So I’m pretty exhausted at work right now. After this long weekend of staying up until 5am every night, I’m finding it difficult to go to sleep on time. I have to get up at 530 to beat the morning DC traffic so going to bed at midnight may not seem late for some, but for me it’s a day ruiner. It was worth it though.

I finished coding the notification bar and have thus completed the last element of the UI. It looks really cool when the bar pops down from the top of the screen to let you know you’ve done something notable (good or bad). I mocked up some achievements and insults to be displayed and it’s quite hilarious when the red bar comes down saying something like “Only your mom thinks you’re special” or “You messed THAT up?!” Even though I wrote it, the taunting still somehow gets under my skin and I find myself wanting to prove the computer (and therefore myself) wrong. I know, it kind of makes me a crazy person.

Although I haven’t written the achievement system yet, or even the insult database, I designed the Notification bar to be very simple to implement. Essentially, the game posts a “Notice” to the bar and tells it what it should say and whether it’s good or bad. The notification bar then adds the notice to a queue and executes them in order, displaying each notice for about 2.5 seconds. So once I design the achievements, I just code the game to check if any achievements have been completed every time something significant happens and if so, the achievement is added to the queue. It’s pretty cool actually.

Farewell Good Friend

So now I’d like to talk about something very tragic. I think my computer may finally be nearing it’s end. I’ve had this hulkish IBM T-60 laptop for over 5 years, way longer than I should have, but up until lately it has performed beautifully. One upgrade to the ram about 2 years ago and office applications, torrents, games, and coding has all been executed with ease until the past week or so when it started freezing up on me.

Now, I told myself last year that I would refrain from getting a new laptop until this one completely died, but given how much I’ve been using it lately I’m thinking I may be justified in getting a new one. I know that I’ll be much more efficient with a lightning fast new computer, it’s just hard to give up on something you’re so used to. Plus I REALLY don’t want to have to reinstall all my programs!!! I guess we’ll see if a new one is in the budget (weddings are expensive!). Until then, I’ll be sure to back up to my external hard drive often and CTRL+S every few seconds so I don’t end up like last night, staying up after midnight because my computer froze and I had to redo half my code :-p