Friday, August 22nd, 2008
After a seriously hard core session (and a huge amount of help from JamesU) I have GLEW compiling with Synapse. This should allow me to use FBOs with shaders which is what I want.
Let’s hope this signals me moving from trying to get shaders to work to actually writing bloody shaders.
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
The Synapse graphics issue has become significantly harder, and I’m setting in for a long haul to get my head around everything. I’m actually going to set up a private office in another room in the house so that when I’m coding I can have quiet time away from the bustle of the main office.
Watched a film called “Hoax” last night, which is a recent Richard Gere film about a writer who pretended to write an autobiography of Howard Hughes in the seventies. While intriguing, it didn’t hang together all that well and was actually very depressing at the end. An almost four star movie, but not quite.
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Oh dear. But also yay.
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
A set-back with graphics today, turns out I have to integrate some new gl stuff into TGB… which could be a pain. Waiting on some help from the GG forums and Chem to get much further.
Still loving Head Coach, as is Bill Harris. I just finished week 5 this morning before coming in to work, and the wonderful 08 Falcons (with new head coach Hanque Douglas) are 3-2!
Week 1: Beat Detroit 27 – 20
Week 2: Lost to Tampa 45 – 7
Week 3: Lost to Kansas City 42 – 10
Week 4: Beat Carolina 14 – 10
Week 5: Beat Green Bay (quarterbacked by Joey!) 17 – 10
I drafted Flacco at 3 (shut up) and he turned out to be a complete bust. Trent Green is our starter and Trent Dilfer is number 2. I can’t cut Flacco because he’s on a ludicrous contract… I don’t actually know what to do about that. I didn’t copy the idiot real life Falcons and pay huge money to Michael Turner (Norwood is a perfectly good RB and is showing it), but I did sign Alan Fanaca, and that’s working out well. I saw a hugely funny massive bidding war for Joey (Harrington) between the Niners and Green Bay… yeah that bit wasn’t so realistic.
So first season is going ok but I really don’t know what to do about Flacco. I really can’t cut him for another three years. I’ll probably have to punt on a couple of low-round QBs in the 09 draft and see if I can get someone good.
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
I have a question for pirates:
What would your reaction be if someone developed a bulletproof anti-piracy system for the PC that was invisible to users?
This has been pretty much done for MoMOs btw… it is basically impossible for single player games, but I’d be interested to hear what teh answer to the question is.
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
I take that pretty seriously. Oh, and Gemma Atkinson of course. I’d take her seriously [Snip. (Ed)]
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
I think sometimes the games industry just cowers inside the gaudy, ridiculous carapace it has built for itself and says, “Look, I’m special, I’m different.”
Intelligent people in the music industry have been dealing with large-scale piracy for over a decade now: they’re happy to admit that one solution they tried didn’t work; it’s what’s now commonly known as, “Suing Our Customers”.
So why aren’t games industry execs listening to them? Because the games industry is diffierent.
MCV informs me today that a bunch of games firms are busy forking out for the worst PR money can buy – don’t they have anything better to do with their money?
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
* [Demo]WiCkEdJuGGaLo has joined #determinance
<[Demo]WiCkEdJuGGaLo> lol ppl play this game?
* [Demo]WiCkEdJuGGaLo has quit IRC (Client closed connection)
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
I alluded to it in my recent post on piracy (I still love you ‘lakian, we just stand on opposite sides), but the thing I love most about PC games is the extent to which you can tweak them. And I don’t mean modding – I mean tweaking.
Making games is hard. Really hard. You just don’t have time to perfect every little thing. Once you get near the end every little change could cause a new bug. So you don’t make the change. Even if it’s a tiny gui change. You just can’t – you’d have to test everything all over again. So you leave it. NOT because of lazyness. Because being critical bug-free is the most important thing and there’s a limit to the number of full test passes you can do.
But with a PC game, you can fix that. Say you think a part of the gui is ugly or too large. You can usually change it. A huge number of the balancing variables in a game are there in a text file. You can change them. The game runs too choppily for your tastes – put the graphics down. The game is too ugly for your tastes – turn up FSAA.
(I don’t want to get into the “patches are good/patches are bad” issue here, but I will say this: People are different. They want different things. The fact you want to change something about a game does not automatically imply it wasn’t made properly. You’d feel happy changing a small rule in a board game for instance.)
I heart PC games. This is the biggest reason.
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