February 13, 2006
Someone posted recently, I think in For Beginners (though it might have been Game Design), that they were working on a clone of SimTower/Yoot Tower. What is this "Yoot Tower?" I asked Google, and discovered that the original designer of SimTower made his own sequal to it.
This knowledge, plus some t…
This knowledge, plus some t…
February 10, 2006
One of the things that always irritated me at Rebellion was waiting for builds. We used Incredibuild, a distributed build system, so compilation times were pretty fast; but the linker would still always run on my own machine. I always pondered why that was. Even with incremental linking turned on, …
February 06, 2006
Oli (evolutional) has made a few changes to the way javascript runs on the site... the menus should be slightly more responsive now, and joy of joys, the private message shaking works again [grin]
Let us know if anyone is running into difficulties...
Let us know if anyone is running into difficulties...
January 31, 2006
I've gone and done it; I've booked flights to San Fransisco.
Now I need to start looking at the sessions I want to attend. For some incomprehensible reason CMP don't have a simple day-by-day calendar of all the things that are going on...
For the Monday and Tuesday, it looks like tutorials are the or…
Now I need to start looking at the sessions I want to attend. For some incomprehensible reason CMP don't have a simple day-by-day calendar of all the things that are going on...
For the Monday and Tuesday, it looks like tutorials are the or…
January 29, 2006
The more I look at this, the more I begin to consider it to be plausible. Strangely enough, I can get flights on Virgin Atlantic out on the 19th and back on the 26th for GBP330. I can try and persuade the university to provide my insurance - I think I can argue that GDC is academically worthwhile t…
January 29, 2006
I've done a little more investigation into GDC. It turns out that it actually doesn't overlap my end of term - there's a week between the two. This is a problem for me, as it moves me back from "definitely can't go" into the undecided area again.
First is the question of how I get there and how I ge…
First is the question of how I get there and how I ge…
January 23, 2006
Second pass on the debugging article is complete; it now stands at 9,894 words. I've sent it off to a contact at Microsoft, and also to a professor here at the university who heads up the Programming Tools Group. Hopefully I'll get enough feedback that I can write another 106 words [grin]
January 21, 2006
Finally reached a point of relative finished-ness with that Debugging article, at 7,792 words... but I've passed it around to a few people and there are already some areas that I need to add more on, like postmortem debugging and how to work with fullscreen apps. And that's just the folks who were …
January 20, 2006
"Our view of the world comes partly from the attitudes we are born with, partly from our upbringing, and partly from philosophies we adopt as adults. Or, if you prefer, from Nature, Nurture, and Nietzsche."
- Quentin Stafford-Fraser
- Quentin Stafford-Fraser
January 15, 2006
...being invited over to a friend's room at another college at ten to midnight to watch Spartacus, and taking him up on it, even though my first lecture of term is at 9am. 4:15am now. Reckon I'll make it?
Edit: I made it.
Edit: I made it.
January 14, 2006
Getting into IMDb was a nice surprise, but I didn't feel truly vindicated until I realised I was also listed in MobyGames.
I'll put the credits for Sniper in once they tell me how to use their credit-entering system correctly...
I'll put the credits for Sniper in once they tell me how to use their credit-entering system correctly...
January 12, 2006
I should really be revising but I feel all restless like I need to do something constructive/productive. That usually happens when I try revising which is why I don't generally bother [grin]
Based on the fact that I don't know what I'm doing with OpenGL (as evidenced by the previous post), and based…
Based on the fact that I don't know what I'm doing with OpenGL (as evidenced by the previous post), and based…
January 09, 2006
I'm writing a little system to render bezier curves using hardware. I'm doing it using OpenGL and Cg, which makes things a little harder because I don't have much of a clue about them, but it's necessary because I'm targetting Mac/Linux as well as PC and I don't want to write multiple renderers. St…
January 07, 2006
I went drinking with some of the folks from Rebellion last night, and while I was at the office I was happily given a copy of Sniper Elite. Naturally, when I got home:
Cameraphone, so it's blurry, but... OOOH YEEEAH. I need to actually play the game to see how much it changed since I worked on it, w…
Cameraphone, so it's blurry, but... OOOH YEEEAH. I need to actually play the game to see how much it changed since I worked on it, w…
January 01, 2006
Happy New Year. Keep posting in that thread, dammit.
Depeche Mode's John The Revelator is a fucking awesome song.
Depeche Mode's John The Revelator is a fucking awesome song.
December 30, 2005
There was a really interesting thread in the Graphics forum about camerawork in games, but nobody's posted since my post.
Go post! It's a good thread and merits further discussion.
Go post! It's a good thread and merits further discussion.
December 27, 2005
I'm pretty knackered right now because I stayed up till 6am and it's now 1pm and I've been up for about an hour.
It was worth it though. After I sobered up a little ([wink]) I was chatting to people in #gamedev and I got into a little design brainstorming session with aboom. He was trying to use CRC…
It was worth it though. After I sobered up a little ([wink]) I was chatting to people in #gamedev and I got into a little design brainstorming session with aboom. He was trying to use CRC…
December 26, 2005
I'm quite drunk after a fair amount of vodka and a few pints of guiness and then more vodka.
we went down to my mate's house for a srot of party thing, and then he and I went down the pub so he could pull the barmaid who is his ex girlfriend, and she's really nice and we went back to his place but t…
we went down to my mate's house for a srot of party thing, and then he and I went down the pub so he could pull the barmaid who is his ex girlfriend, and she's really nice and we went back to his place but t…
December 25, 2005
Got a decent set of things for Christmas, beginning with (but not limited to) indigestion. [smile]
The most relevant one right now is that I got the new PoP game, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. I started playing it at 7pm, took a break at 7:30 when I accidentally hit the reset button on my machi…
The most relevant one right now is that I got the new PoP game, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. I started playing it at 7pm, took a break at 7:30 when I accidentally hit the reset button on my machi…
December 24, 2005
After much experimentation and screwing around with the Vista and XP bootloaders, I'm now back under XP...
... and now Vista won't boot [lol]
My head seems to be alright this morning.
... and now Vista won't boot [lol]
My head seems to be alright this morning.
December 23, 2005
Posting this from Vista, after a few hours of wrestling with it to get it installed and working. Unfortunately the bootloader seems to have gone a bit strange in the head in the process and I can't access XP at the moment. So I'm using IE7 and Vista whether I like it or not [grin]
Thus far I don't r…
Thus far I don't r…
December 23, 2005
Not feeling well. Frequent dizzyness and feeling of nausea, though I've not actually been sick quite yet. Last night was pretty rough, and this morning was hell, though after getting some water and pizza inside me I feel a little better. The world is still slightly spinning though.
However, I should…
However, I should…
December 16, 2005
Something I'd highly recommend in your software project, if you've got the time, is to mess around a bit.
It's a really good way to test the flexibility of what you've written, and it can sometimes expose bugs too. While working on a comicbook-related game some months ago, I had a few days of free t…
It's a really good way to test the flexibility of what you've written, and it can sometimes expose bugs too. While working on a comicbook-related game some months ago, I had a few days of free t…
November 26, 2005
So I finally got the chance to play with an Xbox 360 today. The local game stores have got demo kits in; I was hanging around watching Kameo: Elements of Power on the kit in Gamestation while a friend bought a Neo Geo.
It does look nice - it looks like HL2 on my GF7800GTX with all the effects turned…
It does look nice - it looks like HL2 on my GF7800GTX with all the effects turned…
November 24, 2005
5:35pm: 3-piece variety meal from KFC.
12:00pm: Double cheeseburger from Hassan's kebab van.
Total food quotient for the day: -7
12:00pm: Double cheeseburger from Hassan's kebab van.
Total food quotient for the day: -7
November 19, 2005
I write this entry whilst wearing a wig and a pink cowboy hat with sequinned trim.
Let me explain. Tonight is the night of one of Wadham college's most (in)famous annual parties - "Queer Bop." The boys go and girls, and the girls go as... well... underwear models.
I'm going as a sort of semi-cowgirl …
Let me explain. Tonight is the night of one of Wadham college's most (in)famous annual parties - "Queer Bop." The boys go and girls, and the girls go as... well... underwear models.
I'm going as a sort of semi-cowgirl …
November 17, 2005
In my pursuit of multithreaded execution, I'm paying particular attention to lock-free and wait-free algorithms, and 'atomicity' of operations.
Atomic ops are important because of the nature of the interruption - a context switch. What happens if you're in the middle of modifying something when anot…
Atomic ops are important because of the nature of the interruption - a context switch. What happens if you're in the middle of modifying something when anot…
November 14, 2005
The Four Elements 4 results have finally been posted. Congrats to the winners; commiserations to everyone else, though I hope most people feel that the five-month process has been of value to them. I know for a fact that a number of people have learnt a lot about the nature of deadlines. [smile]
Now…
Now…
November 12, 2005
Followup to my previous post.
In an 100-instruction function, do we necessarily care about all 100 instructions? Given our two sequential processes, what if we were to identify all external state accessed or modified by those processes (which should be fairly easy - for starters we can get a list of…
In an 100-instruction function, do we necessarily care about all 100 instructions? Given our two sequential processes, what if we were to identify all external state accessed or modified by those processes (which should be fairly easy - for starters we can get a list of…
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