list of off-by-one pixel errors are fixed. A subtle retain cycle KVO crash is fixed. Most of the target scanner bugs are fixed. I say &#8220;most&#8221; in that last because I&#8217;m not sure if the final bug can be fixed. The cocoa-dev mailing list seems [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-their-coil-emissions-are-normal/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: They&#8217;re locking phasers.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;Lock phasers on target.&#8221; &#8211; Khan &#8220;Locking phasers on target.&#8221; &#8211; Joachim &#8220;They&#8217;re locking phasers.&#8221; &#8211; Spock &#8220;Raise shields!&#8221; &#8211; Kirk &#8220;FIRE!&#8221; &#8211; Khan The Reliant now has targetting and scanning systems implemented. There&#8217;s still several bugs to work out, but the basic system is in place. When that one little fighter I put in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-theyre-locking-phasers/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Watch it, you&#8217;ve got one on your tail!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Missions of the Reliant version 3.0 now has the framework for enemies, enemy AI, and those infinitely annoying little fighters that everything lauches in droves at you and you can only hit by draining all the charge from your laser couplings. It took some work, let me tell you. Mike&#8217;s original code expresses differences between [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-watch-it-youve-got-one-on-your-tail/</link>
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		<title>The utility of a scripting language.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I feel like quite a geek. I had some text copied from my IRC client that I wanted to transform to XML for my XSLT sheet to display all nicely on the Web interface. Format of a line copied from the client: altered nickname&#60;tab&#62;&#60;tab&#62;message&#60;tab&#62;hh:mm:ss&#60;space&#62;&#60;AM or PM&#62;&#60;carriage return&#62; Correctly formatted XML for the XSLT sheet: How [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/the-utility-of-a-scripting-language/</link>
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		<title>Floating-point makes my brain melt</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sometimes it&#8217;s better to do the obvious than try to be &#8220;correct&#8221;. How would you check if a floating-point variable x was zero? Common sense says x == 0.0 should work, right? But the compiler gets cranky about floating-point compares, yet zero is certainly a valid sentinel value even for floating-point. So I found the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/floating-point-makes-my-brain-melt/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: Something to see at last!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There is now a user-visible change to Missions from all the background work I&#8217;ve been doing! The warp drive physics have been heavily corrected to match the original game rather than ignoring decreases in warp speed and turning the wrong way around. It&#8217;s something, at least. You don&#8217;t want to know how much math went [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-something-to-see-at-last/</link>
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		<title>Missions of the Reliant: I&#8217;m haunted by coordinate systems!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[As if all the mucking about with coordinates before wasn&#8217;t bad enough, next I had to deal with unit vectors, polar/Cartesian coordinate conversion, sign adjustment vs. trigonometric functions&#8230; you get the idea. In this case, my problem wasn&#8217;t caused by needing to update the algorithms Mike used at all, but rather by my need to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blog.darkrainfall.org/missions-of-the-reliant-im-haunted-by-coordinate-systems/</link>
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