Lakie’s Blog

Well, since I didn’t have a camera you’ll have to wait for others to post them, sorry. However I’ve grab the only two available for now (adding credits as possible).

The day started off at 7am, were I woke up (after 4 hours sleep) and found my way to Taunton to catch the 8:19 to Paddington station, apart getting confused with where my reserved seat was and ending up at the back of the carriage taking a non-reserved seat (which was quite nice, next to a window and everything) and almost falling asleep during the 1 hour 50 minute journey, which was smooth no delays or anything, was interesting going full speed through smaller stations.

At Paddinton things got slightly more confusing, apart from the fee on the toilets (30p) which was minorly annoying, the map at the main tube (subway) entrance was rather confusing, I couldn’t find the route I wanted and planned to go on the ‘yellow’ line and swap to the ‘blue’, however it became apparent upon reaching the ‘yellow’ line that the map wasn’t quite correct and Paddington does indeed have a platform on the ‘brown’ line, so I ran (literally) to the platform and managed to get on the train just before it departed (took me like 20 minutes to workout the map and get to the right tube line).

Upon reaching Piccadilly Circus, I was confronted with the horror of trying to work out which exit to use (there are 4 - 5 which was really confusing), so after a call to Owen and lots of asking people I finally emerged from the tube through exit 4 and walked in a straight line towards Lester Square where I found (it was quite obvious) members of the TT-Forums Meet, of which Andel and Owen were late!

Once everyone had turned up, talked and gotten their name tags “<Real Name> (<Username>)” style with a very small TT-Forums logo above them, team leaders got more advanced versions which were larger, clearer and had country flags! With rain starting we headed into Yates’, a pub near by and proceed to colonised quite a number of tables, some of us ordering food and drink whilst Dominic (Andel) rewrote his list of Teams for “The Game”, and Ben (Sacro) went out in search of Mark (welsdragon) and others who may have been lost, finding Gavin.

At about 1pm, “The Game” started after Dominic gave the team leaders some rather bulky looking paperwork and a list of train classes to take pictures of at certain stations as well as a bonus bus to photograph. So we set out under the lead of Brian who knew how to get round the tube quite well, had a little talk about how he got so good at navigating it, after some of the team got tickets for the tube we headed towards Waterloo station (the tube was quite empty we could all sit down quite conformably and everything even if not all of us did), our target station.

Upon reaching our target, we had to sign in, which proved to be minor pain, paperwork and such but we got nice badges saying “Visitor / Contractor”, I think “Manager” or something would have been more awesome though. We then found and took several pictures (well Brain took all the pictures…) of some Class 450’s which were parked, I believe the winning picture had two side by side (from when we went to the end of the platform to find the 459 and 455), the left one was on the verge of leaving in the below picture.

Winning photograph - © Brian Ronald
(Creative Commons)

After finding all the trains we had been asked to find (even taking a picture of a drivers cab in the 450 and the model and build specs of a 455), we returned our badges (which would have made a nice souvenir) and decided to look for a bus (a RV or a bendy bus), which we found (RV1) and Brian photographed as we were boarding, and we decided to have a picture of us riding it as we headed for Covenant Gardens to walk back to Yates’ to end “The Game” and submit our work.

We found Owen’s team waiting for us (and we thought we did it nice and fast too), and waited for the final team to catch up before Andel looked over the submissions and pronounced our team the winner which netted me a T-shirt (same as the default but with “The Game Winner” on the back), and giving a toy subway train to Brian for the best photograph (see above), whilst I got a drink and some food to eat (well, having nothing since 7am leaves one kind of hungry at 3pm)! After another 40 minutes of talking we decided (mainly because of my 17:06 train home), to take the group photograph (we asked some girl to do it for us, she was kind of embarrassed but took two pictures and then left looking even more embarrassed when we offered to buy her a drink for helping us), picture below.

Final Group Photograph

After staying with the gang a little longer, I left for the tube worried about missing my train by getting lost in the tube, which I managed to navigate quite easily, and it was quite quiet which was nice), upon reading Paddington and walking out of the wrong exit (I had hoped to come up in the middle of the station), and consequently walking round the the front, back into Paddington Station, I looked for information about my train. Which was early, I boarded it on platform 2 (it has some stupid little ticket scanners like the tube) at 4:50pm, and found my seat on the train after realising my mistake this morning and went home. The only minor thing this time was a broken signal which was constantly red and held us for 5 minutes before going through it! Which lead to being 10 minutes late, but overall it was a very pleasant experience and I hope to attend the next meet depending on location, date and funds accordingly.

[Edit] Look forward to seeing Owen’s little meet film and a ’subbed’ (usernames marked against the people) version of the Group photograph. There will be plenty from others about the meet so don’t worry about me not going into enough depth for you!

~ Lakie

Well, I’ve been working on this over the last few days as Azarel and Mark may now from talking with me over Skype. Well, after hours of trying to work out Memory and File Streams, I mannaged to workout a ‘relatively’ effeient way of cleaning the excess data from it and then saving to a ‘cache’ to save the program from having to redownload all the images again (which is time consuming). I may release this publically but I could really do with finding a faster feed as the current one updates every 6 minutes.

My old version:

Picture of the original Xbox Tracker.

And my new version:

My latest version of Xbox Tracker.

Changes from my late version:

• Multi threading - to stop the GUI locking up whilst downloading or updating.
• Graphical Interface to change the gamer tags ‘monitored’, now also shows last 5 played games.
• Better download queuing.
• Ability to cache downloaded images.
• Better code to ’solve’ issues with downloading and updating the feed information.

Might release this to the public but I’d imagine there are some hidden bugs which others would find because of doing stupid things, maybe after I make it more ‘resistant’ to issues. That and I don’t think anyone would have an interest in it, btw, if you know a feed which updates more regularly feel free to drop me a line so I can experiment with it!

~ Lakie

After some friendly pushes to get over my fear of the doing something very new to me, from my family and Owen, I’ve decided to attend the meet, booked the train tickets there and back, good thing too because if I left it any longer I’d be paying a lot more to get to London.

~ Lakie

After a day of trying to workout a route and costing it up, (and with some help from Mark (welsdagon) and Dominic (Andel). The current plan will mean leaving at 7:30am and arriving at London meet location at around 10:30am to 10:50am just in time for the ‘official’ starting time of the meet. The plan involves leaving London at 4:40pm to 5pm and getting home somewhere between 8pm to 9pm depending on buses or if I get a lift home.

Currently deciding if I’ll go as £55 (which is what I reckon the travel fees will add up) is quite a fair amount of money, (also I’d need some money for food, drink etc). That coupled with the fact I’ve never travelled so far away from ‘home’ without family or someone to help guide me around (moral support) so I’m not sure if I’ll get lost, panic and basically suffer a mini-breakdown from feeling totally lost and alone (which I can assure you would not be very pleasant for me). I’ve got to decide within the next 2 to 3 days if I’m going or not before the fares shoot up in price! I’ll try to update this blog as soon as possible after I decide.

As always feel free to post comments,

~ Lakie

I finally found time to do some minor Transport Tycoon Developing, one could say it was rather inspired by the awesome work Jonathan has done on allowing junctions and diagonals under bridges (shame that only rail over rail works at the moment though), however if you use TTDpatch I highly suggest you try it out! Also someone’s (DJNekkid) alpha grf (for Purno’s 2CC set) forgetting about TTDpatch not supporting all the Callback 36 Train variables OpenTTD does.

So after finding my trains had zero capacity which was rather annoying I decided to ask him for a TTDpatch workable version (give the MU passenger wagon a capacity) to which that still didn’t work (apparently it was him mistaking weight for capacity), so I started working on trying to make Callback 36 support Train Variable 14 whilst waiting for a fixed version.

First I started by trying to work out how the macros’ which Callback 36 now works with / through (DaleStan wrote the macros to fix some bugs with vehicle structure), it turns out for what I wanted DaleStan had to revise his macros’ and made r1963 which was designed around my plans. Using the new “FIRST” macro with my hooks in the “buyRailVehicle” and “buyWagon” I discovered, with help with DaleStan that I had to call “patchendstrucinit” for each instance of my subroutine which had had the “FIRST” macro used on it.

Fixing this I decided to go on and hook the attach/detach subroutine in TTD, writing the functions to do this was surprisingly easy after studying the idb closely to work out what the values stored in the “tempvar” storage. Finding a suitable place to hook took me longer however, I decided to hook just after it’s refreshed the first train consists window (if the said window is open), thus allowing for it to be called after a successful movement of a wagon. This lead to one minor issue however with the same train consist sometimes being run through twice or a crash, I decided that if the vehicle pointer wasn’t a consist head to abort changing the said consist based off lots of debugging the values and what they point to.

Finally when testing my changes I uncovered a rather old bug [see above], (which apparently DaleStan made when he was adding his “windatabox_sizerextra” structure definition to TTDpatch), initially I only noticed the double ‘edi’ which seemed off to me, and however upon closer inspection it turned out that DaleStan had used the wrong part of the structure, which was causing the window to become very malformed after my “ResizeOpenWindows” function was called, thankfully I was able to correct this mistake before anyone had reported it as a bug with TTDpatch (after a lot of confusing with DaleStan’s structure names not matching the names of the ‘variables’ which store the constraints and sizing information). r1965.

After fixing my poor 32px mode and CloneTrain code, I started on trying to iron out the last bug I’d found with my Callback hooks, Articulated vehicles ‘trailers’ being copied until the end of the vehicle array [example above], which with morevehicles 4 is an awful lot (around 2,000 ‘clones’)! I discovered this was actually due to the Callback variable being the same as the ArticulatedVehicleCount (“articulatedvehicle”) which was causing the buy routine to constantly rebuild the trailer because Callback 36 reset its counter back to 0. To fix this final issue I decided to use a push and pop system, which should work as long as other calls clean up after themselves. See the finished version r1966, expect to see it in the next nightly!

And because there is so much boring text in this post, I’ll attach a few pictures of Purno’s set which I was using to help me test my Callback36 variable support (credits to Purno’s 2cc set’s authors)! As usual feel free to comment.

~ Lakie