February 2010

10:51 - 28/02/2010 - New Flat

Wow, I really have been neglecting this site lately, well I've been neglecting all of my 'personal projects' really. So there's been quite a few changes in my life recently. I'm no longer a resident of 102 Farm Lane, although many thanks to the crew for the times I've spent there, not times of my life I'll forget ;). I'm now living in Barons Court, which is technically in Hammersmith but everything useful that's close is in Fulham so still feels like Fulham, in a nice little two bedroom flat with Ellie. I say little but really there's quite a lot of floor area so much more room than you get when in a shared house that it's kind of silly, I mean we have a spare room. A spare room! A room we don't even really need! This is awesome (it currently has computers in it).

I have also been skiing (well snowboarding) with my dad over half-term week in Tignes, which meant it was kinda busy but teenagers are hilarious to watch so I guess it balances out some. Was really good boarding after almost a 5 year gap, and I'm very happy with the Snowboard I bought, even if the boots are a little small. It's more effort and more scary than I remember, but perhaps that's just my memory failing me. I was with a group of pretty advanced skiers - as I usually have been - which meant I was going quite fast, or quite steep, many a time! I did only a little bit of off-piste, and more to-the-side-of-piste really, but later on in the week when there was some proper deep snow it was awesome, especially because the skiers, who were technically better than me, had a really hard time of it :D. The trip had a couple of down sides though, on the second day I managed to fracture my little finger, but it wasn't really that much of an inconvience and it seems to have healed fine. Far worse is that on the last day my dad had an impressive crash, where I'm told he was catapulted out of his skis and about 10 feet down a black run and landed on a patch of ice on his shoulder and gave himself a nasty comlex break of his collar bone. He's had sugergy now back in England and seems to be recovering okay, thankfully, he was very stoic about it at the time and won a 'Mr Cool' award from our chalet hosts for it (who I should note were pretty awesome all week, so ++ ski olympic).

I'm sitting my lounge listening to the FFVII bgm off my hi-hi at the moment, heh. Wondering if I can find the time (and the will to devote a proportion of my much diminished free-time) to work on my video game projects. I really enjoy my job at Acturis, and like my slightly evolved role of more prototyping of new sites (as well as some css work - which is closer to proper coding than xml in many ways - and the 'standard' BA stuff), but making video games has *always* been something I've wanted to do at the least as an amateur, so I want to keep that alive then I'm going to have to lock myself away from the world for a few hours a week. On the plus side I've got plenty of ideas to impliment because I've spent a good proportion of my commutes thinking about either game design in general or specific programming tasks I could undertake.

A new possibility that I'm quite interested in looking at is using the new spark engine that unknown worlds are making for their game NS2, as a way to produce a really good looking game / mod. They've designed it with modding in mind, of course I don't know how much of the engine they are going to expose to the LUA and if they are going to release the source code at all, so it's going to have to wait till I can experiment a bit before I can decide if I can use it. In the mean time I should probably keep working on my little engine and games.