As the current year is slowly coming to a close, I figured that it would be smart to make a few promises. The first would be to actually add a new post once in a while, say every week, instead of once a year. So who am I…? Stay tuned for my next update

.. and I’m a game programmer. My best game so far would probably be lolball. A game where you move through levels as fast as possible to get a better score, all while doing as many combos as possible. Did I mention particle effects and slow-motion? Currently however I’m working on a remake of tetris so I can get a stable codebase for my next progress.

Until next time…

I recently had to install silverlight at my computer(channel 9 required it), since I wanted to have a look at the brand new Visual Studio 2010 without downloading that huge ctp, and I must say that I really liked the installation process. Unlike most installations it doesn’t force you to press 20 buttons to install it. Only 2, ” install now”, and “close”. It actually felt refreshing.

It still manages to mention silverlight 4 times though without telling you what it does. Still, it’s better than Java .

I recently downloaded the f.e.a.r 2 demo and I must say that I am disappointed. First and foremost I probably need to get a fresh installation of my xp to better enjoy it, not to mention better hardware, but that won’t help the poor design decisions the f.e.a.r team seems to have made. Some of these designs make it seems it’s just a port of the console version, and not a PC game as the original was, while not as obvious as the lock picking in oblivion some of the interactions stems from the consoles.

The first miss is a huge sin, input problems. I cant seem to bind my X1 & X2 (aka forward and backward) buttons to grenades and reload, something I could in the first game. Another input related miss seems to be that I can’t unbind bindings in the option menu while running the game, however I can unbind in the main option menu. Similarly I can bind the delete key while playing the game but not in the main option menu. Also, the notes that you find, and can read with your pda cant be scrolled with the mouse-wheel.

Another thing that bothered me was that the hud. The hud is designed to look like a helm-display, much like the hud in star wars republic commando, however unlike in republic commando I couldn’t find a option to remove parts of the hud to make it less helm-like. The aspect ratio has probably been fixed to a 16:9 or something similar since I had those black bars you get when you watch a wide screen on a none wide display. I have toyed with similar since creating art for both wide and none-wide monitors is cumbersome, however seeing it in a working product I actually felt that it was blocking my view.

Overall though I enjoyed it though. It featured good looking menus, blood, nice explosions okeyish scare effects and feel-good mech joyrides.

The soundtrack of this post has been Link Wray – Batman theme

I had a nightmare a few nights ago. In the dream I apparently had formated my computer without doing a backup of my important data. Luckily it was only a dream…

Working an a skeleton loader, theese are some shots while developing it.

I managed to get my skeleton loader working and I had some problem roatating the turtle 360 degrees but when I enabled ShortSlerp and fixed a few bugs in the angle-loading routine it worked as expected.

Since some time I’ve been sorting my music collection. Going though my hard-drives and Cd’s finding all music-files and moving them to a common place and with the help of foobar2000 place them in a sane directory-structure and keep them there.

Within foobar I sort the artists on the following script. This makes sure that The (International) Noise Conspiracy is among the other artist that begins with I.

$replace($replace($replace($stripprefix(%artist%),’|’,),'[‘,),'(‘,)

That little script keeps things nice and tidy within foobar, but to sort I use these two massive scripts:

$if($greater($strstr(ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ,$upper($left($ascii($replace($replace($replace($stripprefix(%artist%),’|’,),'[‘,),'(‘,)),1))),0),$upper($left($ascii($replace($replace($replace($stripprefix(%artist%),’|’,),'[‘,),'(‘,)),1)),Other)$ascii($swapprefix(%artist%))/$ascii(%title%)

and

$if($greater($strstr(ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ,$upper($left($ascii($replace($replace($replace($stripprefix(%artist%),’|’,),'[‘,),'(‘,)),1))),0),$upper($left($ascii($replace($replace($replace($stripprefix(%artist%),’|’,),'[‘,),'(‘,)),1)),Other)$ascii($swapprefix(%artist%))/$if([%album%],$ascii(%album%)/,)$ascii(%title%)

The first scripts places All My Loving with The Beatles from the album With The Beatles in BBeatles, TheAll My Loving.mp3 while the scrip places it in B/Beatles, The/With The Beatles/All My Loving.mp3. If a folder is missing the album tag it places it in the same location as the first one.

I posted these scripts here so that I might use them if my backup fails or for others. As the usual disclaimer goes, they are only tested on my music files, and may not work with yours. I am not responsible for what happens to your files.

It should be noted that if you want to copy these and use them. For gods sake make sure the scrips doesn’t contain any white characters such as spaces or newlines, and that you copy the whole script, those spaces really screw up formatting.

I recently discovered, not only do the local library have CD’s full of modern music, with my chemical romance-blood among others(despite what you think of chemical romance, blood really is different), they also have a complete collection of sound fx CD’s. I guess I dont have to spend some of my hard earned money on thoose sorts of CD’s when I can borrow

Apparently the pulse didnt came. Now my biggest problem apperently is if I’m such a great nerd because I noticed or I blogged about it.

On June 1, 2009, months after Max’s escape, terrorists detonate an electromagnetic pulse weapon in the atmosphere over the U.S., which destroys the vast majority of computer and communication systems, throwing the country into utter chaos.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Angel_(TV_series)