February 27, 2004

fun fact

Fun fact of the day:
If you eat 50 twinkies you get 100% of your RDA of iron.

Posted by matt at 01:02 AM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2004

Data

Here's a funny little quirk:
If you load your data once instead of twice, it takes much less time. Oh, and you're a lot less likely to leak memory out the wazoo.

(Don't mind me. I'm rewriting large portions of the texture system)

Posted by matt at 12:48 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2004

Well, that was different

I'd like to take a moment and confirm that the DDR Disney Mix does in fact exist. Incidentally, Chim Chim Cher-ee makes for a really weird techno mix.

Posted by matt at 11:44 AM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2004

The tooth

The tooth hurts.

Or rather, it doesn't hurt.
Which is bad, considering that pieces of it seem to be breaking off.

There was more of it last week when I tried to make an initial appointment with the dentist, but I hadn't used my HMO before and it took a while to talk them into letting me see a dentist who wasn't on the other side of L.A. (I don't know how I wound up signed up for that office, I do know that the receptionis wasn't willing to schedule me for an emergency visit and it would've taken me over an hour each way, so I really didn't want to use them).

So, with luck I've found a dentist who can make my tooth stop going crunch. It's one of the wisdom teeth that I've been expecting to lose for the past 12 years, so I won't be too disappointed if the dentist removes it.

Posted by matt at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2004

hammers

When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails

I'm currently refactoring a large section of code.
The code needs refactoring because the person who wrote it has jumped through dozens of hoops in order to make a series of subclasses use a base class that almost does what's needed, but not really.

On the bright side, when I'm done I should be able to recover 100-200k of wasted memory.

Posted by matt at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2004

Help me, Obi Wan

A great disturbance in the Force. It was like a million action items crying out in unison, then suddenly silenced.

Man, I hate it when our producer uses phrases like "the next two milestones have to be redefined", and "Early E3 demo" when he's on the phone with the publisher.

And one day we'll actually be an announced title.

Posted by matt at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2004

IMDB?

A friend of mine watched Equus tonight [0].

Being too busy to watch the movie, but wanting to know what he was talking about I looked it up on IMDB which produced a nice plot summary and a brief user comment (reproduced here in case things change on IMDB):

Plot Summary: A psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, investigates the savage blinding of six horses with a metal spike in a stable in Hampshire...
User Comments: Magnificent performances in a vision of personal hell

and then:

Recommendations If you like this title, we also recommend... 3 Ninjas (1992)

hrm...
I think someone's heuristic has developed a sense of humor.

--

[0] In case you're wondering he didn't like it in spite of the good performances, good atmosphere, and naked Jenny Agutter. I can't comment as I'm a bit too busy writing code to watch movies right now.

Posted by matt at 12:11 AM | Comments (1)

February 06, 2004

Ah, Hollywood

Tomorrow a film crew will be shooting a commercial in the cube next to mine. I guess tonight will be the night I clean up my desk and make sure anything either breakable or valuable is packed away.

Apparently the director was very happy that the cube walls can be taken apart and reassembled.

Posted by matt at 12:02 PM | Comments (1)

February 03, 2004

Beware the siren call

There's this deep temptation that most game programmers feel at some point in the game development cycle where you start to think to yourself "You know, if I add just a few features to the game I could set up a mode where the game is a scene editor and layout tool".

Don't do it.

Games work best with a set of highly baked assets that are in a rigid and predictable format. This makes the assets fast to load and utilize. Editors work best with a set of easily modifiable assets that maximize flexibility.

That, and your editor needs to be working at the start of the production cycle and will probably have a couple dozen hacky features that should be walled off from your game by being in a different codebase.

Posted by matt at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2004

Whales

I went whale watching on Saturday. We saw a mother and her calf (well, we didn't actually see them, we saw the spray plumes). I had a lot of fun standing on the prow of the ship as we splashed through the waves. It was less fun watching some of my coworkers get seasick over the side of the ship, but that's life.

The guy who was running the tour was very kind and let us stay out an extra half hour because we took a very long time to find the whales and we were supposed to head in about 10 minutes after we saw the whales.

Posted by matt at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)