Archive for August, 2008
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
Saturday I continued work on an algorithm to get the walls in Synapse rendering correctly. It’s a surprisingly subtle algorithm and I’ll post the details next week.
I also watched Babylon AD at the cinema yesterday, the new Vin Diesel sci-fi flick. It gets really incomprehensible at the end and the conbat is really boring but it has some awesome visuals (including the best bomb explosion I’ve ever seen) and ideas. I tentitively reccomend it. And spelling school for me.
Today I chilled and watched a couple of rentals, including an absolutely amazing medieval American Pie-alike called “Virgin Territory”. Also a pretty good indie film called “In The Land of Women”. Frankly, the first should have been called “Virgin Territory: In the land of women” and the second something much more sensible. But there you go.
I’ve decided I don’t like Lumines. Average games seem to last over half an hour and that’s too long for a puzzle game. I also dream squares more than usual and that’s boring.
My falcons at 8-6 lost to the Vikings (8-7 also) I think statistically knocking me out of the playoffs. Great, great first season though.
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Friday, August 29th, 2008
Synapse is starting to look incredible. Everything’s coming together and it’s really looking special.
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Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
I’m finally getting into the meat of the Synapse graphics system today, having well and truly made shaders and FBOs my bitch. I’ve got the concept art on one side, and Synapse on the other, and I’m slowly getting the second to look as good as the first.
I can’t tell you how chuffed I am to be writing actual shader code. I love procedural things and shaders are the epitomy of procedural art. I fully expect to be using them far too much.
Not much else to report. Didn’t stay too long at the dinner party last night. It was one of those work social things where it’s not your workand therefor you don’t understand why it’s funny that person x did incomprehensible thing wrong y, so I exited before too long, but it was good to meet a few more of Lizzie’s work people.
Settling into a routine of playing through one full week of HC before going to bed. I’m glad they’re fixing the innability to call plays during the two minute warning – I’d initially classed that as a “somewhat silly but ignorable” bug and now I realise that it’s pretty terrible.
The local off-license has started selling somewhat acceptable pumpkin ale. Nothing over here will ever get to the standards of Pumpkin Jack (hey Dale – how about we do some kind of shipping swap – Banana Bread Beer for Pumpkin Jack?) but this stuff is pretty good.
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
I have to give an absolutely massive round of thanks (and beer) to both Chemeleon and JamesU, who held my hand through getting GLSL shaders into Torque and rendering to an FBO. Seriously, thankyou.
I’ve now got shaders displaying properly, and I’m good to go on actually writing them now. I’m pretty excited! I think I might have some stuff to bring to the table with shaders in 2D.
Going to a dinner party tonight with Lizzie’s work friends… so a bunch of girls who work in an art gallery and their partners. Should be interesting.
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Back in the office after a very relaxing weekend. I always know when I’ve relaxed properly because I start having really good design ideas – I’m hoping one of them proves to be actually good when Bin tests it in Synapse today.
Still loving having a private office to escape to and code. Really important. I’ve got to do a lot more hard work on graphics/shaders this week and I need all the help I can get right now.
Wish us luck on Puzzle Catz this week. Make or break time.
I’ve been playing Lumines for the first time this weekend. I like it actually. I do have a bit of a problem that one game generally takes more than half an hour to play, and then my head kind of feels like it’s silted for a while afterwards. And I don’t much like the art style (I am playing the sequel though, dunno about the first) – I prefered Meteos’.
Saw Hellboy 2 this weekend. I thought it was ok. Not edgy enough for my tastes.
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Monday, August 25th, 2008
This will be all.
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
I’m glad Malakian weighed in on the debate… I’ve though more about the issue the last few days than ever before. I’ve definitely softened towards some aspects of piracy.
I think that the freedom of the PC is it’s greatest strength. We have easy access to an absolute buttload of free content – legal and illegal – and that’s a big part of what the PC is. I didn’t talk about it before, but there are companies which almost rely on people pirating their software. Autodesk is happy when a teenager pirates Max. They aren’t losing a sale and they are gaining a person qualified in the use of their software – it helps them in the long run. It’s also important to understand that piracy has made everything cheaper. And that is good.
I’m angry with piracy because I love the PC and I see every day how piracy is hurting it as a gaming platform. Piracy hasn’t yet hurt me professionally… and I’m hoping it never will. I can’t imagine what it would be like if Mode 7 had to close because of that reason. It probably won’t.
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
Mostly a day off today – spent a while wandering around Bath which was cool.
Should post about Gamecity this year pretty soon – we’ve been asked to talk and I’ll be on the indie games panel again this year. I absolutely cannot stress how much I love Gamecity and it’s great to see it growing in stature. If you’re in the UK and you love games, you have no excuse not to come.
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
I’m having an uber-lazy day today. Was out drinking with Clacy and it was awesome to see him. I drank too much.
- Yesterday was the first day with me mainly coding in my private office and it was a very positive experience. I felt much more focussed and like there was much less clutter. Definitely be continuing that.
- Yesterday was a good day for Mode 7 in general actually. We got an important contract agreed upon (fingers crossed etc, but it looks like it’s a done deal); I made a big breakthrough with gl coding; and I had a really positive play of Puzzle Cats. Oh, and something about Nottingham this year which I’m sure Esteemed Colleague will talk about soon. Great stuff.
- I don’t think it’s possible for me to overstate how much I love HC. I better stop talking about it because, you know, you guys mostly want to hear about our games. But it’s fantastic.
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
This is some serious service from a company who usually just ignores their customers:
I got the Ok to officially say that we are doing a patch. I’ve wanted to say that for a week, but we had to make sure of a few things first.
Here’s an update on our progress with the patch:
- We have fixed the Play Creator/Injury Bug.
- We have added the ability to call plays during the 2 minute drill. You guys better thank Bekins for this.
Normally, this would have been a feature that would have taken forever to get in, but the kid killed himself to put it in there to help everyone out.
- We have added Favre’s stats back in the game.
- We fixed a bug you guys didn’t know about that allows me to change team philosophies in the roster update. Woo-Hoo! This lets me get the teams where I think they should be and correct some ratings issues that way.
- We fixed the contract bug (where scrub players would ask for a ton of money when re-signing).
- We fixed the Draft Day trading bug (where you could force every team to trade their pick by asking them to trade and then backing out)
- We fixed the ability to change a QB to WR and change him back to QB again.
- We fixed the bug where teams would not kick a FG at the end of the half.
- We are investigating a fix to make fumbles better. Staymates found out that a fatigued player would be getting larger penalties than expected to their attributes, including their carry rating. We are greatly reducing this so that fumbles should happen less. This is going to need some more testing since a lot of different factors influence fumble chances.
- We are also investigating a fix for CPU teams subbing out fatigued players quicker in-game so that backups get some carries. Our thresholds for subbing a guy out were too low, so we are raising those. This also needs mucho testing.
- We are fixing any crashes we can reproduce including the issues found on PS3.
I don’t have a date for when this will be delivered to you (we are working very quickly). Once we are done with it, it typically takes a couple of weeks to get through everybody else before it makes it’s way to you.
As I’ve said before, I’m sorry for these bugs. As you can see, we are making it right.
The HC team is obviously a step apart from the rest of the EA Sports teams. I just hope they stay on the HC franchaise.
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