• Corruption
      • by Seriyu
      • posted on Dec. 6, 2011, 3:24 p.m.
      • So, the 1.1 patch has come out for terraria, and me and Jiko have just killed the wall of flesh, and are on to being mauled by adorable creatures and giant flying earwig things. If you haven't played terraria, at least check it out, it's pretty great! I'm sure there are tons of videos on youtube.

        Anyway, on to what you probably came for. Today's piece by Suika Ibuki looks very clean particularly when relating to the kind've scratchy rough looking skeleton monster thingies on the right. As a note, The picture was made before 1.1 patch was released, and as a result the artist did not know what monsters were in the patch, at least in the new corruption. I really like the contrast in that sense, much like Jiko said. Once more you can click the image to go to their deviantart.


        Image used permission of Suika Ibuki/darthvulgar

        Enjoy Terraria 1.1 terraria folk! It's really not as hard as you'd think, it just takes some getting used to. And enjoy your Christmas analogue, for people in countries that celebrate Christmas analogues. And everyone else enjoy something else. You have my permission.
      • December Technical Update: Tools
      • by cogs
      • posted on Dec. 6, 2011, 2:57 p.m.
      • Since I've been a bit caught up in work lately due to year-end scrambling, I haven't made a ton of progress on the site, but fortunately it's not far to go now anyways AND I have a break coming up! I'm not sure I can appropriately convey the joyous sensations which overwhelmed me the moment I wrote that sentence, but suffice it to say I am looking forward to it. However! I don't want to leave you empty handed, so I'm just going to go over a few of the tools I've been using while coding things on this site. I can go into more depth on any of this if there was interest, and probably will even without interest, but this is just a view of the broadside of the barn.

        First off, you need an operating system. My personal preference is Linux (Ubuntu generally, because I'm lazy), but anything Unix-based is a pretty solid choice. While there's nothing wrong with Windows, necessarily, it is much easier to interface with a Unix server from a native Unix command line than a Windows substitute such as Cygwin (though Cygwin does perform admirably, push comes to shove). Oh, I should probably also note that if you ARE on Windows, get Cygwin. It acts like a Unix terminal on Windows. If you are not comfortable with Unix terminal commands, learn to love them. They are infinitely useful.

        Secondly any programmer requires a text editor. Generally I do all my editing in Emacs, which has one of the steepest learning curves I've run into with a program, but has been well worth the effort. Vi is also nice for reviewing code since it does well with making sure you don't give erroneous input, but I prefer Emacs for any actual editing just due to the sheer obscene breadth of its extensibility. Besides, what other text editor comes with it's own built-in text-based adventure game? On Windows, Notepad++ is a very useful tool, and has a good list of built-in syntax highlighters. I haven't actually branched out much from those programs, but I also haven't needed to.

        In order to actually test out website changes, I acquired a small tower computer for around fifty bucks five years back, which is known in-house as the Springboard. It came with a 50 gigabyte hard drive, and I think a single core 1.2GHz processor. I have since taken apart an old 350 gig external drive and added it to the configuration, but the rest of it has remained unchanged. It runs a Debian server with Apache and PHP5 and has done everything I've asked of it with no stutters. Moral of the story being your in-house server doesn't need to be fancy or expensive, and all the software you run on it can be free. You don't even necessarily need a dedicated server; Linux and most other operating systems can run a server instance locally, but it is nice to have a central location for files if you're sharing between several computers.

        Subversion.

        Do this. Whether you are running locally or especially on a central server learn how to use and set up a repository. Subversion is my personal favourite and what I'm used to, but there's CVS, Mercurial, anything, just so long as you're keeping a history of your file changes. I'll be talking about this more in-depth in a future technical update, but I'm just putting this on the table right now.

        Frankly that's the important stuff. While editing CSS, having several browsers installed on your computer works wonders. It used to be that I'd say Firefox is the most important, but frankly with “inspect element” being a default feature Chrome has won my heart over for quick CSS editing. If you're in Chrome right now and don't know about this, just go ahead and right click on something on the page, the side bar for example, and hit “inspect element” in the popup menu. It turned my world upside down.

        Alright, I've rambled on about my utilities long enough. In more future-oriented news, this is the last post I intend to make with the PHP version of the site! So come January 6th we'll be all Django. On that note, I'll be having to switch some of the CGI scripts on the public side to accommodate that, so I'm expecting some issues whenever that happens. Ideally I'll be able to work it out in a few minutes, but the site might go down for several hours. I'm expecting this to be the night between January 1st and 2nd; so if you wanted to watch a website completely lose its composure, that would be a good time to tune in and see the fireworks.

        And last but certainly not least, Seriyu has found a Terraria-themed piece today which would make a great wallpaper. The characters are unique while staying in theme and are wonderfully contrasted against the silhouetted monsters under a blood moon. Top notch all around.

        -cogs