Ramblings of a Devilphish

Happy New Year

Filed under: Ramblings — kamikaze_devilphish @ 9:27 pm

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GCAP 2006 Wrap Up

Filed under: Ramblings, Programming, TotalWar — kamikaze_devilphish @ 11:14 am

(I’ve been sitting on a draft of this post for over a week. Since Tony has his report up already, I thought it was about time I finished this up and posted)

I spent Thursday and Friday of last week (30th Nov - 1st Dec) at the inaugural Game Connect: Asia Pacific conference, held here in Brisbane. It had the same feeling as the now defunct Australia Game Developers Conference. In fact it felt just like the old AGDC, just a little smaller even though it has been extended to the Asia Pacific region.

Now that I’ve had a few days (Or a week as it’s turned out) now to mull over the experience, I thought I should write up my take.

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Cool MTW2 Swag

Filed under: TotalWar, Photos — kamikaze_devilphish @ 12:21 pm

Checkout this cool Medieval2 beer stein and collectors edition pack! I believe the glass was a local marketing promotion.
Apologies for the crap quality of the photos. They were taken on my phone’s camera and it’s CCD is pretty poor in low light environments. No shots of the internals of the collector’s edition either. I’m keeping that one wrapped, which might be nigh on impossible since my kids love to open any games I bring home and the large box looks extra inviting to them.

Getting a hold of the final, boxed and printed version of a game I’ve made bring home why I got into game development, and computer graphics in general—Instant gratification!

The disappointing part of working for Motorola was that you very rarely got the product at the end of the project. Giving everyone on the project a car that contains the ABS code that your team developed just isn’t practical.

But in computer graphics and game, you get immediate feedback. Edit, Save, Compile, Run and see the result of the new feature you’ve been working on immediately. This satisfaction is what keeps me going through the crunch times.

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Storm Follow-Up

Filed under: Ramblings, Photos — kamikaze_devilphish @ 9:09 pm

We tried to take photos of the lightning to document the event, but with out a tripod, a remote trigger, and a lot of luck, we got nothing. Some photographic proof of the rain falling was about it.

:-(

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Storm!

Filed under: Ramblings — kamikaze_devilphish @ 5:26 pm

Brisbane Storms - 3 Dec 2006

Our first big storm in Brisbane for years. The kids are going mad, running in the rain.

Lets hope some of it ends up in the dams, but I’m not going to hold my breath. These big, tropical storms have a tendency to blow through pretty quickly and not produce much rain. As I type, it already seems to have stopped raining. But still, we’re getting a light and sound show for our money!

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Kookaburra

Filed under: Photos — kamikaze_devilphish @ 3:55 pm

My wife took these photos a few weeks back. One afternoon, a kookaburra came up to the back of our house and sat on the kids play gym, about 3 feet from the back door.

They’re amazing looking birds.

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0dayz warez

Filed under: Ramblings, TotalWar — kamikaze_devilphish @ 11:13 am

As reported by the official TotalWar forums, Medieval 2 went on sale yesterday. Well, at least in the UK it did. Sega.com reports that the game is in stores on 17th Nov.

And guess what. The game is already available on the bittorrent sites.

Yup. 182 seeds and 5875 peers at the last look.

:-(

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I Hate Computers

Filed under: Ramblings — kamikaze_devilphish @ 9:46 am

Gee I hate computers. I’ve been working with computers for most of my life. I got my first computer, when I was 8, in 1984 and I was hooked. I went to Uni, studied Computer Science, and have been working in the industry for 10 years. But I really hate computers.

It’s a love hate thing, really. They promise so much: The Internet, Google, Wikipedia, Games, Movies, Pr0n. But then suck so much. Nothing works. You waste time surfing instead of doing real work. Games require ever increasing amounts of power which leads to the endless cycles of upgrades and driver updates. It’s a cruel addiction.
I hate computers.

My laptop started blowing up RAM. The technician couldn’t find anything wrong with it. While it was at the shop, my wife got Internet withdrawals, so I built a desktop machine to replace the laptop. It’s a nice machine. Dual Core ET6400, on an Asus P5B-Deluxe/Wifi.

The install went fine. Nice and smooth. But there were a few niggles. Particularly with graphics. In some games, I was getting massive corruption of vertex data that made the game unplayable.

So on Saturday night, I decided to update my motherboard BIOS. Asus are “renowned” for their overclocking and zero-jumper configuration. They even have a Windows based BIOS update utility for updating the BIOS. In the olden days, flashing a BIOS was something not to be undertaken lightly. The common wisdom was just to leave well enough alone. But the Asus BIOS update changes that. It just invites you to have a go. It says, “Hey, it’s easy. Look I can do it from Windows. No need for a DOS boot disk. Anyway, I have a quick restore feature, if you break me. Go on. Have a go…”

I couldn’t resist. I hoped this fresh BIOS might fix my graphics problems. I went and flashed the BIOS.

Did I mention I hate computers?

I loaded the new BIOS with the update utility. It all when well. I rebooted. And…

Nothing.

What?

Nothing.

It just wouldn’t boot. It wouldn’t POST. The power came on, the drives spun up, but the standby LED on my monitor just blinked a solemn blink.

Cue Optimism: Power cycle again, and again, and again
Cue Panic: It’s dead. My motherboard is dead?!
Cue Despair: I shouldn’t have touched it. Why did I update the BIOS? I know I shouldn’t have touched it

After ripping out the video to get to the CMOS battery, pulling the battery and resetting the BIOS settings, I still couldn’t get the machine to boot. I was at a loss. I was a broken man. The computer had won.

So, in my time of need, I headed to the one place where I knew I’d get help. Google. I knew she’d take me in and give me comfort. I spent some time kicking around and couldn’t find much to give me absolution. Then I stumbled upon a forum post about RAM. I knew the P5B is picky about RAM, and people were reporting having problems with 2.1V RAM. The solution they proposed was to pull out the RAM, put in 1 stick, preferably something slow and stable.

“Nah, that can’t be”, I told myself. “I bought GEIL 1.8V RAM.” The box it came in even reassured me. But then again, it wasn’t going to hurt, was it? I’d tried everything else.

You might be able to guess the ending to this film, before our hero does.

I pulled out one stick of RAM, held my breath, and punched the power button.

Blink… Blink… Blink… Monitor On!

The POST failed. Entered the BIOS setup, cleared the BIOS data to default settings, and forced the RAM speed to 800MHz. Save & Exit. Booted to Windows. Shutdown. Replace RAM stick. Reboot. Windows.
Eureka

I… Hate… Computers.

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It’s Alive!

Filed under: Uncategorized — kamikaze_devilphish @ 3:54 pm

When Medieval2 starts to appear in the junmail that I find in my letterbox, it all comes home to me that the game we’ve spent the last 18 months developing is real!

(That’s a real game as in a tangible product that someone can by, not as in real game opposed to somebody elses toy game. It’s a tough business, I don’t want to belittle anyones effort)

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