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Jansic's Blog

7th Jun 2010 - 17:14	Linux sigh
Nothing about Linux is ever low-motion. I have 2 systems, both Ubuntu, my server runs 8.04 and my work machine runs 8.10. I recently decided that it was time to move to the head of the Ubuntu release schedule and upgrade both. I did my server remotely, firstly upgrading to 9.04. Being a server it lacks any graphical components, that was until it was upgraded. I can almost forgive this, because I installed a gui originally and then pared it back; what I can't forgive it for is changing the way things are configured. All my custom configuration and boot sequences (provided by the sys-v init stuff) all made completely irrelevant by 9.04 shipping with 'upstart' instead. After a good half-hour spent fixing the resulting mess, I then upgraded it again to 10.04 - making a nice new mess of completely different configuration files. Another half hour later after a remote reboot my server failed to come back up. Later, when I arrived home I went to reboot it but all that had happened was the script that updated the dynamic-dns entry hadn't run - because of yet another configuration change. sigh I upgraded my work machine in much the same way; with much the same experience as above. Except this time I had nfs, nis and automounter issues to contend with; resulting in a remote home directory full of rubbish configuration data and bad gvfs mounts from differing versions of the same Linux distribution.The work machine upgrade took a different path too. It upgraded itself to 9.04, twice, then 10.04 also twice (I have no idea). I'm certain parts of the upgrade failed silently too, as I appear to be missing audio capability - no doubt some module or codec isn't hooked up correctly in Linux's over-engineered audio chain. sigh On another audio related note; I was using Amarok from the 8.04 release; it was reasonably quick and quite functional. What the HELL happened to the verision of Amarok that shipped with 10.04? It's slow, clunky, incongruously KDE and a retrograde step in UI design. Why would I possibly need big chunky swooshy applets with lyrics and wiki pages sliding around!?! I want to add music to a list and then listen to it while I work; I don't want to 'browse' the app! Anybody know of any, simpler audio players out there? </rant>
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2nd Jun 2010 - 13:26	Post holiday
just come back from a week on the Greek island of Santorini. It's a nice place, good walks, good food and very very hot. Just the thing to clear your mind. Of course, not having touched a computer for 8 days I've come back with about a thousand different ideas to try and implement. What first? Probably back to DaK, to implement a simpler version of the complicated mess I was creating.
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12th May 2010 - 13:20	Poo Li Ticks
I'm not generally one to express a political opinion publicly but I'm actually pretty happy with the way the UK coalition government worked out. Heritage and history can give you experience but not necessarily a modern way of applying it, youth can help you foresee the future and react to change. Combining the two together is really no bad thing, providing the communication is good. From a programmers perspective, bringing old code up to date is often more realistic and robust than rewriting it from scratch without a working reference. Often you can't teach an old dog new tricks; but I hope both sides are willing to educate and be educated. I suspect there are a lot of unhappy Lib Dems out there. You shouldn't be.
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26th Apr 2010 - 21:51	Note to self.
An article URL, mainly as a note to myself - I'm bound to lose it. link
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1st Apr 2010 - 12:52	April the 'wtf I can't be bothered...'
As the years pass, April 1st becomes decreasingly relevant, especially where news is concerned... 'April fools' were a neat thing when you're a child, an excuse to play tricks on people and be almost completely absolved of any consequences, just because of the date. As an adult, April the 1st is just a painful waste of time - even though it's just for one day. I'd like to go to a news site and not have to second-guess the validity of the articles, I'd also like to not have to cope with weeding subtle jokes from real content based on their timezone (who decided that the jokes are only valid before midday anyway?). The worst part of it all is that a plethora of search engines will record and archive this misinformation, regurgitating it later when you're not prepared to deal with it. The more subtle a joke is the more likely it'll slip past you. Eventually, a few months down the line, a journalist will pick it up turn it into headline news for your local tabloid, stirring everybody with an opinion into a frenzy. Nobody will apologise when they figure out the truth either. It's just not worth it. - "Strawberry jelly causes blindness in goldfish!", says anonymous internet scientist...
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19th Mar 2010 - 13:10	Mapping
My work on the DaK map editor is coming along nicely. You can edit terrain height directly and you can paint textures straigh onto the map. It's now reached the point where it's quite usable and I can actually get back to developing DaK. Have a screenshot: Amusingly the editor is now a better, more functional renderer than the game engine. It does open up a lot of possibilities and may even be suitable for other styles of games; like RTS...
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11th Mar 2010 - 13:22	5-texture blend
Just recently I've been working on the map editor for DaK. It's not a particularly difficult application to write but as I've been developing it certain design decisions have reared their heads as forms of inflexibility, that then extend into the usability of the application. Initially I used an ARGB texture as a blend map for other textures on the terrain, using the alpha channel for baked lighting and RGB for the texture weights. Using the editor made it clear that three textures just isn't enough, even allowing for the fact that I can change textures on a per-patch basis. To alleviate this I switched to normal-based lighting; this freed up the alpha channel and gave me four textures per patch. Four textures is better but still not enough for the flexibility I need. It occurred to me this morning that if I've got texture units to burn (which I have) then actually I can blend 5 textures, because hiding in the weights there's an implicit 5th texture. w0 = blend.x w1 = blend.y w2 = blend.z w3 = blend.w w4 = 1.0 - (w0 + w1 + w2 + w3) Very simple really, the weight for the 5th texture is what the other weights didn't contribute. I'm assigning this 5th texture to the parent grid for all the patches, this means that all the sub-patches share the same texture but can still have 4 unique textures of their own.
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8th Mar 2010 - 14:31	Monitored
When my Philips 200W6 TFT monitor developed a fault earlier in the year I found that replacing it was much harder than I'd anticipated. My first theory when replacing the monitor was that, if I bought it 4 years ago for £250, then an equivalent monitor today must be cheaper! I first purchased an Iiyama E2202WS at £125. Before it had arrived I saw a similar Iiyama in real life and didn't like the colour reproduction. I turned the monitor away without even opening the box. Perturbed by this, I did a little research and ordered what was seemingly the best panel I could find for under £150 - a Samsung P2270. Overall it's a nice monitor but the abysmal colour and weird viewing angle inversion was much worse than my ailing Philips. I sent the Samsung back. It was at this point that I did some research into the monitor I already owned. What I hadn't realised was that my Philips contained an IPS panel and I'd only been looking at monitors with TN panels. Filtering the market for IPS panels was hard, though I eventually came across the Dell 2209WA. It's probably the cheapest IPS you can buy at around £225. £225 is far more than I'd intended to spend but the Dell is an excellent monitor. I suppose if you've never had a good quality monitor then the mediocre quality of TN panels wouldn't be an issue. For me I didn't even know what the difference would be.
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1st Feb 2010 - 13:18	Bioshock returns...
As much as I disliked it I couldn't just leave Bioshock there unfinished. This weekend I put a little time aside to complete it, which I did. Overall it took about 12 hours of total play time, I saw pretty much everything and achieved the 'good' ending. A little back-track-reloading also allowed me to get the bad ending but it really wasn't worth the extra effort. Overall, Bioshock is much less of an innovative modern game than its hype portrayed. Design-wise it's decidedly average, reeking of late 90's level layout & mission structure, especially towards the end - the level where you lose control of your plasmids is lame and the penultimate 'escort' level is wholly frustrating and annoying. Story-wise it plays out a lot like SS2, in fact, pretty much exactly like SS2, so there's no innovation there either. Often I don't really care about the quality of audio in games and I tend not to notice the difference between average audio and very good audio. Bioshock is one of those rare games with sub-standard audio, not in terms of quality but in terms of its use. Bioshock is an incredibly noisy game. Everything in it makes a sound and the volume levels are set in such a way that they screw with the positional audio cues; something as simple as reloading your gun can pull your attention to the left - when your gun and the enemy are both on your right. Nowhere are the volume levels worse than with the dialogue; especially the audio diaries and the radio comms. Frequently you'll turn a new corner, trigger the next bit of exposition and end up in frantic fight which blots out things you needed to hear. The inventory system is also gripe-worthy. You have an inventory but you can't view it, so you can't tell what ingredients you're holding (for the U-invent machines). When you loot things (like bodies, desks and bins) the loot might contain undesirable items along with desirable ones. Since there's no way to filter out the ones you want and there's no way of seeing how much of an ingredient you have, you end up always taking everything - just in case. By this reasoning looting really should be automatic. As an aside there's a 'search again' tonic that lets you optionally look harder in containers to find more stuff - the problem is, if you do 'search again' you lose the original stuff. Mechanically you know it's just done another dice-roll but from a realism point of view it makes no sense... I could pull it apart all day but now it's finished and really can move on to a better game.
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28th Jan 2010 - 13:02	DirectX SDK version mismatch.
A while back I had some problems with silent errors from the DirectX Effect creation functions. Specifically relating to effects pools. I thought I'd fixed the root of the problem at the time. I recently moved to the August 2009 SDK and my application started generating silent errors when run on my Vista test machine. What confused me is that installing the August 2009 redistributable package didn't work, but removing my effects pools did fix the problem. I can't have that though, because I need the effect pools. Further investigation showed that the redist does _not_ install the updated D3D compiler DLLs that you link against with the SDK - even though the cab files are in the install. To fix the problem, find the right cab file for your CPU and copy the D3DCompiler_42.dll to the Vista system and effect pools magically start working again.
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