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Fun Diversions

October 4th, 2007 · Gaming, Personal, Stuntwork

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

I took a little time to kick back and relax tonight after spending around two hours on my monthly report to the board of directors here at GDnet. Yes, we have a board of directors. See? You learn something new every day. If you’re wondering exactly what I mean, check out our company chart. Oh and no, you can’t read it.

Anyways first I installed a few program updates as I do at the start of every month thanks to FileHippo’s Update Checker telling me what new versions of programs are out. I also installed some new apps I got off the latest Maximum PC disc. My favorite is Stellarium, a virtual sky gazing program. Using Google Earth, I positioned myself in my backyard and now I can look up and see a real-time rendering of what the sky looks like above my roof. And I do mean real-time – the stars and planets all move! You can select any star in the sky and learn stuff about it – almost like Google Sky but cooler.

Then I installed the World in Conflict game demo to check it out. I’m a pretty big strategy buff and this looked like a fantastic game visually so I decided to check out how it played. I’m a bit disappointed it didn’t scale to my native screen resolution, but what can you do. I have it set to 1440×900 and the graphics detail set to High and I’m churning out an average 16fps (I know this cause they have a cool benchmark utility built into the game. Sweetness). Not too shabby. Very High graphics slow me down to a choppy average of 9fps – that falls below the 12fps limit where stuff starts getting very noticeably herky jerky. I played through the tutorial and someways through the first mission. I’ll have to go back and play some more before I can decide if I like it though, as I’m not used to the style of gameplay it employs for controlling units and “building” units and such and such. At least I can confirm it’s a very pretty looking game.

In other news, it looks like I won’t be shooting my scenes tomorrow nite on my bike, seeing as the tail lights are now completely fried or something. I jiggled wires around to no end and the best I got was the turn signal on my right light to start working if I held the wire in the right spot. Dammit. Now I have to order a new part that’ll cost me about $80 and delay my shoot. Talk about timing right? Geeez.

Oh and I found this pretty cool as well. Never knew they were making USB monitors. Lappie fans should be happy.

I also tried out Pidgin tonight as a possibility to replace Trillian as it supported GoogleTalk and MySpaceIM (despite many people’s hatred of MySpace, I’ve found it an effective means to keep in touch with my friends) in addition to the services supported by Trillian. However upon loading, the buddy window decides to stick itself to the upper-left corner of my left monitor and refuses to budge. WTF is up with that?? I couldn’t drag it anywhere despite every effort, and there was no option to be found to undock it from the top of my screen. Oh well. Maybe I’ll try again a few versions down the line.

Crap. It’s almost 6am – better be off to bed. Before I go tho, the links for this entry…

Gaiiden’s Links: Email

LinkedIn – Professional networking site. It’s the “in” thing to get linked-in so hop to it! Hey if you’re a link to me mind sending me a reccommendation? Call me a loser but my profile completeness is at 90% and I need another reccommendation to help push me to 100%! 😛
Plaxo – A nice service to keep info updated amongst your contacts and stored online for access anywhere
POPFile – Screw those built-in filters. Here’s the only spam filter you will ever need. Let me check my stats… 98.95% accuracy after 31,590 emails. Yup, that’ll do!

Previous Link Posts

Compression
Communication
Audio

Don’t forget to add your own useful email tools in the comments and check out what others have suggested. I’d also be interested in your opinions in World in Conflict if you’ve played it.

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From the Executive Producer’s Desk

October 3rd, 2007 · GameDev.net, Stuntwork

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

The Biggest Article Yet

if you haven’t looked at it yet, the recent programming article, 20 issues of porting C++ code on the 64-bit platform, is the largest article I’ve personally posted to date. In fact, when I uploaded the entire HTML content to the database, it spat at me:

Quote:


WARNING: ARTICLE CONTENT IS OVER 60K


I dunno if that’s a bad thing or not, I guess Richard will have to chime in on that. Why should I care if an article’s content is greater than 60K? What limit is that? Anyways I thought that was cool.

Hopefully I don’t get any comments on it about how it’s written in “bad English”, because it’s really not. Sure there’s some backwards grammar and slightly incorrect verbage and whatnot, but it’s still readable and understandable. I get rather ticked when people complain about things not being grammatically correct. Not everyone’s first language is English, tho many of us who speak it feel that is the way it should be online. It’s a very helpful and informative article so take the slightly extra effort to read it if it’s up your alley.

Oh and you may also notice this article goes against the editorial policy (if you happen to know the editorial policy) of being featured content that is not less than 30 days old or previously unpublished. From time to time I will be bending the rules to feature quality articles I want highlighted, that also lead back to a site that houses more quality articles, as it the case for Viva 64

New Issues Tracking Software

Richard mentioned this briefly in his blog a few days ago and it’s been nice using it to track improvements, bugs and features on the site. Any problem or suggestion I see on the forums gets added to the list, so be sure to point things out. Don’t expect any faster turn-arounds as a result of using this software, but at least your requests won’t get lost in a sea of email and PMs and forum posts.

IGC Coverage

In just under a week I’ll be boarding a plane out to Eugene, OR to attend GarageGame’s IndieGamesCon. I’ve been itching to get to this event nigh on 3 years now. I was ready to go last year but they didn’t have one. Now I’m finally set to jet out there. One of the IGF finalists I met at GDC last year happened to have moved out there a few months ago and agreed to put me up for a few days. Maybe he’ll be willing to help me out on the coverage, but I’d also like to know if anyone else from around here is going to be attending as well. I posted a poll on the main page and so far 11 of you have said you’re going. So if you’re one of those people reading this let me know! The one and only thing I’m totally bummed out about is that they’re having a TGB boot camp the Sat following the conference – and I fly out Friday nite!! They announced this like a week or two after I bought my flight. They have a TGX boot camp on Friday, and TGX is similar in many ways to TGB so I suppose that will have to suffice.

On the personal side….

Small Change

Crazy enough, I’m still getting some change in royalties from my Game Design Perspectives book contributions. The check that arrived a few days ago totaled $12.34 for the first and second quarters of this year. Hot damn I’m going to go buy me… uhm… not much. Eh, there’s two-three days worth of food. That’s something.

Action Star Update

In case you missed it, I’m filming a short action movie with a fellow stuntman. I’m still hoping to shoot the final two scenes of me on my motorcycle this Friday night. The weather’s holding out really nice – as it stands now they’re predicting a low of 65 degrees that night – perfect temperature! The one glitch that arose was my bike’s tail lights going out over the weekend. This has happened twice before and whoever installed these things in my bike (before I owned it) needs to be drug out into the street and shot. Luckily I managed to isolate the offending wire this time without have to strip off my entire rear fairing and reduce my rear end to chassis to remove the light assembly and repair it like the last two times. Still, only the left light is really working in terms of full LED tail/brake lights and turn signal. The right light has only a small cluster of LEDs active, no brake lighting and the turn signal just blinks the active red LED cluster on and off. But it’s enough cause they’re LEDs and they’re bright as hell. Luckily shots of my bike will be from the left so you won’t even be able to notice my right LED is shot to hell. I’m going have to start looking for a replacement tho. Argh.

Gaiiden’s Links: Compression

You won’t find a lot of originality in this section unfortunately, but here it is none the less. Still working my way towards the good stuff.

ALZip – If you don’t like getting nagged by WinZip to buy it, then here’s the best free alternative that doesn’t nag
WinRAR – I found even ALZip can’t handle some RAR archives, so it’s always nice to have a backup tool. It nags, but not as bad as WinZip does.
WinZip – The archive daddy. Free for a while, then nags like hell to get you to buy it.
WinISO – if you need some help opening ISO files that ALZip can’t handle for some reason, here’s a decent app to di it. Not for free though.

Previous Links

Communication
Audio

And as usual, hit the comments for additional archiving suggestions!

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More Linkies

September 28th, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Time for the next series of useful free (for the most part) software apps and tools!

Gaiiden’s Links: Communication

Trillian – IM client for IRC, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ/AIM, and a few others. $25 for Pro version – used to be a yearly license but I have yet to renew mine after a year so I guess they changed it.
GrandCentral – Tired of handing out 5 different phone numbers? How about just one? That barely scratches the surface of this awesome service
I.M. Everywhere – I.M. Everywhere is a plugin for Trillian Pro 2 or greater that lets you access your contact list — as well as send and receive instant messages — from any web browser or mobile phone. It can also send email or SMS alerts to your cellular phone when you receive new messages, or when favourite contacts come online.
Imagination Cubed – A simple online white board collaboration tool where you can invite friends to join in
Pidgin – used to be GAIM – supports a wide variety of IM clients, more than Trillian.
Skype – Make and receive internet calls from other internet users and land/cell phones. Supports common IM features as well

Other Links
Audio

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Action Star Part 1

September 27th, 2007 · Production, Stuntwork

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Awesome, I just spent two hours way earlier tonight (from 10pm to 12am) shooting the first scene of my short fight film. Before I go any further, let me stress exactly what I mean when I say “film”. This is not a home movie. This is not shot by me and my buddies with a Handycam. A good friend of mine does some serious video production and has at his disposal a Sony XDCAM (I don’t know the exact model) for filming in High-Definition Video. Can we say ~$20k camera?

Hells yea!

I wanted to get more than once scene shot tonight, but I completely underestimated the time involved with shooting a scene. I’ve experienced how long it can take to set up and rehearse and run through live fight scenes, I guess I somehow thought doing it for film was different. That’s the first mistake I’ve made in this process. Obviously won’t be the last.

So this scene is the very beginning of the movie and is set at a local 7-Eleven. Mainly involves me walking out, getting a text on my phone, hustling over to my bike and peeling out of the parking lot. Sounds simple right? Actually it wasn’t too bad. The location was fairly decent. There was no parking in the front of the store, which meant we never had to content with cars being in the shot. The store was lit on the outside almost as well as the inside, so we didn’t need any extra lights to balance the scene and make me more visible. The exit was a broad apron onto the street that allowed me to zoom my bike off at a decent speed. The street in that direction extended far enough that I was able to run up my RPMs fairly high before getting out of frame. Being that it was just me and my friend, it took a while to get some shots established, and there were times we had to wait a few minutes for people to pass through, as this wasn’t any sort of official set.

All in all it turned out pretty good. Got in plenty of takes I can take to the editing room and play around with. I parked my rear tire on a painted line in front of the store so that when I took off I was able to peel out rather easily and effectively. The next two shots involve a high-speed camera pass, wheelies, and a skid to a halt. My friend won’t be back in town until the end of next week though, so we can’t do any more shoots until then. Stay tuned!

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Oh yea…

September 27th, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

There was something else I had forgotten earlier this morning. Each new entry I’m going to be posting up links to my favorite free applications (some are paid for, but the majority are free) for the rest of you to take advantage of. Some of them are very mainstream, others not so much. Hope you can get some use from them. Here’s the first series.

Gaiiden’s Links: Audio
(unless stated otherwise, apps listed are free)

EAC – Exact Audio Copy – The best tool for ripping high-quality MP3 from your CD collection
LAME MP3 encoder – You’ll want this encoder if you plan to use EAC
MP3 My MP3 Recorder – Record internet radio and save to mp3 or wav. Record streaming audio from the Internet, microphone, or any other source for that matter. MP3myMP3 Recorder works directly with your system sound card – if you can hear it, you can record it!
WinAmp – You really need to know what this is??
winLAME home page – winLAME is an encoder for several audio formats, including mp3 (MPEG Layer 3), Ogg Vorbis and more. winLAME lets you set up the encoding process with an easy-to-use wizard-style user interface. winLAME supports many input audio formats, and uses the LAME mp3 encoding library for encoding and the MAD decoding library for decoding.

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Damn, September’s over already?

September 26th, 2007 · GameDev.net

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Geez, seems like the month started just yesterday! Well, time’s still passing so better get on with it…

Editorial Question

If you’d like to have a say in the direction of future article publishing on GDnet, then hustle on over to my thread on the subject – Editorial Question: Spread em out? Dump em out? – and lend your thoughts to the discussion. I’m interested to hear what you all say. You can comment here too – but I prefer you share your thoughts with everyone.

New Articles

As always, not all new articles make it to the main page. Here are some external links I added to the Resources this past week:

How to Focus your Game and Give Players More of What They Want – Another blog post by GG’s Joshua Dallman on a technique to help bring focus to your design to give players more of what they want and less of what they don’t.

Stan Melax (aka ‘Melax’) sends these contributions:
Do You Really Mean Rotation? – covers programming practices and illustrates the importance of naming variables carefully
Volume Integration – easy short methods to compute volume, center of mass, and inertia tensor of a mesh
3×3 Matrix Diagonalization – shows how to derive a quaternion that diagonalizes a matrix (i.e. principal axes)

That is all

I think I may have had more to say – not much and nothing major – but my sleep-addled brain isn’t function well anymore. I guess it’s finally time to hit the sack. Don’t want to be tired tonight – hopefully shooting the first few scenes of my short fight film, and I don’t wanna be tired while doing wheelies and skids and rocketing down roads on my motorcycle ya know. This is all if it doesn’t rain *shakes fist at the sky*.

Unless something exciting happens – see you in October.

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I feel secure

September 22nd, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Just wanted to mention that I signed up for Mozy’s online backup service this week. I’ve been a really bad person when it comes to data back-ups. Heck I rarely even use CVS to keep track of my code changes. Call me lazy, call me old-fashioned. Whatever. I’ve been fortunate enough never to lose any data due to hard drive failures. My most recent laptop did have a hard drive problem, but I managed to revive it long enough to remove any vital data before replacing it. An external hard drive of mine also seemed to be on its way out, and I got everything of that as well. Feeling more blessed than I deserved, I decided to bite the bullet and look into online backup services. Of what I found, Mozy seemed to be the most widely-used and favored backup service, so I signed up for their unlimited backup plan of $4.95/mo. I just backed up 6.6GB of data this week and I feel a bit better now. Certainly more convenient than buying another external or internal drive just to hold my own backups.

If you’re not backing up your data (most polls show a majority of people don’t) then you’d better hop to it before you see the light after losing all your data. Just sit there and think good and hard about the implications. Look at your daily life and then imagine it without all the stuff you normally access on your hard drive. It can be pretty scary. Don’t be stupid and think it can never happen to you. Never forget that hard drives fail. This is a fact. Whether or not you lose everything when they do is up to you.

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Quick Note

September 21st, 2007 · GameDev.net

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

John posted a review up and scheduled it to appear next Thurs. Well, it showed up today. So ok, I moved the two articles before it back two days. Check the schedule for the changes. Nothing major, but in my last post I did promise an article tonight so I wanted to make sure no one was confused as to why a review is up instead.

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Triple Monitor Part 2 – The Monitor

September 21st, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

My monitor came today on schedule, NewEgg hasn’t failed me yet. I unboxed it in record time and threw it together and put it on my desk… geez this thing really is monstrous. It has only like 3″ of clearance beneath my desk light. Anyways I plugged it on and configged it no problem, and now I have three monitors. Awesomeness. I watched the Anakin vs. Obi-wan duel in Episode III – very nice picture quality. Nice to see every thing so big. Well, bigger, heh heh. It’s only a 20″ widescreen so it’s not massive (compared to a 24″) but it’s still very nice. I’d recommend it.

Yea I know, I need some cool backgrounds. I dunno, I find blue to be soothing for some reason. And now that I’ve found this little app, Display Fusion, I can easily set different wallpapers or span one huge image across all three monitors. Much better than the Web as Desktop hack to getting more than one image on a monitor at a time.

Okay, that’s all from me. There’s an interview that was supposed to appear today. It will show up sometime tonight or early tomorrow depending on your locale. Oh and John and I have pretty much finalized the month of November for publishing, so check it out.

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Triple Monitor Part 1 – The Graphics Card

September 20th, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

But First….

AGDC coverage is still in the works. Whatever I can wring from people by this weekend. It’s getting posted this Monday no matter what (it’s back on the schedule even). There may be updates after the fact, but if that’s the case I’ll notify you here of course.

Okay, that out of the way, let’s talk triple-monitor setup. Well obviously the first place to start is the “Why??”. Why do I want three monitors? The answer: cause I want three monitors! Well okay, for one thing it’d be nice to have a gaming monitor running off a single graphics card while having two more monitors that can stay on and not cut into my performance at all. Secondly, I’ve never really had my two 17″ monitors side by side so I’m tired of looking left and then right. I’d like one main screen right smack in front of me. But whatever, my reasons are my own really, so enough harping on this, if you are still trying to figure out what monitor to but I suggest reading this aming monitor buying guide.

Here’s the card as it arrived today. Yea, don’t ask me about the scary female adorning it – I got nothing. For more on this card, check out the post I made a few months ago when I first dreamed up this setup.

Mmmmmm… all unboxed and ready for installation. I feel like I should put it in quick – that… thing on it is starting to scare me. Oh it’s also at this time that I notice that the heatsink fan is blowing out the back of the card, towards the case. How retarded is that?? I have a Sapphire X1900GT and its heatsink fan blows out the front, towards the I/O shields, so I dunno what Sapphire was thinking. True, this card won’t be cranking out as much heat as its bigger brother, but it’s still annoying.

Before I can install the card tho, I have to do a bit of re-wiring. I needed to move my extra USB ports up to the top of the stack, where one of my 1x PCIx slots is (prob never going to use that anyways). I do this so I can leave open the slot beneath the graphics card to help air flow past it and out the case.

Okay, got everything back in with no problems. SuhWEET

Glamor shot of the inside with the motherboard tray back in place

The end result. Got my USBs on top, then my X1900GT, then an open slot for cooling, then my Hauppage TV tuner, then the X1650, another open slot for cooling, and then my SoundBlaster Live. Speaking of cooling – seeing how my case temp does in the summer (SpeedFan reports my temps in normal ranges for now) I may pick up two of these to fill in those empty slots.

And presto! After starting up the comp, having XP automatically load the drivers, restarting, and opening up Catalyst Control Center, I am now presented with 4 possible monitors. Mwahahahaha.

That was way easier than I thought – thank god. I was having nightmares of having nothing but trouble getting this second card to work, but it was up and running in no time flat. *phew*! If you haven’t guessed, this is the first time I’ve ever run more than one graphics card in the same system. Glad I got it right the first time.

Tomorrow my 20″ widescreen monitor is scheduled to arrive. I’ll have some more eye candy then. Well… maybe not since it could take more than a day to clean off my desk and make it presentable enough to take pictures.

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