Blog Frankie

25/06/2024 | 3:01 pm

New additions include a project, Atari restoration, and a game, Selk! The Atari restoration page has enough words so I won't waste ink here. Selk is an Unreal game developed for a graphics class; go read about it!

I've also made slight graphical changes to the website's homepage, games section, projects section, and contact.

21/06/2024 | 3:29 pm

Couldn't help myself and had to include Font Awesome into the website! Also, brought some small rearrangements into life.

21/06/2024 | 2:03 pm

Another website has been completed and I'm just too happy about this one! (nfcook.com) :) Finally I decided to create a professional website, which showcases projects in a portfolio section. I've expanded my horizons and dipped into frameworks, and for this website I used a Jekyll framework, plus a template. Although my intentions were to simplify the process in using a template, I did wind up getting stuck on some desired modifications. I wanted so badly to have proper hover and click capabilities for the portfolio section on desktop AND mobile. Down the rabbit hole I went... If you're wondering how this website is being hosted, I am using a combination of Netlify and Github to host the website for freeeee! I only have to pay for the domain! Moving on, 99% of development time was spent on creating images and demo gifs of each and every project under the portfolio ;_;. Harsh lessons were handed out about .img and .gif file size. In hindsight, start your project KNOWING what size your images will need to be. Another interesting issue I came across is a strange one. I found my touch-evvents were triggering mouse-events, which was a head-scratcher for me. I'm still not certain were this dark magic comes from but I resolved to change my idea rather than die on that hill. One last thing I uncovered is 'Font Awesome.' Font Awesome provides a nifty way to incorporate any number already made general icons, and in various image sizes as well.

27/09/2023 | 2:20 pm

why does everything take sOO LONG!? (Could it be me?) Oh well, live and learn I suppose. I'm a simple being, with simple wishes. All I wanted was an email notification sent to me when a visitor submits to any database... How could such a simple thing break so many times?? FINALLY tho, my dream has come true. 0.0 Email notifications are now implemented. (oh yeah, I also went into the bloody depths of my file structure and PHP code, abstracted everything I could with magic powers, and reformatted the files. A dangerous task, but I prevailed.)

25/08/2023 | 2:55 am

uh, late night coding.. 3 am. the only time projects make progress. uh.. oh anyway I completely refactored, trashed, retrashed, and factored my canvas application. It should be more broken than ever now and I just haven't found the plethora of bugs crawling around inside those pixelated mattresses. Once they surface it's back to square one. Worse than square one. NOw. Because I'm a masochist (and simply upgrading the canvas for two weeks was not enough pain) I created a database for submitted images ANNND crafted a page to display everybody's less than stellar artwork. You'll find plenty of my blood and tears on the gallery page. ..I'm going to bed. MAKE ART PEOPLE

11/08/2023 | 12:25 pm

Finished and released the guestbook for visitors to sign! I messed around with PHP in the backend a lot in order to get this functional. Go sign now you visitor.

10/08/2023 | 3:52 pm

I finally decided to do a massive rehaul of the canvas and so much has been added in one day. Touch controls have been added, full color options are available, download button is available, pen width can be adjusted, and the submit button works better than ever before. Hooray for progess

09/08/2023 | 4:34 pm

Small fixes and updates have been made to the video game touch controls. I'm trying desperately to make the touch controls mobile friendly, yet it seems soo hard.

24/06/2023 | 9:05 pm

My lastest creation is a Flappy Bird clone aptly titled Stupid Duck. NOW don't jump to conclusions, there is more depth here than meets the eye. The ENTIRE engine that Stupid Duck runs on was built from the ground up! I used an incredibly insightful tutorial series by Travis Vronman to build a TypeScript engine from scratch.

01/05/2023 | 11:57 am

Idk why it took me so long, but I have an SSL certificate for my website! I wonder how many viewers I've turned away with that annoying security popup...

07/03/2023 | 12:14 pm

I've achieved the 'ray-casting engine' rung of the CS hierarchy. If you don't know, a raycasting engine is a relic from the 90s that doesn't quite meet the criteria of 3D engines. Simply put, this engine comprimed 2D and 3D to achieve a '3D-feel' in a time when hardware wasn't at a standard to operate 3D engines. My project has taken a long time to complete, but this raycasting engine is a huge milestone for me. However, I feel excited and ready to move on to newer projects more than ever now. A couple of notes, in retrospect, about this raycasting engine should be said. Firstly, I (unsurprisingly) only implemented 5% of what I intended to accomplish. I had gigantic visions for this engine and much didn't come to fruition. Maybe, maaaaaybe, i'll return one day to upgrade/redo the engine. maybe.. Secondly, I'm disappointed to say, in this form, the engine does not operate true to how a classic raycasting engine, such as Doom, would perform. At the end of the day, all of my rectangular segments are being rendered as polygons, not drawn pixel-by-pixel. I don't know how much is lost in such a conversion, but surely it's possible to render a truer method with some WebGL finesse.

12/06/2022 | 12:14 pm

I fixed the submissions for the contact page and the canvas project. Anyone can send me messages this way and/or submit images to me they create with the canvas.

11/02/2022 | 8:45 pm

How fitting, exactly 368 days since my last journal update. It's been a REALLY long time. That was way to loo0Ong of a haitus, but I wasn't being still. I've been learning real web development concepts and designs for the past five months. Slowly and painstakingly rebuilding every piece of the website during the process (so much ..so much). It has been a lot more than I ever imagined, but I finally feel confident that I put the website into a manageable state. I knew nothing before this. NOTHING. Before this time, I was not using the most basic web design principles: building outside in, normalizing webpages, border-box, dynamic html, flexbox, and so much more. I even have the website ready for a mobile experience! Yet, some of the older projects and games might not function correctly with mobile. That reminds me, I changed every single project and game in some form during this haitus as well. Usually, this was to integrate them with the new website design. I still have so much more to talk about, but I don't want this to carry on for too long. I've created a FrankieFrankie official Discord, with a link on the homepage. (join, join, join). There is a link to my twitch channel, which I intend to start streaming coding sessions on. Also, the website is now running on a Linode server.

08/02/2021 | 9:33 pm

Wow, the website is over a year old now! I can't believe it! What's even better is I can now say that I am 100% self-hosting my website on a homeserver!! :D I'm super proud of that and it is something I planned to do since the beginning of this website. It was a bit more complex than I had originally anticipated, and took multiple attempts over the course of weeks, but the website works now. Sadly, I missed the anniverseray of the website because the previous hosting service had ran out of time, and there was a gap between that and me setting up self-hosting where the website was down. Everything is running smoothly now, but until I am more knowledgable with website security, the contact page will be down.

29/09/2020 | 10:15 pm

I seem to be updating this website less and less frequently, as my life is getting a bit busier and my projects for the website are growing more complicated. I desperately want to reorganize, recode, and redesign the entire website, but that will have to wait for now. Anyway, I have finished my first project involving marching squares. Marching squares are a super cool way to create graphics, and you should definitely look them up if you're interested. As usual however, my project has not implemented everything I wish and does not feel as clean as I would like, but I'm happy it works. :)

28/07/2020 | 4:38 pm

Visual effects are done! well.. done for now. There is still a lot I want to do with the visual effects and the canvas, but that will have to wait. It took a lot longer than anticipated, but I have finished enough that there is now a visual effects webpage. Just to show them off! I really want to allow the viewer to interact with the effects, but that is another project waiting to be done.

21/03/2020 | 12:28 am

I've uploaded a new song titled Constant. I decided to take a break from coding so much and finished a song I had been working on instead.

14/03/2020 | 12:24 am

I finished my first overhaul of the entire website today. It took a few days to go through every page of the site, but I cleaned up a lot of the mess I had created. I updated the sandsimulator and canvas to look a little more friendly and usable. Also, anything that uses php, like the canvas or messaging, no longer displays a blank white screen when complete. For the most part, I was cleaning up small details on the website that probably are not noticable and cleaning up the code itself.

24/02/2020 | 3:17 am

These projects are getting more ambitious and more time consuming. It's been nearly a month since my last addition, but I have come back with a fully functional canvas that visitors can draw on! I am stoked that I finally finished it and there were many many roadblocks that I ran into, but I know way more about php than I ever have :). Additionally, anyone can submit their image and it will be emailed to me. Well, sort of.. It is actually encoded and I have a decoder on my end that I use to remake your images.

13/02/2020 | 1:14 am

Unfortuanetly, no changes have been made to the website in a hot minute becuase I've been spending a lot of time working on a new game to implement here. However, this game will have to be shelved for now becuase it got to complicated and I need to take a break from it before I get back to it. I'm moving on and will be implementing new stuff into the website shortly.

26/01/20 | 10:10 pm

I have not posted anything in about two whole weeks.. I am finally back with my greatest addition to the website too date. My sand simulator debuts today! It is an incredibly simple physics engine that attempts to imitate the motion of sand using pixels. I am super excited with the way it turned out, but this is part of the reason I have not posted in so long. It took foooorever to work out the bugs in this project, and on top of that, I had several exams for school sprinkled in these past two weeks. I'm back though

11/01/20 | 11:57 pm

Visitors can now send messages directly to my email! I had to learn a little bit of PHP to figure this puzzle out, but I finally got it to work. I even have a validation check for wether or not the boxes are filled. Unfortunately, there is a problem with the PHP script ending on a blank white page when displaying the alert box and I will have to figure out how to fix this at a later date.

04/01/20 | 12:06 am

I uploaded another song titled "Dark Magic." I honestly just make these names up last minute. I'm not as happy with this one but I wanted to move on from it so it's here now.

02/01/20 | 12:48 pm

Implemented my first javascript into the website today! It's a little "word game" called Letter Scrambler. It's pretty simple and replaces a random letter around a vowel with a different random letter. All in all, it was a fun project to take my first steps with javascript in, but I'm not sure if I'll update it. Stay Tuned

31/12/19 | 12:08 am

I finally started to learn JavaScript. It's not going to be too difficult as long as I put in the time it takes. However, I have yet to incorporate any script into the website.

Also, I uploaded a new song titled "Reflections." I was experimenting with echo modules in this one.

28/12/19 | 12:38 am

I uploaded another song. I am way to excited right now.

27/12/19 | 6:47 pm

I have the music player working and uploaded a song I titled "Caverns"

27/12/19 | 5:24 pm

The website is up and working! Siteground, my website hoster, finally connected with the domain. I'm so stoked right now!

25/12/19 | 12:56 pm

I just bought the domain for frankiefrankie.xyz! (It's going to take 24 hours until the hosting connects though)

25/12/19 | 12:15 pm

I have been using html for about two weeks now and I think I'm going to buy the domain for my website. The website is not.. aesthetically together.. but I am super excited to own the domain! It's not clean, but it's mine.