There goes my last 400 quid

I'm going to America tomorrow, to visit Tommy! I may drop by Boston on the way back, possibly to see one of the MIT interface groups with my Dad, and possibly to see JP (of Irrational) and Karla, who I have been wanting to meet for years.

The past few days I've been storming through sound specs for Justin. I used our wiki, and I feel like my abilities on it have levelled up since I found out about "transcluding".

Basically, you use transcluding to import the contents of another page. So say you've got two pages which need common information on them - you don't want to have to copy/paste one bit of info into the other, and you don't want to have to update both when information changes. So, for the common piece of information, you set up a new page, and use {{:WikiWord}} to import that page into your other two pages. Update the common information page, and the changes fill down! Really useful! I also hear that you can transclude from individual subheadings in a page, without using the entire page, but it's not supported in the old version of MediaWiki we're using.

Kind of refreshing to get back to documentation after pure coding and back and forth-design as it has been with Tommy. Our wiki went out of use previously, just because it's a bit of a full time job managing it, and I only had one person to inform about design changes. It was a bit redundant, and really just nothing but overhead work. Now that Justin is involved, it's useful to get specs down where both Tommy and he can see them.

People are being very nice about my dumped game, "K", recently. I'm thinking that it might be due a revisitation after our current game, possibly as a bit of an open project (and certainly as a side project for me - I have other ideas I want to seed after this). I could get a public wiki going for the design document, forums for discussion, and hopefully attract dip-in-collaborators to help like Guy Balding has done.

Ofcourse, dip-in-collaboration depends entirely on the attractiveness of the venture offset by the difficulty of producing work for it. Guy Balding is perfect, because pixel art is not percieved as difficult (even though it does take real talent to make really good pixel art), and the project has been started by people who really know their stuff in that realm - it's an unabashed pixel wank, and there's no way your mother's going to open the door and spoil it all. Arne and BMcC are being excellent wayfairers on the project, and I'm looking forward to freeing some time to get some more jump animations done. Might be a while yet, though.