It seems I "forgot" my pre-July post, but I have my reasons that I like to think of as being good enough. The day after I returned from a two week long trip to Sweden (I joined the bachelor party and was the best man at my friend's wedding and I attended NCNP2011), I spent 3 weeks working ~9-22 in a workshop. I had never done any kind of metal work before these weeks, but now I know a bit about milling, drilling and "lathing" iron, steel and anticorodal, plus how to shape old crappy drill bits by hand. 5 years university physics for machining metal!
Alas, haven't had the chance to indulge in a lot of recreational activities. I took two days off Thu-Fri last week which was nice, I finally had enough time to even feel like cleaning my apartment! Fired up Mass Effect again, in a desperate attempt to like it. I got almost twice as far as last time, I just had to throw it away after that. Largest botchup in gaming history ever, it could have been sooo grandiose...
I am currently writing "producing" code rather than "academic" code for FoF, there's been a few screenshots and movies the last week. Pondering about the project layout while waiting for discussions with the other team members. There are a bunch of huge stray art files in the repo which I want to strip away, working on that already.
Why don't the Japanese build guitar amps as good as Fujigen guitars? When I'm back in Gothenburg, I _will_ get an amp one way or another. I have also started following a new rule which is really taxing, but forces me to think very differently while playing: no shredding. No exceptions.
That's it for now, I will have to write up another post in less than two weeks, gotta leave some material until then!
Monday, 18 July 2011
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Advance on all fronts
Not much really happened last month, by which I mean a lot of things happened, but I don't know how to present it all. I'll do my best not to bore whoever reads this. Got a bit busy so this post is a few days too late even.
The foil device has arrived! It has been installed for testing, the stepper motor driving is working (somewhat), details are slowly being wrapped up. Lots of things to get running still, the setup must be aligned etc. At least there's a clear idea and material to work with. The uncertain aspects are mostly some remaining manufacturing.
I changed gear just as I was about to pack my lightmaps, which was a little unfortunate. I was really interested in trying out some unorthodox, stochastic packing algos. Instead, I turned my eye to lower level problems like networking and other "basic" problems.
On to a review of Portal 2 (possibly spoilers, but I will try to keep them discrete):
I played through co-op with my brother rather quickly (5 hrs or so), we were both disappointed in the short campaign and easy puzzles. Co-op is supposed to be extra hard since there are two brains available to solve things. Some puzzles even relied on breaking conservation of momentum between portals. Sure, it's a game, it's supposed to be fun, but it's pushing the word "science" in your face every 10 seconds so you think they'd do it right. In fact, after the co-op campaign, I was regretting buying it this early. Aesthetically, it was very nice, but the concept of the game was thrown away. Puzzle game that was too short and too simple, disaster combo. That was until I played through the single player campaign.
Many puzzles in SP are much more interesting and some of the later level designs are wonderful. The majority of other reviewers seem to complain about how the pacing suffers in the second half of the game, that's when I thought the puzzling really started to shine. The first and last parts are so incredibly artificial and forced upon you (here's a test chamber, here's a test chamber, here's a test chamber...), whereas "down in the deep", you almost feel like you're exploring (it's all linear still of course). Loved the feeling of the vast undergrounds, although I was never really happy about how big it all was. It was mentioned somewhere in the game that "some scientist" or whatever had bought an old salt mine to explain it a bit, but those caves were HUGE. Also, when I played it through, I never thought about how the white gel was made out of ground moon rock which is mentioned in passing during the game. One thing, which was made obvious you had to do by the developers, made a lot of sense when I thought back on that. Fun detail.
This is not completely relevant, but I wanna say it anyway: Why are robots with human traits, which is pretty much completely detached from robots in reality, hailed as excellent actors and the writing praised along with that seemingly because they are tightly integrated? Glados, Wall-E and co. How can they even be considered to compete in the same top tier as HAL? Good writing creates entities like the city of Baltimore in The Wire, or the troubled group of small village people in the Deer Hunter. Excellent actors find their place in the story like Vito Corleone (that's kinda low hanging fruit, but failing to appreciate what Brando did there is simply not tolerable :p ). Not cute puppies with an expressive eye and eyelid or a supposedly evil computer (we already have them). The voice work was very nice, but the voice acting? No way, critical reviewers wanting to commend voice acting better get their sh!t together.
Anyway, really good game, co-op is really lackluster but the sp campaign is really, really good. I think it ended up being worth 45 EUR in the end.
This post is short, it will probably grow larger...
The foil device has arrived! It has been installed for testing, the stepper motor driving is working (somewhat), details are slowly being wrapped up. Lots of things to get running still, the setup must be aligned etc. At least there's a clear idea and material to work with. The uncertain aspects are mostly some remaining manufacturing.
I changed gear just as I was about to pack my lightmaps, which was a little unfortunate. I was really interested in trying out some unorthodox, stochastic packing algos. Instead, I turned my eye to lower level problems like networking and other "basic" problems.
On to a review of Portal 2 (possibly spoilers, but I will try to keep them discrete):
I played through co-op with my brother rather quickly (5 hrs or so), we were both disappointed in the short campaign and easy puzzles. Co-op is supposed to be extra hard since there are two brains available to solve things. Some puzzles even relied on breaking conservation of momentum between portals. Sure, it's a game, it's supposed to be fun, but it's pushing the word "science" in your face every 10 seconds so you think they'd do it right. In fact, after the co-op campaign, I was regretting buying it this early. Aesthetically, it was very nice, but the concept of the game was thrown away. Puzzle game that was too short and too simple, disaster combo. That was until I played through the single player campaign.
Many puzzles in SP are much more interesting and some of the later level designs are wonderful. The majority of other reviewers seem to complain about how the pacing suffers in the second half of the game, that's when I thought the puzzling really started to shine. The first and last parts are so incredibly artificial and forced upon you (here's a test chamber, here's a test chamber, here's a test chamber...), whereas "down in the deep", you almost feel like you're exploring (it's all linear still of course). Loved the feeling of the vast undergrounds, although I was never really happy about how big it all was. It was mentioned somewhere in the game that "some scientist" or whatever had bought an old salt mine to explain it a bit, but those caves were HUGE. Also, when I played it through, I never thought about how the white gel was made out of ground moon rock which is mentioned in passing during the game. One thing, which was made obvious you had to do by the developers, made a lot of sense when I thought back on that. Fun detail.
This is not completely relevant, but I wanna say it anyway: Why are robots with human traits, which is pretty much completely detached from robots in reality, hailed as excellent actors and the writing praised along with that seemingly because they are tightly integrated? Glados, Wall-E and co. How can they even be considered to compete in the same top tier as HAL? Good writing creates entities like the city of Baltimore in The Wire, or the troubled group of small village people in the Deer Hunter. Excellent actors find their place in the story like Vito Corleone (that's kinda low hanging fruit, but failing to appreciate what Brando did there is simply not tolerable :p ). Not cute puppies with an expressive eye and eyelid or a supposedly evil computer (we already have them). The voice work was very nice, but the voice acting? No way, critical reviewers wanting to commend voice acting better get their sh!t together.
Anyway, really good game, co-op is really lackluster but the sp campaign is really, really good. I think it ended up being worth 45 EUR in the end.
This post is short, it will probably grow larger...
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Summer is almost here
Geneva currently has what I would consider ideal weather conditions for me. Not too hot, not too cold (10-15 degrees Celsius) and the sun is shining from a blue sky. If only it could always be this perfect...
Another month gone by. Without any foil hardware. It's not funny, it's not frustrating, it doesn't make me angry. It's just the way things are. The transport has been initiated afaik, so maybe it will be here next week.
Working on light mapper, coding things I've thought about so many times before but never have implemented. Next step is to orient the charts and pack them in textures. I haven't thought about size problems yet, but it'll creep up on me sooner or later. I have not thought much on the real time indirect lighting, I will first try a high quality offline baker and see what can be done for incremental updates. I want that, otherwise I could just bake in a 3d modeler.
Didn't think on it much, but there will be quite a few new interesting games this year: Battlefield 3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Mass Effect 3, Rage, TES5 Skyrim. Slightly off this list are Diablo 3 (eta 2012?), DNF (meh), Max Payne 3 (hmm). Trouble is they all go for mass markets: the combat in BF3 looks like more of the same mind numbing kneading, DXHR looks horrible and stupid compared to the oh so wonderful original for its time, ME has always botched a wonderful premise with a crap action game (slow deep story and interactive action sequences don't mix!), Rage is an id game (gorgeous, but boring) and Oblivion was so close but ended up being stupid (I was the master thief, assassin, magician, warrior and whatever else in the world eventually). Where is the new tight Raven Shield, difficult Ghost Recon, funny and superdiverse NOLF, evil Diablo 2, zany clicky adventure games, Oblivion like a Sim X game where things don't go according to plan...
Side-note: Grim Dawn. I have higher hopes for that than for Diablo 3. Looks properly evil and gritty.
Game development articles online are really depressing too. It's either about making games for the mass market including marketing and business, Minecraft (nice game, but enough already!), portable games for people on the run or the private life of a game artist. It's all facades, games aren't serious anymore. Most people would say it's the other way around, like how AAA titles turn around sooo much money, rivaling Hollywood and they should strive to become art to prove Ebert wrong or whatever. But then it's a business and the hunt for something irrelevant. Games have become a channel. Where are _the games_? Games created by one visionary eccentric designer who can actually write a fair amount of code going "I wanna do this". Not a medium forced on a computer or console, but a computer or console showing you.
Lost Eden may have been bad, but the world is an insta-pull compared to what you see today.
This is why I will never give up programming :)
End of vent.
Another month gone by. Without any foil hardware. It's not funny, it's not frustrating, it doesn't make me angry. It's just the way things are. The transport has been initiated afaik, so maybe it will be here next week.
Working on light mapper, coding things I've thought about so many times before but never have implemented. Next step is to orient the charts and pack them in textures. I haven't thought about size problems yet, but it'll creep up on me sooner or later. I have not thought much on the real time indirect lighting, I will first try a high quality offline baker and see what can be done for incremental updates. I want that, otherwise I could just bake in a 3d modeler.
Didn't think on it much, but there will be quite a few new interesting games this year: Battlefield 3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Mass Effect 3, Rage, TES5 Skyrim. Slightly off this list are Diablo 3 (eta 2012?), DNF (meh), Max Payne 3 (hmm). Trouble is they all go for mass markets: the combat in BF3 looks like more of the same mind numbing kneading, DXHR looks horrible and stupid compared to the oh so wonderful original for its time, ME has always botched a wonderful premise with a crap action game (slow deep story and interactive action sequences don't mix!), Rage is an id game (gorgeous, but boring) and Oblivion was so close but ended up being stupid (I was the master thief, assassin, magician, warrior and whatever else in the world eventually). Where is the new tight Raven Shield, difficult Ghost Recon, funny and superdiverse NOLF, evil Diablo 2, zany clicky adventure games, Oblivion like a Sim X game where things don't go according to plan...
Side-note: Grim Dawn. I have higher hopes for that than for Diablo 3. Looks properly evil and gritty.
Game development articles online are really depressing too. It's either about making games for the mass market including marketing and business, Minecraft (nice game, but enough already!), portable games for people on the run or the private life of a game artist. It's all facades, games aren't serious anymore. Most people would say it's the other way around, like how AAA titles turn around sooo much money, rivaling Hollywood and they should strive to become art to prove Ebert wrong or whatever. But then it's a business and the hunt for something irrelevant. Games have become a channel. Where are _the games_? Games created by one visionary eccentric designer who can actually write a fair amount of code going "I wanna do this". Not a medium forced on a computer or console, but a computer or console showing you.
Lost Eden may have been bad, but the world is an insta-pull compared to what you see today.
This is why I will never give up programming :)
End of vent.
Monday, 28 February 2011
Radiosity
The big thing this time is that my interest for real time approximate radiosity has received a major boost, mostly due to seeing Geomerics at work in BF3. A few days ago, DiCE released a video showcasing very short snippets from inside the game apparently and it looks really nice. I read up quickly on the current status of real time global illumination methods and started up my own gears upstairs and I have one idea I'd like to try out. It should require relatively little preprocessing and not only allow dynamic lights and objects to receive radiosity, but to actually affect it as well. Imagine a big sci fi ship descending into a dock with radiosity working that scene. Bold ideas, no demo ;) FreeGLUT and hard code to the rescue.
Still waiting for the foils hardware...
I have played way too little guitar lately. I want a proper amp and cabinet alt. combo, a Marshall plexi 1959 or 1987 or a Fender Deluxe... Dunno how often I would power it up though, considering how careful I am with not disturbing my neighbours.
Been playing a fair bit of Titan Quest on weekend evenings with my brother, pretty fun. Act IV sure is one major step up in difficulty compared to the rest, love it. That one double headed dog boss was a pain though, went relatively quickly once my brother and I set up a dirty quick swap strategy and tickled it to death. Anyway, I really like the potential in combining so many masteries, but some masteries feel too similar. Piercing and poison are crazy powerful too, whereas red hot burning pieces of stone are like flies coughing at you. TQ bosses are too easy. Some funny balancing issues, otherwise a really neat game.
Still waiting for the foils hardware...
I have played way too little guitar lately. I want a proper amp and cabinet alt. combo, a Marshall plexi 1959 or 1987 or a Fender Deluxe... Dunno how often I would power it up though, considering how careful I am with not disturbing my neighbours.
Been playing a fair bit of Titan Quest on weekend evenings with my brother, pretty fun. Act IV sure is one major step up in difficulty compared to the rest, love it. That one double headed dog boss was a pain though, went relatively quickly once my brother and I set up a dirty quick swap strategy and tickled it to death. Anyway, I really like the potential in combining so many masteries, but some masteries feel too similar. Piercing and poison are crazy powerful too, whereas red hot burning pieces of stone are like flies coughing at you. TQ bosses are too easy. Some funny balancing issues, otherwise a really neat game.
Monday, 31 January 2011
Overall progress
It seems like the tilting foils device is nearing completion! A few details left, some repairs and modification on the implantation chamber and then hopefully it will be tested in the experimental hall. Found a break in the analysis, trying to work out some statistics mismatches in two programs.
I have been slacking off with TDD lately, I tend to write a lot of implementation before tests, mostly because it's really hard to write tests for something like a "splitter widget". A lot of fail safes fall into invariance testing anyway. Maybe all I have to do is to write destruction tests for all those widgets. Also, memcpy() in an assignment operator or a copy constructor, bad idea, learnt the hard way. There's a reason why classes with pointers should define their own mentioned pair... Smart pointers are really nice, esp. unique_ptr for widgets. Had to write a custom container for grabbing and focusing which may be a little dangerous, better keep that in mind.
My brother has bought a Realforce, I am really excited about his thoughts on it. Hopefully he will have it today. I have gotten a slightly scary desire lately, to open up my Filco and reduce the activation force. Very intrusive manoeuvre, but the keys are not as light as they could be. I shall wait until I have tried a Realforce, to see whether I want to keep the Realforce or if I can go postal on my Filco.
"Cliffs of Dover" is way too overrated, Eric Johnson has so much more to give. "Trademark" is all I have to say.
I have started training Colemak seriously, I exercise every day. My muscle memory has pretty high momentum, however, so it's going pretty slow. It feels great, QWERTY is probably as inefficient as layouts can go (probably not really... EDIT(2011-10-25): carpalx has found the most ineffective layout by stochastic methods, if you're interested.More on carpalx in the next blog entry!).
Another recent idea I've had is to improve my "dreaming", or dream recall to be more precise. Paying more attention to your dreams apparently improves your chances (or even control) of lucid dreaming, something that has intrigued me for several years.
I have been slacking off with TDD lately, I tend to write a lot of implementation before tests, mostly because it's really hard to write tests for something like a "splitter widget". A lot of fail safes fall into invariance testing anyway. Maybe all I have to do is to write destruction tests for all those widgets. Also, memcpy() in an assignment operator or a copy constructor, bad idea, learnt the hard way. There's a reason why classes with pointers should define their own mentioned pair... Smart pointers are really nice, esp. unique_ptr for widgets. Had to write a custom container for grabbing and focusing which may be a little dangerous, better keep that in mind.
My brother has bought a Realforce, I am really excited about his thoughts on it. Hopefully he will have it today. I have gotten a slightly scary desire lately, to open up my Filco and reduce the activation force. Very intrusive manoeuvre, but the keys are not as light as they could be. I shall wait until I have tried a Realforce, to see whether I want to keep the Realforce or if I can go postal on my Filco.
"Cliffs of Dover" is way too overrated, Eric Johnson has so much more to give. "Trademark" is all I have to say.
I have started training Colemak seriously, I exercise every day. My muscle memory has pretty high momentum, however, so it's going pretty slow. It feels great, QWERTY is probably as inefficient as layouts can go (probably not really... EDIT(2011-10-25): carpalx has found the most ineffective layout by stochastic methods, if you're interested.More on carpalx in the next blog entry!).
Another recent idea I've had is to improve my "dreaming", or dream recall to be more precise. Paying more attention to your dreams apparently improves your chances (or even control) of lucid dreaming, something that has intrigued me for several years.
Friday, 31 December 2010
2011
In an effort to avoid cliché garbage about the past or the coming year, I shall do my best to keep this post as down to Earth as possible.
I finally got my new guitar, an FGN NCST 10m 2TS, which is a Fujigen strat copy with an alder body, maple fretboard and 2 tone sunburst, almost exactly like the first 54 Fender strats (they sported ash bodies). Beautiful, looks to be very well made. Really thick satin finished neck in contrast with the really slim (almost record breaking) wizard neck on my Ibanez RG. I looked really hard for the body block crease, but I couldn't make it out. The guitar sounded nice acoustically, and since I only have a Zoom 2.1u, I don't dare say too much about the pickups. According to an obscure German review somewhere, the pickups sound somewhere between Fender vintage and Texas. I know nothing about Fender guitars, but I have a feeling that assessment is kinda correct, the FGN can provide nice cleans and more output for some proper metal! With a Zoom.
I have done a lot of research about developing Outburst recently. Most importantly, I started playing around with Visual C++ to make sure my source code plays nicely with that IDE. I had to move around and rename files quite a bit, but but it's all sorted out and still just as easy to build in Linux or with MinGW. Or right, MSBuild is a joke, imho. I probably haven't seen the real strengths behind the terrifying piles of XML files, but a simple makefile is a lot more flexible and easier to write. A 30 liner for GNU Make could do more complicated file location stuff for a small project than the full MSBuild arsenal.
Time for the last meal of the year that my parents have made and apparently I am not allowed to keep writing this entry, so Happy New Year peepul!
EDIT: I had to cut my post short on New Year's Eve, so here's a small addendum to flesh things out a bit. Back in the land of nonchalance, I gave my guitar a good bashing right after having abused my brother's Fender for a few weeks. One thing for sure, I always have, do and always will hate D'Addario strings, they're like railway tracks. Good thing is they came for free on the guitar, bad thing is I would have preferred something else. Don't much like the 008 Malmsteen set by Dean Markley either to be honest, they feel like stretched out mosquitos. The saddle makes a popping sound when I do bends, even for whole note bends (with D'Addario strings, 1.5 bends are like successfully blowing the whistle on evil mega conglomerates, otherwise awarded for their brilliant and consistent improvement of environmental impact by their processing and manufacturing branches and providing for a better world for everybody, even young children and infants in poor third world countries, to live in), so I will get a TUSQ or similar eventually. I have also been eyeing the GOTOH 510TS-SF1 tremolo to fix the wobbly whammy bar (the Fender tremolo bar spring is supposedly bad for the threads), but these require new large holes for the posts so I'm gonna wait. The neck is peculiar. Perfectly fine, but it feels like a sort of light weight modern plastic wood compared to the heavier wood on my brother's Fender. Feels very airy and almost blown up due to it being pretty thick but still very light. Not sure if it's good or bad, just a neutral observation. I think I prefer it to the heavy Fender neck. The springs pick up on a tone just under C# on the 6th fret on the G string (and the same not on other strings). Pretty powerful feedback, so it seems there is a lot of transfer from the strings which is a good thing. Dunno if it's a good thing that the springs pick it up though. Did the Verheyen B string vibration transfer trick and the guitar body is well "alive".
I played around a lot with the Zoom this weekend and boy are the pikcups fun. Clean, plopping and chiming chords or really heavy, chunky riffing both work very nicely on the Zoom. Of course it doesn't have the "meat" of a tube amp, but for a hobbyist like me, it's more than good enough. And I really like the super fast patch switching in the Zoom, the fastest in the business when the unit came out apparently. Instaswitch.
Eudaimonia Overture, amazing to play, I recommend practising it. There is hardly a single dull piece of guitaring in there. Just a few sections that I need to work out still.
I have become rather accustomed to TDD and class invariances by now and I am almost starting to cheat a little. Sometimes I write the class declaration before the tests, but never the implementation. Porting the GUI widgets currently, I have the old size distribution calculations for the grid widget done, doing the button currently. Decided that pixel perfect rendering in OpenGL is a hopeless project and will go for Duplo style graphics (big fat rectangles for a bumbling artist).
I finally got my new guitar, an FGN NCST 10m 2TS, which is a Fujigen strat copy with an alder body, maple fretboard and 2 tone sunburst, almost exactly like the first 54 Fender strats (they sported ash bodies). Beautiful, looks to be very well made. Really thick satin finished neck in contrast with the really slim (almost record breaking) wizard neck on my Ibanez RG. I looked really hard for the body block crease, but I couldn't make it out. The guitar sounded nice acoustically, and since I only have a Zoom 2.1u, I don't dare say too much about the pickups. According to an obscure German review somewhere, the pickups sound somewhere between Fender vintage and Texas. I know nothing about Fender guitars, but I have a feeling that assessment is kinda correct, the FGN can provide nice cleans and more output for some proper metal! With a Zoom.
I have done a lot of research about developing Outburst recently. Most importantly, I started playing around with Visual C++ to make sure my source code plays nicely with that IDE. I had to move around and rename files quite a bit, but but it's all sorted out and still just as easy to build in Linux or with MinGW. Or right, MSBuild is a joke, imho. I probably haven't seen the real strengths behind the terrifying piles of XML files, but a simple makefile is a lot more flexible and easier to write. A 30 liner for GNU Make could do more complicated file location stuff for a small project than the full MSBuild arsenal.
Time for the last meal of the year that my parents have made and apparently I am not allowed to keep writing this entry, so Happy New Year peepul!
EDIT: I had to cut my post short on New Year's Eve, so here's a small addendum to flesh things out a bit. Back in the land of nonchalance, I gave my guitar a good bashing right after having abused my brother's Fender for a few weeks. One thing for sure, I always have, do and always will hate D'Addario strings, they're like railway tracks. Good thing is they came for free on the guitar, bad thing is I would have preferred something else. Don't much like the 008 Malmsteen set by Dean Markley either to be honest, they feel like stretched out mosquitos. The saddle makes a popping sound when I do bends, even for whole note bends (with D'Addario strings, 1.5 bends are like successfully blowing the whistle on evil mega conglomerates, otherwise awarded for their brilliant and consistent improvement of environmental impact by their processing and manufacturing branches and providing for a better world for everybody, even young children and infants in poor third world countries, to live in), so I will get a TUSQ or similar eventually. I have also been eyeing the GOTOH 510TS-SF1 tremolo to fix the wobbly whammy bar (the Fender tremolo bar spring is supposedly bad for the threads), but these require new large holes for the posts so I'm gonna wait. The neck is peculiar. Perfectly fine, but it feels like a sort of light weight modern plastic wood compared to the heavier wood on my brother's Fender. Feels very airy and almost blown up due to it being pretty thick but still very light. Not sure if it's good or bad, just a neutral observation. I think I prefer it to the heavy Fender neck. The springs pick up on a tone just under C# on the 6th fret on the G string (and the same not on other strings). Pretty powerful feedback, so it seems there is a lot of transfer from the strings which is a good thing. Dunno if it's a good thing that the springs pick it up though. Did the Verheyen B string vibration transfer trick and the guitar body is well "alive".
I played around a lot with the Zoom this weekend and boy are the pikcups fun. Clean, plopping and chiming chords or really heavy, chunky riffing both work very nicely on the Zoom. Of course it doesn't have the "meat" of a tube amp, but for a hobbyist like me, it's more than good enough. And I really like the super fast patch switching in the Zoom, the fastest in the business when the unit came out apparently. Instaswitch.
Eudaimonia Overture, amazing to play, I recommend practising it. There is hardly a single dull piece of guitaring in there. Just a few sections that I need to work out still.
I have become rather accustomed to TDD and class invariances by now and I am almost starting to cheat a little. Sometimes I write the class declaration before the tests, but never the implementation. Porting the GUI widgets currently, I have the old size distribution calculations for the grid widget done, doing the button currently. Decided that pixel perfect rendering in OpenGL is a hopeless project and will go for Duplo style graphics (big fat rectangles for a bumbling artist).
Monday, 29 November 2010
November update, with zealots and only a hint of TDD
I noticed a few days ago that I have managed to post an entry almost once per month, and thought maybe it's time to finally commit myself and update my site exactly once per month. So this will be my November 2010 post.
TDD is definitely one of the better things I've picked up for development in the last few years. No smallish graphics demos (like that would ever have happened ;) ), but I am writing tests and new classes for the Outburst game engine and reorganizing classes a bit. The new source code looks really nice. Another friend of mine has another game idea with simpler technology which may bear fruit a little sooner, now developed from scratch with some planning and TDD strapped tight just underneath. No more bloated classes or members, no more super complicated dependency chains or whatever. Oh right, wrapping TestInvariant calls in class templates for auto verification at the entry and exit points of methods, constructors and destructors is pretty useful, just be careful with local objects that mutate the current object.
Waiting for my guitar. It took two days for the guitar to go from the Japanese provider, through customs/export, through the air I guess and to the french customs in Roissy outside Paris. It's been there for one week plus 25 minutes or so as I post this.
I noticed a problem in a particular piece of open source program and thought I'd remedy it. The developers hang out in IRC, so double newbie warning there, since I don't normally hand in patches (I use my own forked version of DWM, customized to how I work on my PC, nobody else will ever have it) and I never use IRC. Like a sheep without any worries in the world, I presented my patch and got some suggestions on improvements and I asked about a few implementation details such that the patch would fit the rest of the project nicely. The discussion went from the ISO C++ standard about primitive types to me being a user of abuse discussion tactics and childish for pointing out that was an offensive thing to say to a guest. Oh yes, I was just wrong too. When I asked how, I was referred to _my_ older posts. It's like saying "You are wrong. See previous sentence." This reminded me of a forum discussion that I tried to start up regarding stuttering in 3D applications on Fedora but not on Ubuntu. These days, the Fedora and NVNews forums are run as companies by angry Windows converts with the brains of suits, meaning if you got a problem, goons who know how to click on "reply" and "post" shove you into the hands of support people. From my part, the discussion was along the lines of "glxgears stutters in Fedora, not in Ubuntu, what does Fedora do that Ubuntu does not?" and I was met with "GLXGEARS IS NOT A BENCHMARK, YOU ARE A CHILD, GET LOST". Mhm, some caps. It took a few days until "reasonable" people showed up and started discussing various ideas without bearing any fruit. At that point, I did not care any more and I'm a happy Slackware user now. The problem is, big Linux distros are what Windows is, i.e. "try this, try that, until it works" "yay it works!" "nay it unworks". Where did "the problem may be this and that _because_ of those and these, so I would _look into_ this or that." Linux people of today actually don't understand what is happening. Plug the CD in, install bloatness and off we go until we need to do the same thing in a year.
I said I was gonna fix that patch. I think I shall not ever go to that channel again to be honest.
The Filco tenkeyless blue keyboard is still holding up nicely. The keys have loosened a little bit and it's so wonderful to type on once you hit a streak of feelgood words. My webcam mic picks up the sound pretty badly though, but if people force me into talking rather than letting me use my wonderful keyboard... payback! ;) Doesn't mean I don't want a HHKB 2 Pro. Stupid price.
EDIT: Leslie Nielsen has passed away. It was not immediately apparent on IMDB, they sport a very pleasant wine red:ish almost camouflaged banner at the top for actors recently passed away. It's Nielsen of all people, they should have painted the banner in flashing neon green.
TDD is definitely one of the better things I've picked up for development in the last few years. No smallish graphics demos (like that would ever have happened ;) ), but I am writing tests and new classes for the Outburst game engine and reorganizing classes a bit. The new source code looks really nice. Another friend of mine has another game idea with simpler technology which may bear fruit a little sooner, now developed from scratch with some planning and TDD strapped tight just underneath. No more bloated classes or members, no more super complicated dependency chains or whatever. Oh right, wrapping TestInvariant calls in class templates for auto verification at the entry and exit points of methods, constructors and destructors is pretty useful, just be careful with local objects that mutate the current object.
Waiting for my guitar. It took two days for the guitar to go from the Japanese provider, through customs/export, through the air I guess and to the french customs in Roissy outside Paris. It's been there for one week plus 25 minutes or so as I post this.
I noticed a problem in a particular piece of open source program and thought I'd remedy it. The developers hang out in IRC, so double newbie warning there, since I don't normally hand in patches (I use my own forked version of DWM, customized to how I work on my PC, nobody else will ever have it) and I never use IRC. Like a sheep without any worries in the world, I presented my patch and got some suggestions on improvements and I asked about a few implementation details such that the patch would fit the rest of the project nicely. The discussion went from the ISO C++ standard about primitive types to me being a user of abuse discussion tactics and childish for pointing out that was an offensive thing to say to a guest. Oh yes, I was just wrong too. When I asked how, I was referred to _my_ older posts. It's like saying "You are wrong. See previous sentence." This reminded me of a forum discussion that I tried to start up regarding stuttering in 3D applications on Fedora but not on Ubuntu. These days, the Fedora and NVNews forums are run as companies by angry Windows converts with the brains of suits, meaning if you got a problem, goons who know how to click on "reply" and "post" shove you into the hands of support people. From my part, the discussion was along the lines of "glxgears stutters in Fedora, not in Ubuntu, what does Fedora do that Ubuntu does not?" and I was met with "GLXGEARS IS NOT A BENCHMARK, YOU ARE A CHILD, GET LOST". Mhm, some caps. It took a few days until "reasonable" people showed up and started discussing various ideas without bearing any fruit. At that point, I did not care any more and I'm a happy Slackware user now. The problem is, big Linux distros are what Windows is, i.e. "try this, try that, until it works" "yay it works!" "nay it unworks". Where did "the problem may be this and that _because_ of those and these, so I would _look into_ this or that." Linux people of today actually don't understand what is happening. Plug the CD in, install bloatness and off we go until we need to do the same thing in a year.
I said I was gonna fix that patch. I think I shall not ever go to that channel again to be honest.
The Filco tenkeyless blue keyboard is still holding up nicely. The keys have loosened a little bit and it's so wonderful to type on once you hit a streak of feelgood words. My webcam mic picks up the sound pretty badly though, but if people force me into talking rather than letting me use my wonderful keyboard... payback! ;) Doesn't mean I don't want a HHKB 2 Pro. Stupid price.
EDIT: Leslie Nielsen has passed away. It was not immediately apparent on IMDB, they sport a very pleasant wine red:ish almost camouflaged banner at the top for actors recently passed away. It's Nielsen of all people, they should have painted the banner in flashing neon green.
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