February 2009

00:29 - 25/02/2009 - Plasma Balls Explode

I'm not sure if it's the fact it may be pressurised or have a different gas inside to allowed for the pretty effects or just because of it's shape, but if a plasma ball, you know the spherical things that have cool looking purpley / blue plasma stuff that's attracted to your touch, has enough pressure exerted on it, say from falling off a desk into a narrowing gap between Hifi and wall, they can explode quite spectacularly.

I'm currently listening to the album Mickey Mouse Operation, by little people. I went bought and downloaded it after listening to the tracks on audiosurf radio. I often play audiosurf late at night, it lets me think about stuff whilst distracting the twitch reaction part of my brain with shinies and listening to music.

00:25 - 23/02/2009 - Too late to come up with a title

Went to a Charles Darwin Memorial / Climate Change Lecture at the newly opened Severn Theatre today. Nothing particularly new for me but the speaker highlighted the problems the theory had in its time which I hadn't heard before and his little "cocktail party philosophy" ending was quite interesting. He made a parallel between the increase in fundamentalism in both the east and west as the world faces the challenge of cooperating on global climate change to the fate of the easter islands (amoung others), which was as I said interesting, so far I'd pretty much attributed the effect to 'old gods die hard'. Makes me want to write down some of my 'cocktail party philosophical' musings.

I uploaded something resembling a portfolio website at delphic.me.uk (although it redirects to the hosting for this site, as I can't really afford two sets of hosting!), using one of my old website designs modified a bit. It's only got ZeroG on it at the moment, which I'd like to work on a lot if I'm honest but I should probably see if I can get something else useful up! I've been playing with DirectX lighting / materials and the mesh functions, but I've yet to make it into anything particularly exciting for anyone but me.

I'm mildly ashamed to admit I'm currrenty watching Fern on Sky1 trying to grab celebrities off the red carpet of the oscars, quite entertaining though. I'm guessing Rupert Murdoch has bought the rights to air the oscars and is going to make people pay to watch them, which is a shame cause I'd quite like some late night TV that I found vaguely interesting.

21:11 - 01/02/09 - ZeroG v1

Okay, here it is! The first version of my first game project, it's a work in progress and there's a lot of things I'd like to work on, specifically the AI and a lighting / matieral system. The idea was a space shooter that was a bit more like space combat would truely be like, unfortunately the way the AI works at the moment (a very simple 3 choice FSM) minimises many of the differences. Due to the constraint of needing something to put on my CV whilst I apply for jobs I'd tidyed up the current version and put in 3 levels getting harder, starting from shooting a stationary object to "omg this is impossible", seriously if you complete level 3 - wave 3, please press F5 for a screenshot and send it to me. The current form has a few limitations in that the resolution is set in the code, and that you cannot alt tab from the program whislt it is running (well you can but directx won't reintialise when you alt tab back and you'll have to press esc to exit, or alt-f4) these are just features and once done won't really enable me to learn new things and so have taken a backseat for the time being. You can download a 5:4 version (1280*1024), a 16:10 version (1680*1050) and the source below, any constructive feedback is welcome (sp00nofdeath at hotmail).

Update: Here's a link to the ZeroG Page on my portfolio site rather than direct download links, this version has had a couple of tweaks, it copes a bit better with alt tabbing, but I'd still not recommend it.