Jansic's Blog

9th Nov 2009 - 13:24	Zii 8
We released our ZMS-08 system on a chip today. Please go and buy them, for I like beer.
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30th Oct 2009 - 13:19	7 and other stories
I fixed the car! Actually I fixed it about 2 months ago but couldn't be bothered to post. The cam-carrier resealing was quite simple (if not messy) and the FTO received a cambelt change and some new auxiliary belts in the process. It's been running fine since the work was done, now all I need to do is sort out the leaky differential seals. I also bought Windows 7. After many years of using unused, hand-me-down, bundled or MSDN freebie copies of the various OS revisions I've finally bought a proper copy of MS's latest offering. I started with a nice new hard disk and Windows 7 went on easily enough. Isolating and installing the appropriate applications was a chore but nothing was particularly difficult. The one real pain was rearranging my disk drives. Copying old data into the correct location on the new drives required passing through a temporary drive so that I could swap data over and resize some partitions in the process. All in, it took me took about three days to get my machine working how I like it. Now I can get back to doing some programming and other useful things.
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21st Sep 2009 - 13:21

Up-da-tea

Lots of stuff has been going on lately. Lots.

Car:

Most of the last two weeks the FTO has been in pieces. The rear cam carrier & camshaft oil seals have been leaking and this last weekend I finally managed to reassemble it all. Fitting the timing belt was far easier than last time and I was quite happy when the engine started that there were no obvious timing issues. However as with all things, you tend to rush the last few tasks and as it is the engine is warbling quite noticably. This probably means I've overtightened the cambelts or the camshaft journals and the tappets are probably a bit tight too. The annoying part here is that it's almost a complete disassembly to access the parts involved; something that'll have to wait another week.

Most annoying is that the heater matrix is leaking, again. I really don't see how because the unit is practically brand new; but it leaks quite profusely into the passenger footwell. Regardless of how it's been damaged, removal and replacement is a mammoth task. I've bypassed it for the moment with a bit of pipe and two jubilee clips in the engine bay but as the daytime temperature drops I'll need it fixed soon. I hope it doesn't need a new unit because originals are around £150 and this month has been rather expensive.

Also in the high-expenditure department; A-plan quoted me £660 insurance this year, up £30 on the previous year. I've now switched to Direct Line's fully comprehensive offering of £380 - the cheapest I've ever paid for insuring the FTO.

Games:

I completed Fallout 3; the ending was poor, so poor in fact that I have reloaded from a previous save and am now exploring the world. Fallout 3 babysits you to an ending, offers you the illusion of choice and then plays some mediocre black & white video for a few seconds before the credits roll. What happened to the open-ended world you got to roam around in at the completion of Oblivion and Morrowind?

Also in the news, NC-Soft are shutting down Dungeon Runners; the free-to-play (with micro-transactions) game with a miniature team of three developers apparently wasn't very profitable. Hot on the heels of Tabula Rasa, I'm wondering if this is to do with the market climate or just NC-Soft being mediocre.

In the better-games-department there's a new DotA map, 6.63, and I must say that the changes are not what I'd expect. The hero tweaks are very much for the tournament crowd and I'm bemused by their making the weak characters even weaker and the strong characters even stronger. Never mind, we shall see how this pans out next Wednesday.

Programming:

I've not had much chance or program lately but that I have done has been quite productive. I got DaK terrain rendering properly then after much frustration with OpenGL's state mechanism I've rewritten the core for DirectX 10, we'll see how this pans out. Overall I'm quite positive about how the coding is coming along and that's good.

Jans.

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24th Aug 2009 - 13:22	Lannage
Well that was entertaining. This last weekend's organised gaming finished yesterday evening and was possibly one of the better large-scale sessions we've had in a long while. All the usual suspects turned up including Sneeze and we managed to rattle through many computer games (some of them even entertaining) including Warcraft 3 - DoTA, BF1942, AvP2, Dawn of War (Dark Crusade) and a little UT2004. We also found time for a few board games. - Friday evening it was War on Terror, an mildly entertaining offering but our first play didn't really get the most from the mechanism, it could well be worth revisiting. - Saturday evening brought us Arkham Horror, a complicated game and with the high number of people present Matt offered to GM to speed up the play. We did win; although in part this was due to a little tweaking by the GM. - Finally our lazy Sunday was filled by Munchkin an easy fallback, it's a pity we didn't get time to play Zombies vs Humans though as there was plenty of time. There are some pics pending somewhere although they're probably only of interest to the people who were there. As an aside, today's xkcd is pretty good (and accurate). Jans.
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20th Aug 2009 - 15:04	Shameless Plug
If you're an OEM please buy a Zii Egg it's cool and it pays my wage.
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10th Aug 2009 - 12:54	Not Hair Brush
I bought a small modeler's airbrush for a project I'm working on but I couldn't help testing it out on something else... Using a little touch-up paint and some cellulose thinners I wielded it at the FTO to try and sort out the appalling state of the front bumper. While I've proved that airbrush works (the bumper even looks slightly better) I can say that they're definitely not designed for large-scale automotive work. Anyhow, now I need to find some suitable water-soluble colours for the next step.
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4th Aug 2009 - 22:43	Subemote
Note to self: Do not submerge after partial progress.
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29th Jul 2009 - 13:05	grawl
Just recently I've been having a bit of a mental meltdown; closely followed by a rewiring of my neurons and an extreme case of bizarre-brain... Amongst other things, this has culminated in me wanting to do a great many things. I have need to go out clubbing, a need to go out with friends and a need to realise a plethora of new and bizarre ideas that have recently popped into my head. First on the list is a night out a Electrocute in Reading on Friday. I've never been and it might be rubbish but you never know. Following on from that I'm going to return to do some modeling (as in for photography) initially filling some spaces in a friends portfolio and then some stuff for myself. Beyond this I'm unsure but it'll be nice to see where the road leads.
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29th Jul 2009 - 13:05	grawl
Just recently I've been having a bit of a mental meltdown; closely followed by a rewiring of my neurons and an extreme case of bizarre-brain... Amongst other things, this has culminated in me wanting to do a great many things. I have need to go out clubbing, a need to go out with friends and a need to realise a plethora of new and bizarre ideas that have recently popped into my head. First on the list is a night out a Electrocute in Reading on Friday. I've never been and it might be rubbish but you never know. Following on from that I'm going to return to do some modeling (as in for photography) initially filling some spaces in a friends portfolio and then some stuff for myself. Beyond this I'm unsure but it'll be nice to see where the road leads.
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18th May 2009 - 13:21	Deja vu
I've been doing quite a bit of work on my latest project - Dak - and its supporting libraries. I've now reached a point where I have enough infrastructure to create the game but the next set of tasks are all immediately dependent on something else. I've been here before. It happened with Cataclysm, it happened with Smog and to a lesser extent it happened with Mistral. I'm not entirely sure what causes it, though I suspect it's to do with number-of-components rather than project complexity - something that can only really be solved with either manpower or a linear development plan. Linear development (an approach similar to the waterfall model) doesn't work. It doesn't work in business and it doesn't work at home. The reason is that you cannot completely implement the precedents for the following stage because you can't fully describe each stage without implementing it i.e. design concerns aren't representative of implementation concerns; or put simply - flowcharts don't crash. I tried this approach with FLib 1. The requirements of the games I wanted to base on it were often so different from FLib 1's support for it that I'd have to back-track and rework the library. Increasing project manpower has the advantage that the individuals can focus more closely on the task at hand. This worked well with Sneeze while developing because I never really felt overwhelmed about other (not immediately relevant) aspects of the game. The problem with increasing manpower (as I've seen) is the dependencies: you can't force a dependency to complete when it blocks your development without leaving your current task; and no dependency seems to be more prominent than content generation. It gets me every time. With Dak, I have actually implemented the map editor first. It's not complete but it'll spit out terrain data that I can load in with little effort. Anyway, more soon, maybe even some screenshots.
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