So, if you are still a bit clueless about SOPA/PIPA, you may be asking, “What is SOPA/PIPA?”.
Here is a good little cartoon to help explain it.
Now that you know what the problem with SOPA is, what can you do to help? Go here, and sign the petition, and also, please make sure you contact your Senator and House Representative if you are in the U.S. This is an important problem that will not only ruin the freedom of the Internet in the U.S., but the whole world!
And for that matter:
is/are Polytechnic schools. Meanings, they are schools that train and teach in many engineering, technical and scientific fields of study, and have a high focus on these fields.
NYU Poly, filling out the application for it, asked me one question in particular that was really interesting.
How are you a ‘PolyThinker’?
Now…. I had trouble answering this question at first, so to help me come up with an answer, I decided to look it up. I came across this on there site:
PolyThinking Defined
- noun
- an innate capacity of analysis or problem-solving characterized by a healthy suspicion of obvious or widely-held conclusions
- an act of thinking in parallel that optimizes how the brain processes information
- verb
- to conceive of technological, scientific, mathematic, visual, and management approaches that illuminate deficiencies in existing approaches
- to make micro or macro advances in a field of study that have ripple effects in multiple fields
Well… I had come up with a nice, good answer to this question, and wanted to put it in… and well… There was a 500 character limit, the length of a status update on Facebook, 3.5 times the length of a tweet on Twitter. There is NO way I can answer this appropriately in such a short space. So of course, what do I do? Cut out plenty of it, and give a ‘good enough’ answer to it, and come on here to blog my full answer. 
A Polythinker is someone who has the innate capacity of problem-solving by being suspicious of widely held conclusions, and think in a parallel manner that optimizes the thought process. Whenever someone tells me that this is a fact, and that I should trust them on that case, I ask, “Why? Why is this true? Could you please prove it to me?” I solve problems the long way, and then make short-cuts after I realize that the widely-held conclusion is true or false. I think about problems in a multitude of ways, to conceive of a solution to them, and combine all the thoughts together to create the conclusion. I look at a problem with both how it would appear to an outside source viewing the intended end result, and of different ways of going about solving the problem. I then break apart how it is supposed to be, to find the branching ways of thoughts to see the fastest and most accurate way of solving said problem.
So, just thought I’d share this with you all…
Today, I had decided that if I am going to be spending all my time on my laptop looking at web pages and text editing, I might as well do it with a nicer and faster operating system than Windows. So, here I am, getting ArchLinux to install on my laptop, planning to dualboot it with Windows so that I can still play games on my gaming laptop in case need be, and what do I stupidly do? Oops… I wiped my hard drive entirely… You know, of ALLLLLLLLL my homework and work for one of my classes, and of Windows entirely, and all the games on it. Of course, I didn’t think about backing all that stuff up, or looking into dualbooting… So NOW, not only am I stuck with ONLY Archlinux on my machine, which I am still having problems installing, but I am also stuck having to redo everything for the class that I am already doing the worst in… Yeah, I had all my homework due on Monday completed, and what do I do? Delete it… Yeah, that is how smart I am…
Well, good job, me…
Anyways, going to go finish installing this operating system, and then seeing about redoing that homework, and maybe… oh I don’t know, put it into a drop box folder, instead of a folder on my desktop….
Moral of the story, before you have the chance to do anything stupid… Back all your stuff up…
So today I just released an update of my game, showing off the keybind system (which still needs some work), a little bit of the gameplay (completely unfinished), and the settings menu in action. This video can be seen here.
The things shown in the video include:
The music in the video was by Approaching Nirvana.
The things I need to work on next are:
This weekend I released 2 tutorials on soldering, where in the first one, I soldered 2 wires together, to teach the basics of doing it, and in the second I soldered together the MakerShield from the MakerShed.
I also plan to put together a few more C# tutorials this weekend, and hopefully upload them all on Monday. There is just one snafu with that plan, which you can read in the next section.
That is right, I am getting tutoring from Meredith Scheff in a bunch of different things. We went over soldering these past 2. I already knew how to solder, but I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working as well as I had believed it should, and she explained why. This upcoming week, we are going over something awesome! Arcwelding! Yeah, you heard me right! Technically, it is MIG welding, Metal Inert Gas welding. We will be welding a little metal box together, which should be fun.
In my tutoring with her, we will also be working on a costume for next years Burning Flipside Festival, down in Apache Pass. I am making a Time Traveling, Victorian engineer. My Time Travel machine? A backpack! …Wait… wait… Did I say Victorian?! Yes sir I did! We want to make the whole costume be in a steampunk apparel, since I am having a major obsession with steampunk right now…. Ohhh ideas for my game!
Yep, it is that time of my life…. Applying to college! Finally growing up, eh? Well, I would list all the colleges I am applying to, but I don’t want to bore you, but wish me luck, my readers! I am definitely going to need it for a few of the colleges I am applying to!
Also, Just saying, these college applications take up a LOT of time, so that is one of the reasons I haven’t been around… boy have I been busy…
So yeah, funny heading, but just wanting to let y’all know what else has been taking up my time! I am taking a pile of AP courses this year, and I can barely keep up with them while trying to get all the other stuff done that I am wanting to do, so instead of doing all that other stuff, I spend half my weekend pouring over my course work, while the other half, attempting to have a life. (A life? HA! Right….)
Well, tomorrow (Sunday, 10/30/2011), TotalBiscuit is doing a WTF-a-thon, which basically means, in 12 hours, he is going to try and do the first 15-30 minutes of as many games as he can. He will be live streaming all this, and I hope to catch most, if not all of it, so that basically means I can’t have a life at all tomorrow. That will impeded on my ability to get those C# tutorials done that I promised early, but we will see if I take a break or 3 in watching to get stuff done.
Another interesting thing going on in my life is… Well…. My life has been consumed for the past week by this awesome game by Trendy Entertainment called Dungeon Defenders. It is absolutely amazing, and I can’t get enough of it. Or at least, I couldn’t… I am starting to get bored of random searches, and since I have completed every level, all I have left to complete are challenges and leveling… And then of course Insane difficulty… I am really wanting to play the game with friends, rather than random people, because it is just SO much more fun.
As for not so fun, well… I am in a huge rut right now, and it is kind of a nasty place to be… Just do note, there is some not-fun stuff going on in my life, and that is as far as I want to talk about it on my public blog… Love you guys anyways. 
And lastly, I’d like to conclude with wishing my schools band the utmost luck in the competition tonight in Atlanta! My friends (and enemies) in the band better do excellent tonight, otherwise I will be drastically disappointed!
The screen does change sizes, and so there is a huge empty space problem currently. The current resolution in these pictures is 1280×800, which is quite big, so that is why the buttons and whatnot are so small, and there is a huge amount of empty space.
I plan to have a video or something playing in the background of all the menu’s, just something interesting, such as energy pulsing throughout something or something along those lines, not sure yet. The menu items (buttons, etc.) will be placed on top of the video, and the video will be under that bar below the title (which yes I know it just says SHIP GAME, I REALLY need a title for it…).
Okay, so it is missing sound volume, and a ton of options, but hey, you can’t even save the settings yet anyways! Tomorrow I will get saving and loading of settings in place, and then we shall see about all the different settings!
Well, that’s all for today folks, next time I will hopefully have more!
Ok, so after having a long break from my wordpress, I am back!
A few things I plan on updating on this blog are these:
And to get it all started, here is some little information on my upcoming tutorials:
The reason my tutorials haven’t been coming out very much lately, is because I have been working on a beginners introduction to C# tutorial series, along with being very busy for school. Being a senior, and starting to apply to different colleges, I have lost quite some time to do things, add in the fact that I have quite a few difficult classes that are very taxing, video tutorials are slow coming, but they ARE coming!
In this new series that I am working on, I will go over what a Variable is, what a method is, what a class is, and how you can do a whole bunch of different things in C#. I will be making example applications on different basic features of C# and programming in general, and be making a hopefully easy to follow and understand series on the basics of programming in C#. I know for a lot of my followers, this is pretty useless, but I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked the question, “How did you learn C#? It is so complicated for me!” This tutorial series is designed to combat these questions.
Anyways, that is it for now, and I will be getting back to the people that follow my blog with more things I am working on and any other interesting news.
So, ever wanted to learn how to add 1 object to another, of object types that you create? Well here is how!
You can find the video here.
I hope this comes in handy for all y’all out there.
So I am running into a weird issue. I am trying to get a list of classes that aren’t monobehaviours to remain after pressing play, but they won’t, and it makes no sense why not.
I have tried everything I can think of, but to no avail…
The GUI class in Unity really needs to be removed. Why? Because it gives people a false sense of control. It also creates terrible, terrible practices among Unity Developers. The GUI class allows you to define exact coordinates for your GUI. What you don’t realize, is that this breaks 2 things:
Semantics!
Your GUI should always be as purely semantic as possible. It is the HTML fight but in Unity. In HTML, using Tables is a deprecated way of styling your websites. It is far superior to use CSS. An HTML website should be purely semantic, and have no styling without CSS. It is the same with GUI’s in Unity. GUISkin’s allow you to skin your GUI’s similarly like CSS for HTML. It can allow you to build far superior GUI’s, as you can easily change out the style whenever needed.
GUISKINS
GUISkins don’t work properly if you manually place objects. They get really confused when you try and add margins and spacing, change font sizes, etc.
With GUILayout, your GUI is almost entirely semantic in meaning besides the little bit of styling that is required in GUILayout. It also makes GUISkins work properly, and scale and texture things appropriately. If your designer came in, and wanted to completely redesign your interface, with GUILayout, he doesn’t have to touch the code almost at all. The only code he’d have to touch is if he wanted to change the order of things (Button 1 on the right rather than the left, things like this). GUILayout allows your designer to bring in tons of artwork, and easily redo spacing, change out fonts, tweak alignments, etc. without having to go into code at all. This is what is desired, and if you are smart about making your GUI’s, you’d go the GUILayout approach.
Awkwardly shaped GUI’s are entirely possible using GUILayout.Area(Rect position) and GUI.Window() and GUILayout.FlexibleSpace() and GUILayout.Space(float amt). There will be your 4 best friends when working in weirdly shaped GUI’s. For instance, let’s say you wanted to make a U shaped GUI, you would then make an GUILayout.Area in the area that you want it, and put whatever you need on the left side, flexible space, and then do the right side, then in your second GUILayout.BeginHorizontal() you will do your next row or your bottom row, where it is the bottom of the U.
As you can see, GUILayout is very powerful, and is the superior choice. That is why they added it after all…
I just finished recording a whole strew of C# tutorials on some advanced topics, and will be releasing these as soon as possible. Currently they are being rendered, and will take a while to render them all. Once they are all rendered, I will have to upload them all, then make them available all at the same time.
