Happy New Year

The first set of games I ever played was a bunch of burnt DOS games on an old CD that my father got me for Christmas when I was 6 years old. It was a disk from Apogee. I got lots of games. I'm trying to construct this list from memory, so I'm not guaranteeing its 100% correct, but I believe the games were:

1) Duke Nukem 1 (second game I ever beat)
2) Duke Nukem 2 (first game I ever beat)
3) Duke Nukem 3D (a game I have yet to beat)
4) Realms of Chaos
5) Raptor : Call Of The Shadows
6) Rise of the Triad

There's one I can't remember. Oh well.

So, where does this come in? Well its, nothing but a bit of reminiscing, and thinking about how things were different back then. How I used to be so scared of the pigcops in Duke Nukem 3D that I was afraid to go past the second level in Episode One or play anything else. Also thinking about how Duke taught me how to be a good, gentlemanly citizen - "Aaah, much better...*flush*" :).

So anyway, next year is going to be packed. I have CXC exams, so this blog will have significantly less postings. Oh well, gotta live it up while it lasts, you know?

Speaking of Duke, all you Duke lovers might like this video. Start the new year laughing. It'll be a barrel of laughs *shotgun cocks* :).



THAT WAS HILARIOUS.

Anyway, I'm staying up until the new year comes around so I can make my super-secret-ultra-cool-pimpriffic new year's resolution. What is it?

I can't tell you, or else it wouldn't be a secret now, would it?

What sucks is that I only have 8 free days after the New Year starts, because I have to go back to school on the 9th of January. Oh well, welcome to The Suck.

Happy New Year Everyone!

P.S. If anyone can find the full version of any of the above games, I would really appreciate it if you could get it to me one way or the other. That would be so cool.
Remember you can add me at www.myspace.com/gavin468.

Crank Dis And Nilwinds....

Just in case you're wondering, the second part of the title of this post is not what it sounds like when a pirate tries to pronounce my name. Actually, its the name of a new project of mine. Those of you who know me are probably thinking, "Great, another incomplete project." Actually not this time.

Why?

Because the resources will be as easy to obtain. I was planning to do a traditional 2D style Final Fantasy-ish RPG. Therefore for the graphics, I can use RPGMaker graphic charsets, which can be created at this site. All I need to do is the following:

1)Create a Map Editor and a map file format
2)Link a scripting language(preferably GameMonkey, to keep it simple).
3)Create the main game executable.
4)Rinse, wash and repeat.

Some of you may be wondering what the story will be like, as an RPG is nothing without a story. I won't reveal any details here, but I will tell you its based off a short story I wrote a while back(that no one has ever seen, or ever will see, or that will see not the light of day).

Anyway, moving on to topics that normal people can understand. I found the video below on youtube. Did you know that they have a whole youtube group dedicated to Crank Dat videos? Nah, neither did I.



That was hilarious though.

I go back to school on like the 8th or so of January, so I'm gonna live it up while I have my freedom. That means I'm going to play as many video games as possible!! I'm gonna play until my frontal lobe shrinks to the size of a peanut!!!

By the way, remember to add me on myspace at www.myspace.com/gavin468.

Merry Christmas everyone! Don't drink too much eggnog or you might explode!

Its High Voltage, You Can't Shake The Shock!

Lately, I've been catching up on my listening. That means I've been on youtube and Ares constantly, watching and downloading videos and songs from Talib Kweli, Nas, Linkin Park, Daddy Yankee and Saosin. I'm probably deaf as I write this, as my little brother is watching TV right beside me and I can't hear a thing.



In game related news, I beat Quake 4. Great.

Now what do I have to live for?!! Well, there is still Quake 3 Arena which I have not beaten in nightmare mode *yet*. Christmas is still 4 days away, and I hope someone will have the good sense to give me some games or I'll have to get them the good 'ol fashioned way:



software piracy. Just kidding. I don't really pirate software,(I mean, who pirates Blender...) but like everyone else I download music.

In other, nerd related news, I successfully started a partially heated argument on the gamedev.net forums about LU decomposition(hell if I know what that is, sounds cool though). You can find it here.

By the way, I'm on MySpace. Add me. My page is at www.myspace.com/gavin468.

Merry Christmas, suckaz!

Friends, Power, Sex and Halo

After reading that title, you're probably thinking, what the hell ?! Well, I needed a catchy title,so I decided to used it to appeal to all the bleeding hearts, megalomaniacs, nymphomaniacs and halophiles. Lets start in order of importance. That means Halo. I'm getting Halo 3, I'm getting Halo 3, la-la-la-la-la-la-la. Seriously. Also, a friend of mine is getting better in Halo. He actually almost beat me when we were playing with guns. I beat him, 25-14 when we were playing with swords alone though.

For the hell of it, I'll just skip sex. "But wait," you say,"skip sex?!!! Is this guy retarded?" No seriously, there are more pressing issues. Earlier, I used the word megalomaniac. That means a pathological egotist.

In English now. That means a power hungry nutjob. Have you ever thought about strategy games nowadays? Basically, in my opinion, they're helping to raise armchair generals, who believe that soldiers are expendable. Think about it. This is more pronounced in futuristic RTS games (think Starcraft, how many Terran marines did we waste?).
Before anybody decides to email me, I should just say I'm not knocking RTS games. I'm an avid RTS gamer. In fact FPS, RTS and RPG games are my favourite genres. I'm just saying that RTS games nowadays seem to encourage throwing out hordes of units to kill your enemies, rather than carefully using a small group of units to destabilize your enemy.Ranting done. Proceed, soldier... the Rear Admiral waits.

While we're on the topic of Warcraft by the way, look at this. Its a video of Warcraft 3 being played on a touch screen.



This was developed by Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, whose website can be found here(click me bitch!).

Okay, now how do friends come in?

Well, for this post, I decided to focus on one friend, whose birthday is tomorrow, the 20th of December. Sadly, she's sick. I hope she recovers by tomorrow. She's really a nice person, once you get past the quirkiness and the annoyingness and the randomness and the ... . Anyway, I'm just kidding. She's a good friend. She really easygoing and has what I call natural crack, she's always energetic.

So Cammy, I'll let the image do the speaking since a picture is worth a thousand words.



Ummm, oops lol. Just kidding. You know science could never replace you

Here ya go sport:



Love ya(like a sis)!


Tata for now people!!!

So far, so good

Well so far, the holidays seem okay. I've been doing nothing but playing games, working on LunaLib and going out. Most nights, I go to my bed after 1 am and usually I wake up at 7 am.
LunaLib is giving me HELL!!!! Its not impossible, its just taking forever. It is very mind numbing to sit down typing out 4 by 4 matrix multiplication, just to realize that your ordering scheme for matrices is wrong so you have to start over. Collision detection is giving me hell. So far, I've only really managed to implement point in polygon tests. I'm really too lazy to implement line in polygon tests right now. I'm AFRAID to start ellipsoid collision detection.

Anyway, nerd stuff aside. I have almost a full month of holidays left. I really should go to the beach, but I'm afraid of water. And sand. And the sun. And other people. Oh well, such is life. I've decided to end this post with some intellectually stimulating quotes that I got from here as well as your recommended dosage of Happy Tree Friends.




"Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway." - Unknown
"Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling." - Unknown
"Energizer Bunny arrested, charged with battery." - Unknown
"One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures." -George W. Bush
"Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the world together." - Unknown

Sayonara.

Blender, Physics Engines, Holidays and Quake 4

Today, after playing Quake 4, I went on MSN messenger to talk to some friends of mine. Out of the blue, one of them suggested I should make a quake 4 mod. Fine. I started messing around with the Quake4 editor, and to my surprise, it was amazingly easy and intuitive. Another plus was that the scripting language resembled C, so I was right at home. After messing around with it for a few hours, I got bored, and decided to move on. I wasn't in the mood to work on my game engine, but I felt like improving my artistic skills, so I started working on the Blender Noob to Pro lessons and then messed around with MakeHuman. As I write this, I'm working on the modeling a die part in the beginner section of the Blender lessons.
So whats the point of all this information? Well, between all 3 programs, they have one thing in common. All of them have cleverly designed user interfaces, which gives me a great idea of what proper GUIs look like. What I've learnt will be put to good use, in the map editor for my game engine.For example:
1) I will do my best to make the whole thing Linux compatible.
2) Everything will be rendered in openGL(thus, it will use GLUT).
3) It will use a grid like the Quake 4 editor, with measurements shown.

Nerd stuff aside, in other news, today I went to my prize giving ceremony. I came second and got a book and a bunch of certificates.(Whoopdedooo!! <_<) I came second in my class. I don't mind this, because the guy that beat me has only 50% of his teeth, so he doesn't count. It was only a 1% difference.




Anyway, jokes aside(well, maybe not), today marks the official start of my Christmas holidays.

Here's another funny picture:



Bye People!!

Friday

Well its finally the end of the week, meaning its time to relax and play Doom 3. This week was hell. I had to rush a Biology project on Wednesday and Thursday night, but hey, it turned out pretty decent so HA! I haven't made any progress on my previous suggestion, instead I decided to delay that for a while and create a game engine for my personal use, using the knowledge I have gathered over the years.I want to write my own physics engine and use openAL and openGL. I also got a new graphics card. Its a halfway decent Chaintech Nvidia GeForce FX 5200, 256 MB 128 bit card. If it really works as well and has half the features it claims it does on the back of the box, then I'm set for the next 2.5 years. So I'm in a pretty good mood. I'll set up the card tomorrow.

Tata,
Gavin

Another Post

Well, I'm still fairly new to blogging, but I figured I should talk about C++(since I have nothing else to write).

*sigh*

C++ is a programming language. Nuff said.

Okay, I'll try and be more specific than that. C++ is an object oriented, general purpose programming language created by Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup in the early 1980s at Bell Labs. It supports features such as operator overloading, preprocessors, templates, encapsulation and inheritance.

So how does all of this mean remotely anything a man addicted to Pepsi?

Well, as an ardent follower of video games, I should point out that C++ is general purpose, for all the right reasons. C++ can be used to program everything, from operating systems to video games.(I really learnt it for the second reason).

Well, all that aside, Christmas is coming up really fast. I actually hope that this holiday drags along, as when I return to the loop in January, its gonna be nothing but work and sex. Ermm, well mostly work.

This Christmas, I plan to visit friends and family and brush up on my C++, and actually start a useful project. My idea was a COM control to replace Flash.

We all know Flash is good for 2d stuff, and 3d can be faked, but Shockwave is sorta slow and not used much. My idea was to create a COM control based off the Irrlicht Engine(http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net) and openAL. This allows graphics and audio to execute as a control inside a webpage. I was planning to use Python as a scripting language to control all this. I haven't come up with a name yet though, so for now I'll call it Cerberus. Imagine:


Oh well. Oh yeah, Lunatek is the name of my company. It currently has 3 employees. We mostly work on ...nothing. Oh well.

Pepsi calls, ADD is at my door.

Hahaha. I'm on Blogger

Well I'm finally on Blogger. After a lot of personal introspection and drinking I've decided that this would be a good choice. Do you wanna know more about me?

If so, come back later.

Well, nah, just read my profile.