date_range 11/07/2009 01:38

Yay, I’m 16! What did I get? -The ability to now suffer from fatal car crashes due to legal driving age -A free phone that just coincidentally happened to appear on the time of my birthday, not a present -A new computer Here’s a little pile of things, excluding the laptop. Surprisingly, the free phone, a Nokia N95 for opting in to a survey team, is faster and better in some ways than my LG Renoir touch phone. I don’t know which one to use as my main, carrying two around is a little unpractical, but my old one’s still...

date_range 07/07/2009 22:07

I’ve recently gotten a bit into the more raw process of programming with nothing but just C++ and DirectX involved. It’s quite educational to learn more about how it all works instead of just letting a modern engine doing it all for me. So far I’ve managed to create a triangle and a blue strobing screen. I found it quite interesting to create a bluescreen, it just reminded me of the raw basis of a 3D application for some reason. It also reminded me of the beloved bluescreens Windows let us know about. I haven’t actually had any since only...

date_range 29/06/2009 22:54

I haven’t posted in a while so I’d think of writing a quick update. About a year ago, The PS3 received an update to allow customers to rent/purchase of movies in the Playstation Store. The downside was, Europe/Australia did not get this. Not too long ago, a free service called VidZone came out that allows us to download free music videos and such. It’s pretty good, but I’d much rather have the full Video Store which is coming around Q3 2009, which it just about is. There’s been quite a few things going on lately, the near release of Gran...

date_range 04/05/2009 20:26

I spend the weekend building a computer for a friend which proved to be quite entertaining. The case wasn’t in stock, so when he came over to test it he was rather confused at the screen output from a pile of parts next to him. The specs were as follows: -Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.6Ghz -Gigabyte EP43-UD3L -MSI 9800GTX+ OC -2x2GB Kingston 1066Mhz Memory Cooling fan and motherboard behind it, BEFORE scraping off the thermal paste. Which was, in this case better in every way than my own system, though fortunately for me not by much. I wish...

date_range 28/04/2009 17:21

I’ve spend a few days working on a simple little game recently, based on Tic-Tac-Toe. It doesn’t have Crysis graphics, it doesn’t have 35 weeks of continous gameplay, it doesn’t use DirectX11, it’s a simple game. I made a blog post a while ago about starting back from the beginning with some very simple 2D games before I do anything more entertaining to other people. It looks like this (It’s huge, I don’t know why I made the game big): And it has a fancy configuration panel I made as well: Technical details: -Game written in C++. -Settings window made...

date_range 25/04/2009 17:43

I’ve just returned from a 4 day camp, 5 hours away from home at Emu Gully, under the name of “leadership camp”, though “survival camp” would be a little more suitable. I’m not sure what to write about it considering I’m still tired from it so I might edit the post later. Anyway, we arrived and we’re greeted by what seemed like a rather empty patch of land. It had a few sheds here and there, but not enough for anyone to sleep in. We slept in swags. It was all good and fun until I found out the bottom...

date_range 14/04/2009 20:52

SDL. What? Simple Directmedia Layer. What is it? It’s yet another one of those game development libraries I’m trying. I’ve tried Ogre, Irrlicht, 3DGameStudio, DarkBasic.. What’s in common with all of these? They’re pretty much build for 3D applications. SDL on the other hand is for 2D games. “2D games are easy”. Put Game-Maker, Construct or any other drag-and-drop designer anyway. I’ve used them myself, they’re a great start and have self-programmable areas, but face it, you’re still creating a relatively pre-made game. The full 3D sets on the other hand, are quite simply, complex. So why’s SDL different? It’s...

date_range 30/03/2009 17:55

I’ve been notified lately that I had somehow managed to create over 2 million files on my hosting account. Unfortunately I had left on a caching feature from my proxy. This created a nice little 30GB of 2 million files, and it took a good 2 hours to remove. For anyone who isn’t aware, the caching feature will allow users to browse the proxy faster as it has already loaded certain files instead of having to download them again. Existing users shouldn’t really notice any change as I am on a very high speed plan anyway. I saved myself from...

date_range 15/03/2009 18:40

Last week, in my IPT subject we have begun our Visual Basic topic. I have personally never used Visual Basic before, but am fairly quick with it as I’ve had previous experiences with C++. So the first lesson we create one of those simple “Hello World” programs. I also have a functional calculator finished at this time, with other people still struggling with the first program. It wasn’t so fun for me when I realized a calculator was what we’d spent the next 70 minutes on for the next lesson when I had already done that.

date_range 07/03/2009 23:12

I haven’t dreamed anything (or at least, technically, haven’t remembered any dreams) lately so I figured maybe I should do something interesting. I randomly thought of the idea of flying Boeing 777’s at speed breaking the sound barrier and applying brone-crushing gravitational forces by doing barrel rolls and other such stunts while listening to the main theme song of Top Gun. It was more entertaining than it sounds.