William Willing

Tomorrow I’ll be teaching my first classes of this schoolyear. I won’t just be teaching programming in Java, as I thought previously, I’ll also be teaching HTML and scripting. HTML won’t be a problem, since I’m the one who developed the method they are using at the school.

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I regularly watch DVDs (or, to be more precise, the movies that are on these DVDs) on my computer. There are a couple of things that bug me about DVDs, though. Region codes, for example. Also, copyright warnings and, in general, any content I can’t skip. And I think messages along the lines of ‘The opinions expressed in the following interviews are the individual opinions of the people being interviewed and are not necessarily the opinions of Big Movie Studio.’ are downright pathetic. Fortunately, I won’t have to deal with these annoyances anymore.

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What’s the strength of a good programmer? Why, programming, of course. If you are a lone wolf game developer and you basically suck at graphics and you are not especially good with sound or music, then you should design games that allow you to showcase what you are good at: programming.

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I finished my first scenario for Jayden today. It goes something like this. Mary comes into your shop and tells you that her daughter is ill. She’s afraid her little girl will die and she asks for your help. You can turn her away immediately, but she won’t like that. Besides, it’s bad for business. So, you ask her a bit about the disease, you figure out what it is and you tell Mary that you have a cure. Unfortunately, she can’t afford your potion. At this point you can send her away, reduce the price or give her the potion for free. That last option leads to scene two of this little scenario.

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Today I spent a lot of time on a seemingly simple task. I’m writing a tool I need for Jayden using the Win32 API. In general, I quite like the Win32 API, but I ran into an annoying quirk today. I finally found the solution and I’m documenting it here to help other people that might run into the same problem and to make sure I don’t have to go through all this trouble again if I run into this problem in the future.

What I want sounds quite simple: I want to make it impossible for the user to close my modal dialog box by pressing Escape. Normally, this would break expected behaviour, but if you’re using a dialog box as your main window, it actually makes sense. I’ll go over the procedure to do this step by step. Don’t leave before we get to multiline edit controls, though, because that’s where it really gets weird.

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