28.9.2007 softwhat

Two posts in two years, then two in one day. Awesome.

I've been wanting to write stuff more and more recently. Thoughts on games, music, whatever. I could easily end up posting here a couple times a week, but the PHP I scripted back in '04 isn't up to the task: there's no archive capability, no tags, nothing like that. Basically, it needs work.

That sounds like effort! I am not a fan of effort, so do not be surprised if this site's running on Wordpress next time.

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28.9.2007 blogtronic

It's been nine months odd, right? Hey, that's as good a time as any for an update.

I'm now over two years into my career as an engine programmer at Frontier. Two years! Time flies when you're having fun, I guess. My first credited game came out last November - Thrillville, it was. The sequel's coming out at the end of this year, according to LucasArts' website. We've another game in the works, The Outsider. Looky!

And... that's all I can really say about my job without worrying about if I'd get told off for it. Those worries are largely unfounded, I'm sure, but we're a secretive lot in the games industry. We've got good reasons to keep things under wraps, I think!

On the music side of things, I'm getting an album together as a hobby project. I've been writing tracks for a decade or more, I think, but I only resolved to create an album for reals late last year. I did this because it'd force me to develop my skills and fix up my weaker areas. It's working: I've learnt so much about production and about structuring longer songs recently that I'm constantly on the verge of going back and rewriting all the material I've earmarked for the album. The downside of all this learning is that, every time I get closer to the goalposts, they turn out to be a little further away - learning how to make better tracks just shows me the problems with the ones I've already done. Still, I'm not redoing everything! It's already taking long enough.

Most of the tracks I have up publically are from early on in this effort, or before it. Still, here's an old one that I'm still very happy with:

look to sky.mp3

Dig it?

To start with I was worried the album wouldn't hit a barely respectable 40 minutes in length. So far, though, it's up to 55 minutes and going strong. Assuming I don't decide to expand some old track and that nothing new makes the tracklist, it's just a couple minutes of material away from some kind of completion. Eeee! In theory it might just need a quick bit of spit and polish. After that I'll have to figure out what to do with it, I guess. I'm largely doing it as an exercise, so I haven't really figured out what I'll do with the finished product.

Thus ends the telecast, probably consigned to the strange fate of posts on an inactive blog; a semi-permanent record of a moment in time long past and a vague indicator, if any, to the present. I'll try not to let it get there. Expect occasional music tracks and information on the album's progress. If nothing turns up, honoured visitor to this dusty, peaceful corner of the Web, why not email me and tell me to get on with it?

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18.1.2007 intercepted

Still here.

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16.8.2005 outer space

Frontier.

I've been a tools programmer here for a week so far. It's pretty cool. ^^

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22.7.2005 level up!

randomnine is entering the games industry!

Job hunting has led to a bunch of interviews. I've only finished the application process at one company and they've given me a job offer - yay them! I am holding out for other interviews, to get a sense of the industry and to give slower-responding developers a chance to convince me that they rock. It is entirely possible they will succeed, since all four of the companies I have applied to are world-class developers and can be counted amongst the best in the UK. It's a very exciting time.

I guess it'll mean even less regular news on this site than there has been so far. It's a great thing for me though - I'll be gaining all sorts of things that'll help me make my own games in the future, plus I'll be working on some kickass title you guys will hopefully get to see soon enough.

I'll be accepting some offer and relocating pretty soon. It'll be fun. :)

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7.6.2005 super combo!

I am done with university so I need to do that job hunting thing. It is hard but probably worthwhile!

In the meantime I have very little to do. I've just finished playing Metroid Prime through again - it's a staggeringly pretty game and the logbook entries really add a lot. It'd be nice if there were more than two species in the game that weren't instantly and actively hostile, though. Oh, and if the puzzles weren't limited to hunt-the-button and simple colour matching. It's still an incredibly solid and immersive game. I should probably pick up the sequel.

I don't really have time to mess about with Ogre and RakNet, though I'm still thinking of investigating them both individually. I'll probably do a few little games while I'm job hunting, waiting for replies and all that. And if that doesn't occupy enough time, course, Photoshop tells me there's always:

I kind of like the orange-and-binary motif.

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5.5.2005 back down forward punch

University stuff is slowly coming to a close. End of this month, it'll be over. From that point on I'll be looking for work, but while I'm doing so, I'm going to be working on CT2.

I'll be building it on the Ogre + ODE + RakNet platform. That means assembling the engine from parts to start with, but at a much higher level of granularity than DeadAir. The renderer and the netcode are already written, and so is the entity management. It just all needs to be linked together. It'll be fun to see how it goes.

Once I've made a start, course, I'll need to find art type people. Should be interesting trying that without a mod community to access...

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27.3.2005 teaser

Do you want it?

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17.1.2005 faltering spontaneity

I think that's everything, or as close as makes little difference.

Huzzah.

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16.1.2005 the people's glorious revolution

Well, that's some stuff up. I'll put more up tomorrow - I've got a lot of things still to go - and then i'll backdate things and so on so things are roughly accurate and projects that are long dead stay that way.

To do list: hcg, notjoust, birdy, LP, music, polyfighter, ODEtest, VRE, avikit, CT, turbo, sindesk and blur. Then sort out dates. And then I can delete the test project, bless it.

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16.1.2005 progress rocks

Bloody finally. For the first time since I started putting this site online I'm starting to get back in a productive groove, and one of the first things on my list was sorting this site out. It's still very much in progress, though now most of the PHP is done; the only remaining bit is automatically generating thumbnails of project images, which should be pretty quick once GD support gets compiled in. After that, I'm going to fill out the different projects. I've actually got a pretty large number of things I can put up, so I could be here a while. heh.

I'll be able to put up Geoline and DeadAir for the first time, thanks to the sheer webspace on here. I'm also liking the flexibility of this system, where projects are lists of files and images; it means I can put all kinds of things up, like photo albums and mp3 collections (my music, not other people's). I'll have to get busy.

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15.1.2005 TETSUOOOOO!

KANEDAAAAA!!

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2.12.2004 bass test

Just checking I can post links on this thing.

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2.12.2004 the inevitable return of

Why, hello there.

The Foundation, the Labs, Anger, Industry, wannabe hero and the previous Iteration... I guess I'll never settle on a website design for over a year while I have one. There's just always something different worth trying. This time, though, I've kept the name - it's come to mean something to me, in a way, so it can live for now.

My actual website, of course, I'm restructuring pretty fundamentally. It's going to be database driven, which is something I've avoided in the past. Now, though, I want a solid system I can throw lots of little projects into and have things look nice without redoing the HTML in notepad for every page. I've also decided to orient this website totally around my projects: what I'm working on right now, which will be available from this front page;what I've done that's in a state I'd be happy to show to employers, which will go in the portfolio page; and the abandoned, overly experimental or irrelevant, which will go in the wasteland page. I don't really know how this will work out as a system... have to wait and see, I guess.

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