Technobabble

Hrmph. Strange. Anisotropic filtering in OpenGL on NVidia cards finally started to work after switching from uncompressed to DXT3 compressed textures. Whodathunk....

Lets try a little experiment. (Try to) read this. Sykhronics Entertainment Anyone that’s followed my work probably won’t be miffed by that mean looking first word. But if you stuck around, you stuck around for my work, not my clever name. You probably have your own pronunciation of it too. I’ve certainly heard some interesting ones from telemarketers that whois’d my domains for a phone number. Lets see if we are thinking the same thing....

Ranting… I’m sorry. I suppose I’ve been “writing” music with trackers for about 13 years (Scream, Impulse, Modplug, Buzz, Renoise). Alas, my results have been less than satisfactory. I want to take this moment to apologize to everyone I ever recommended trackers to. Sorry. Sometime last month I set out to find a better music app. I’d already entered the world of VST’s thanks to Renoise, having put down a big $600 for Colossus....

Here’s a fun point. Almost everyone works at a desk, but nobody talks about desks. Chairs come up sometimes, especially in discussions about the Aeron chair versus a well made leather, or general sitting ergonomics. This is an incredibly broad topic that could easily span dozens of blog posts in it’s complexity. Game developers and other media professionals have many needs for their working surface. And depending on how many hats you wear as a developer, you’ve got to fit several monitors, speakers (stereo or surround), input devices (keyboards, mice, tablets, midi interfaces), scanners, printers, and other office friendly objects (fans, phones, paper and supplies) on it....

This is part of a forum post I made. Classic Mike, going completely off topic and force feeding all the random advice I had saved up. – – – – Be sure your input update is written/recorded immediately before the game processes it. In other words, at the end your control interpretation code/handler. That way it can “in theory” reproduce a crash, instead of coming up a frame or two short....

This is from a forum post I made in response to a question on testing methods. A classic Mike random advice assault. This branched off to a series of thoughts on built in game recorders. – – – – Free testing methods: Peer testing has worked well for me, as developers tend to have bizarre PC configurations (multiple monitors, multiple gamepads, etc). There’s also a level of critique a developer can give that goes above and beyond, but you need to be clear and capable of asking for the harshest of critiques....

From a forum post, a set of bullet point advice on creating a custom archive format. – – – – – For terms: Archives are a directory/dictionary/list of filenames with offsets to chunks, and many data chunks (files). Compression comes later. – Directories and subdirectories are just longer filenames. Unlimited file name length means unlimited directories. – Padding the start of data chunks to 4 byte boundaries has performance advantages on many platforms when in RAM....

I think I’ve already posted about this everywhere, except here. If you’re like me, and decided to skip out on Travel, Hotel, and admission to GDC, you can get the meat of the event for a fair $32. GDC Radio Store $8 gets you a day (about 6 hours of talks) for either the Indie Games Summit or the Casual Games Summit. Nice. Buy ‘em all for nearly 24 hours of interesting discussions and talks....

I was busy last month cutting together a trailer for… business purposes. I’ll talk more about this later. It turned out surprisingly more difficult that I had have hoped, but I found a rather unique way of pulling it together. Obviously, the secret weapon is Fraps. Trying to nab constant 60fps footage was doable, but proved tricky, due to my hard drives not being the most defragged. I don’t know how many takes later, I ended up with nearly an hour of game footage, that was cut down to a 4 minute presentation....

You see, what’s fun about big computers is… oh wait… there’s no fun here. Back sometime in ‘98, whilst I was working in a computer store, my fascination with big computer crap began. And I purchased this massive “Server” case, which was PC’s case for a couple years. Eventually, this behemoth of a case was “promoted” to an actual server, since routine maintenance/upgrades were painful given it’s shear mass. Then in ‘04, I had the brilliant idea to purchase the biggest, fattest Laptop mankind has ever seen....