Up-da-tea

21st Sep 2009 - 13:21

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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