Konfusion with a K

This is going to make me sound out of touch, bud something I’ve discovered recently is podcasts. I’ve known about them before, but never really got into them as I never really had time to sit down and listen to them. However, now that I have an hour bus ride to work and back every day (soon to be 30 minutes, thank goodness) I’ve got lots of time to listen to stuff on the iPod.

Podcasts can be better than music sometimes as it’s a bit more.. intellectual fuel, per se, and less just mindless entertainment. It’s more of a keep your mind going thing than a shut your mind down thing. The podcasts I like? The stackoverflow podcast, which is just Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood taking questions and and answering them and discussing them.  BBC Inside football weekly, which is exactly what it sounds like.  And the tech tv this week in tech podcast is good.  There are some others that are alright, but there have been a few that were disappointing.  (The BS report, for example).

Anyone have any podcasts they really enjoy?

Is one of those games that I could play forever.  Really good games don’t get old, they just get better with age.  Nancy’s replaying chrono trigger, I assume that game falls in the same category.

Well, I suppose it’s been a long time since I posted. Things have changed a lot.

I’ve left MDA, and accepted a job at Action Pants Inc, a game development place in downtown Vancouver. Yes, its back to the ol roots for me. Sometimes you just feel it’s time to get back to what you do.

Also, Nancy and I have bought a condo in East Van and will be moving into it towards the end of May. Which is good, because my current bus commute to work is 45-60 minutes. The move will trim this down nicely because I will be able to take the Skytrain.

I can’t say much about AP yet, because we don’t have any games out yet, so it’s very hush hush. I’ll post some links though once the info becomes available to the general public.

According to Rob, there are four kinds of bloggers. I think I’m stuck somewhere between whimsical and casual. Most of my posts do start with “I know I haven’t blogged in a while”.

So it’s time for me to try and fix that. I’m thinking the opposite of Rob on this one though. I’m thinking to get my “creative juices” flowing, I need to do more short posts. We’ll see how that works.

-3 degrees Celsius seems absolutely unbearably freezing for January.

Until I go 2 months without blogging. Better nix that fast. Was at a resteraunt the other night where two people were shot outside the resteraunt while we were inside eating. Pretty crazy stuff that Vancouver gang violence.

Buying Mass Effect today.

Quite excited.

The reasons there have been no posts lately are Hellgate London and NWN2: Mask Of the Betrayer. Don’t expect any after Mass Effect comes out either

But seriously, I’ve been keeping myself busy lately with a multiple of different things. I had another hobby coding spurt, and probably invested ~40 hours in 3 weeks refactoring and cleaning up my graphics code to add an opengl version of my hobby game to the direct x version. It basically uses an Abstract Factory to create the proper derived classes of all the graphics objects. I originally wrote it with no intention of porting it to openGL. But then I thought it would be interesting to take code that had been written with no intention of extending it like that, and add the opengl functionality. I had tried some big design up front ideas, but I couldn’t come up with anything I liked.

So I added a second project config to the visual studio solution, and added it’s own #if def, GFX_OPENGL. Then I added the GFX_DIRECTX definition to the DirectX configs. The goal with this was at any point in time, I wanted o be able to switch from the non implemented openGL version back to the direct x version and have the DirectX version still work fine.

Once I had that done, I stripped all the direct x headers from the opengl config. Then I hit compile, and presto, compile errors. So I’d tackle them one by one. The first one, IDirectDevice9 not found. Not surprising. So I’d create a new class, IDeviceManager, and derived classes DirectXDeviceManager and OpenGLDeviceManager. Then I’d do a global find and replace, and replace all the IDirectDevice9’s with IDeviceManager. Then I would slowly fill in the interface as the compiler led me to do it.

So I did that, and it took a while. It was a lot of refactoring, as I had to move a lot of directx code from inline in other methods to specific classes, such as DirectXFont, DirectXTexture, etc. But eventually, the openGL version compiled, but running produced black screen. So then i started implementing all the interfaces I had stubbed out in the previous steps. After yelling at different font libraries for a while (settled on FTGL) I finally have the two versions both running and rendering the front end almost identically. Next is the backend.

It was an interesting project, and the method I used was interesting to me, because I wasn’t sure how well it was going to work out. It turned out quite well. Theres only a few places left where the GFX_ definitions are stil used outside of the actual definitions of the type specific classes. So I’ll work on slowly getting rid of them.

Hmm. That took longer than I thought to explain. Stay tuned next week for my 1 week reviews of Hellgate London and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer.

This weekend Nancy and I went to Seattle to attend a post elopement reception for Sean Quinn. Due to the need presented by the circumstances, I had to use the internet to learn how to do something that I’d never quite managed before. Intrigued?  Click
It was my first time in Seattle, and I have to say, its a nice city. It’s got the water, some nice stuff. We ended up a while at the science fiction museum / hall of fame. That was pretty cool. And we didn’t have much time to do much else because of the reception and then the fact I was hung over on Sunday. But we spent most of Sunday at an outlet mall between here and Seattle. With the dollar the way it is, cross border shopping is fun and profitable. (Don’t tell Nancy I called it fun though.. shh)

As my downtime posts explained, Nancy’s parents were here for about 3 weeks (19 days). So I didn’t have a lot of time to blog about anything.

While they were here, we did things like go to the states shopping for a day, go to chinatown, go to ikea for a day (I shit you not) and other fun things.

They left yesterday morning, and last night Nancy and I went on a dinner cruise in the Vancouver harbor to celebrate one of the projects she worked on going live. Vancouver harbor is a very pretty place, and seeing the lit Vancouver night skyline from the water was really cool. And the food was good and there was a bar, so it was a good night. A bunch of us then went down to Steamworks.

I was introduced to Steamworks by Sean and Julie, and its one of my favorite places to drink downtown. It’s downtown on the water, its got great food, and they brew their own beer. They’ve got a few that are really good. It’s also huge, and is divided up into many areas, which is cool. There are some nice resteraunty rooms, a patio, some pub rooms, some bar areas, some areas with comfy chairs, some areas with tvs, and a few pool tables. It’s big enough that last night when we showed up with ~18 people, we waited 5 minutes for a table that seated all of us. Thats pretty damned good for a friday at 10PM.