sweet! i'll have to give it a try too

that is nice. try decreasing the contrast on the background, though. right now it's difficult to tell the sprites apart from the map.

i got a pack of gum and a trip to the grocery store =)

as for gifts: knitting and baking and working on a game engine for my brother (though they're all running a bit late).

without getting into the code itself, here is a good way to handle jumping:

check if the jump key is pressed. if so, check if your character is immediately on top of a platform and if vertical velocity is not negative (meaning the character is not rising). if this is all true, set the character's velocity to some negative value, depending on how high you want to make him jump.

each frame, acceleration should be a positive constant, causing the velocity to change constantly and the end result to be a clean arc, assuming no things get in the way. while the velocity is negative, check above your character's head, from the topmost pixel's starting position to the position it would be in at the end of the frame. if there is a platform in the way, set the character's vertical position so that that topmost pixel is immediately below the obstruction and set vertical velocity to 0 (or maybe a positive amount, if you want him to bounce off). similarly, when velocity is positive, check beneath the character in the range between the bottommost pixel's starting position and ending position during a frame.

EDIT: if you want to allow jumping higher by holding down the key, set a "timer" variable to some positive value. decrement it by one every frame until it is zero, and, while the value is non-zero and the jump key is held down, maintain a constant vertical velocity rather than adjusting it due to gravity.

EDIT 2: also, if your platforms are tilemap-based (i.e. have constant-ly sized blocks making up platforms), that collision detection gets lots easier, as you can just check if the projected position is inside of the space taken up by a tile.

sed is best. here's a line from my panel:

hc tag_status | tr '\t' '\n' | sed \
-e '1d' \
-e '$d' \
-e 's/\(.*\)/\1 /' \
-e 's/:/ /' \
-e "s/[#+\-%]\(.*\)/%{B${bg_focus} F${fg_focus}} \1%{B${bg_normal} F${fg_normal}}/" \
-e "s/!\(.*\)/%{B${bg_urgent} F${fg_urgent}} \1%{B${bg_normal} F${fg_normal}}/" \
-e "s/\.\(.*\)/%{B${bg_normal} F${fg_grey}} \1%{B${bg_normal} F${fg_normal}}/" \
| tr -d '\n'

and yeah, shells are meant to just be the glue that binds together other programs

this appears to be a bit borken. movement is pretty unintuitive and collisions with pits / the beast don't actually work with my system's implementation.

also, why did you choose java for making a game?

the idea sounds interesting, though =)

Eeems has been nice enough to host a mumble server for public use again.

somebody should give that Eeems guy a cookie.

oh, and i might have to actually get a microphone and come bug you guys some time now.

...backed by the world's largest Crowd GPS network.

so... putting one of these on your keys means that someone other than you could use it to find them?