Stuff I've read lately

The Rising: Volume 1 of the Flight Engineer (James Doohan and S. M. Stirling) - Why do we eat twizzlers? You see the bag, you know they aren't very good, but "mmmm... twizzlers", you get them. Then you eat them all. Then you think, "That wasn't very good." And they're not good for you. Some books are like that. Any Star Wars book not by Timothy Zahn, any Star Trek book - this book. I like twizzlers, so I read this book. I told myself, "Maybe Stirling will keep the quality high." I was fooling myself. I mean, mining antimatter from a planet! Why? Why? Ah, well, I'll let you know how the next one is :)

Speaking My Mind (Tony Campolo) - I have spared the zero readers of this blog (I don't need to read it, I already know what's here...), and posted this review on my Faith blog.

Fixing Star Wars - Episode 2

Wow, were in the home stretch now. I think it was about 2 in the morning at this point... :)

Episode 2 is in pretty good shape. Mostly trimming for time and tempo, and patching to fit in the other changes we've made:

• Cut Obi-wan's bartender friend, and reduce the library search. It slows everything down. Remember any scenes of Jedi training should have them older than five years old.
  
• Remove the factory fight (and flying R2). It adds nothing.
• Shorten the interrogation of Obi-wan and monster arena fight. The action doesn't climax until after the Jedi arrive, and then the stormtroopers arrive. This leads to some amount of saturation.
• If that isn't enough time savings, the asteroid chase can also be removed. It adds little, and Obi-wan can still need Anakin to relay his message (Ben's ship is too small, or has a random failure).
  
• Put in some conflict between Anakin and uncle Owen. That had to be the easiest connection back to the original trilogy, and Lucas dropped it on the floor.
• Remember that Count Dooku is Darth Maul (per Episode 1). This can help to maintain the suspense on whether Dooku is good, evil, or just independent.
  

That is most of the changes. I will put together all the changes for 3, 4, and 5 into a final post.

We Come in Peace!

We come in peace.
We come in peace.
WE COME IN PEACE.


New orders: KILL KILL!

do do doo to do doot

Fixing Star Wars - Episode 1

(See the previous post: Fixing Episode 6)

Flush with success, we asked ourselves: "Could episode 1 be fixed?" It seems impossible, but let's look at the problems:

1. Gungans
2. Confusion in the final act (four disparate settings)
3. Amidala, the eleven year old politician
4. Anakin, the five year old love interest
5. Slow start (the fate of the whole galaxy rests in trade negotiations at a backwater world?)
6. Darth Maul -> Count Dooku issues
7. C3PO (a protocol droid) built by a five year old for his enslaved mother?
8. Light treatment of slavery on Tatooine
9. Midichlorians (or was it mitochondria?), 'nuff said
   

Ok, that's a lot of issues. But we can tackle them one-by-one.

1. One, two, and five are somewhat related, and can be solved together. I think everyone can agree the treatment of the Gungans falls somewhere between atrocity and poorly done. More subtly, they slow down the story at the beginning, and overly complicate the story at the end. It seems Lucas was trying to show that the rebellion includes metropolitan and rural interests. This can be done better by reducing the footprint of the Gungans to a minority population in the cities (on top of cleaning the material). This quickens the introduction, and eliminates one setting in the finale. A handful of Gungans can help Amidala to retake the palace.
2. Handled mostly above. Also improvement needed in how Anakin influences the battle.
3. Amidala needs to be either: a beauty queen (like American idol for a position more like England's queen, i.e. public relations) or the daughter of a more senior politician. She should also be older, maybe early twenties. This gives a lot of room to play a smart, rebellious youngster against older politicians.
4. Ok, I think Anakin was supposed to be closer to ten; but you put him next to Liam Neeson, and he's going to look tiny. A lot of the problem is Lucas is very fuzzy/odd about the Jedi order. From episode 4, Luke is "too old". He was about twenty. But Anakin is "too old" too! Clearly, you have to be about three to be a Jedi! That's kind of creepy. Actually, that's a lot creepy. Combined with 3, Anakin can be about 16. Say 13 is the cutoff.
5. Handled mostly above. The pod racing scene also could be reduced. Time savings should be converted into deepening characters, settings, and politics.
6. The Count Dooku issue will raise its head again. But the first step is to stitch together Maul and Dooku. There are supposed to be two Sith (master and apprentice). Instead we get master, old apprentice, new apprentice, and robot apprentice (General Grievous). The solution is to make Maul the mask for the public figure of Dooku (you can even keep both actors). Hmm, now you can't kill Maul at the end of Episode 1, but that's ok. Maul kills Qui-Gon, knocks out Obi and makes his escape.
7. C3PO is clearly part of Amidala's staff. If you want to show off Anakin's skill, he can create a robot we don't see in the late trilogy (or one we know less about).
8. There is room in Episode 1 to deepen this. But resolution should probably wait until 2 or 3.
9. I said 'nuff said!
   

Ok, that was painful. But we made it! Epsiode 1 is fixed! Now finish them!

New Stars Status

I used to tell John how a certain GUI feature was only a handful of lines of code in Tcl. He would always come back with, "Yea, but it takes you a whole day to write those lines." It's true. I would look through man pages, and experiment with the console, then finally write a line or two; and modify another line or two.

The latest changes have had me thinking a lot. I need to add waypoint tasks when the user changes the waypoint task drop down. I realized the first step was to add the code to find the planet a fleet is in orbit of (or deep space).

That is finally done. Compare these two screen shots to an older fleet view:




Part of the trouble was I no longer have access to a Visual C++ compiler. The key was to use -mno-cygwin on g++ cygwin. But then I had to rebuild the whole tool chain...

Next step is to add the code to the waypoint task updater.