in no way obtainable within our life time.

That would be my cousin speaking. He says we should drill domestic oil, pull out of middle eastern affairs, and stop spending insane amounts of money on alternative research.

…

Here’s what I have to say to you, Bob:

MUUHUHAHAHHAHA

248 horsepower electric motor, two-speed manual transmision, 0-60 mph in 4 seconds! Max speed of… well, illegal.

Equivalent of 135 miles per gallon.

And it plugs into your wall socket.

Let’s not bullshit. Electric cars are damn sexy.

Proving, yet again, that he doesn’t need a record label to make and distribute music, Trent Reznor has released a FREE album on his site. It comes in mp3, m4a, flac, and various other flavors and he even uses torrent distribution. This guy understands it.

He’s going places (beyond even where he’s been).

This is the future of the internet. The music should be free! If you want a hardcopy, you have to pay for it. That’s how it works; but, for a digital copy? Free.

The man can make his money other ways. I mean, this is a great way to introduce new people to NiN.

“Hey, ____, check out this album.”

“I can’t afford to buy an album right now off iTunes. My parents cut my credit card in half.”

“No, no, no. It’s FREE! You can download it right from their site!”

“No way!”

“Yes way!’

“Dude!”

“Dude!”

Download now from www.nin.com.

~ Andrew

Researchers teach ‘Second Life’ avatar to think

What is the world coming to when a serious school like Rensselaer decides to play around in Second Life? I guess there are benefits, as stated in the article, to working in a persistent world with real individuals. The fact that it is a rigid world with specific stimuli and expectations means it’s easier to develop for, of course.

Regardless, it’s still Second Life. Second Life isn’t… particularly… wonderful.

Then again, I guess it does provide the user base they require for a test of this kind. It means that they don’t have to have a whole bunch of people know they’re being used as guinea pigs in an AI experiment sitting in a stark room in front of a screen.

Oh, and the whole thing about the “holodeck” (see bottom of article) is ridiculous and horribly awesome.

So, I have a total of 3 computers I use:

• Desktop: AMD 64 X2 4600+, 2 gigs of ram, ~500 gigs of storage, Asus NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT, Creative Audigy something or other, 5.1 surround speakers, two 20 inch Samsung SyncMaster 204B’s
• Laptop: HP NW8240
• Laptop: HW tx1000

The tx1000 runs Vista. So does my desktop (ouch). Anyway, I decided it was time for the tx to dual boot Ubuntu. I’ve spent a good portion of my day getting little things to work.

One little thing:

Windows Boot Manager decided to be the guy to handle boot order and selection. That made life a little interesting. I didn’t notice it and was going, “Why won’t Grub load up Ubuntu first?!?!?” then I realized it didn’t look like Grub and that Windows Boot Manager was at the top.

So, I had to go into Vista, run cmd, then run BCDedit. I had to look at it and change the displayorder. Then I changed the default.

And, well… I think I broke something.

*Grumble*

I’ll have to keep hack, hack, hacking away until these OS’s play nice.

~ Andrew

Hey, stop distracting me from my writing!

I guess this is writing, too, right? It’s a warm up. Yeah. That works.

So, what I forgot: I GOT A SUMMER INTERNSHIP WITH ELECTRONIC ARTS.

Not only did I get a summer internship with one of the SICKEST companies in the WORLD; but, it’s also with their Los Angeles studio!

That’s right. I get to go back to LA for three months of caffeine driven code inspiration! I have no clue what I’ll be doing. I probably won’t be able to post about it.

Just thought you’d all like to know.

Best,

~ Andrew

Okay, I bit the bullet. I just bought 3 years of hosting with DreamHost.com. I also registered and deployed Embrace The Myth, a collaborative site for my side projects through my LLC, Mythos Studios.

DreamHost provides SSH access and a slew of other lovely features (including 500 gigs of storage and growth of storage over time, which is ridiculous). It’s just… lovely. It really warms of the cockles of my heart.

That being said, I spent a little bit of time considering what software to run to facilitate collaboration. I decided on:

• Mantis - Mantis is for bug tracking. Essentially, it’s a ticket system that allows a user to describe the problem, the file it’s located in, and it can be assigned to someone to reproduce, fix, etc. Project-wise, it’s pretty modularized (just like you should be coding!). So, ours is broken down in specifics of the engine/design.
• Subversion - If you’re not using versioning on multi-user projects, what are you smoking? It’s even immensely useful for small, single-developer projects! Ever delete a file and suddenly go, “Crap… I totally shouldn’t have done that.” Or, work on a laptop and a PC? Ever copied and replaced a newer version with an older? Well, that’s why you should run some sort of versioning! It’s better than that. Wiki or something for more information; but, being able to branch and merge is ungodly useful.
• MediaWiki - We need to keep documentation, have an organized method of displaying information, and allow easy modification. So, Wiki is wonderful for this. I modified the PHP in ours so that non-project users can’t see any pages or even create an account. Basically, our Wiki is private.
• dotProject - Managing a collaborative effort with developers and asset creators from all over the globe can be a daunting task. The challenges of breaking down work and assigning it are mind-numbing. So, to help me battle the forces of discord, I enlisted the aid of dotProject, an open-source PHP-based project management application. It’s pretty sexy.

What really disappoints me: SUBVERSION AND MANTIS DON’T PLAY WELL OUT OF THE BOX. What? You’d think that Mantis would be tailored out of the box to communicate with popular repository versioning software, right? I mean, it’s supposed to interact with a code base and most pro ones utilize some sort of version control. Well, you’d be wrong. I was wrong.

Luckily, I found some sexy shell scripts (SEE, SSH IS IMPORTANT) that I used to help them play a little bit better. It’s not everything I want; but, it’s something.

Seriously, I expected much better out-of-box integration. Mantis, fix it. I don’t want to hear about your complaints. Just fix it. While you’re at it, clean up your user manual. It’s a little lacking in certain areas, if you know what I mean.

So, this domain is still hosted on GoDaddy, for the time being. My account subscription ends in 03/09 or something. So, I’ll let it run its course then switch it over to my lovely DreamHost account.

Anyway, enough babbling. I have a novel that needs writing and it won’t write itself.

Maybe I’ll write up some tech babble from it later. Time will tell.

~ Andrew

A robot that can… follow… trained… tasks?

Okay, it’s using “learning” algorithms (which have been around for a while, there are some SIGGRAPH whites on it); but, really? I mean? All you need to do is record where the arm is being moved, how it’s being moved, etc. in 3D space and then play it back.

It’s not learning. It’s a macro.

… Where’s the impressive factor?

So, I’ve spent the past days of the week staying up until 4 or 5 am coding, testing, and sketching.

I can be paranoid (maybe… maybe I’m just a realist?). So, I decided to do my own versions of all the art that people had promised to get me. That, plus coding, plus homework, plus working on gameplay and directing the sound engineer all pushed my nights into the wee hours.

That means I can’t sleep now, when I have nothing to do.

That’s why I’m writing, instead.

Splash! has been uploaded in its final version to the Imagine Cup 2008 website!

That’s right, after months and months of meetings, code writing, and content creation we have finally finished our project! It’s wonderful! It’s splendid! It’s, it’s!!!!! I’m done. I couldn’t care if we win, we did a damn good job. That’s all that matters to me.

We made a game that I thoroughly enjoy and that I hope others will enjoy. It’s a product of our toil and I’m proud to say that I worked on it.

You can find it at John’s personal site. It’s an MSI file. It should work; but, the installer doesn’t seem to like all setups. If it is finicky, install .NET framework and the XNA framework on your own and then cross your fingers.

Oh, so, those artists? Yeah, none of them actually created anything. We ended up using my art! Good thing I had plenty of time (who needs to study for finals, anyway?) to sit in front of my computer listening to grumpy music (Assassins and Sweeney Todd… and Megadeth) with my Wacom table.

Regardless, it was all a wonderful experience.

In other news:

I just accepted an internship with EA’s LA branch!! That’s right, I’ll be making real video games over the summer! I can’t wait!

Here’s the skinny: My primary artist just informed me that he’s not going to be able to finish any of the art he promised us. Why? because he has too much work for school.

What was he responsible for?

• New menu buttons
• New interface for the game
• Windmill animations
• New fish
• Misc. animal art
• New factories

The signs had started to show that he wasn’t going to make good on his obligations to my team. He hasn’t sent an iteration of anything for our review in several weeks.

What steps I’ve already taken:

• Last week, I asked one of my friends if she could do some art we’d been planning to initially give to our primary artist. I gave her a Wednesday deadline. If she finishes early, I’m going to farm out some more art to her.
• Last night, when I got the news from our main artist, I asked a different friend if she could pick up some of the art. She, however, has a tight schedule; but, she said she’ll help me in my search for another artist to take up slack.

On the programming side, we still have work to do. John needs to finish some specialFX, Cam has gameplay code to write, and I have the map editor to finish (which has made a ton of headway and now is insanely fun to play around with).

I’m also coordinating with Will, our esteemed composer. He’s doing a great job. Still, I need to touch base with him and ensure the product is ready for our Thursday “UBER TEST.”

What is this Uber Test? Well, we’re going to get as many people as we can (probably 30+) to play the game and do last minute bug testing and whatnot. I’d like to start this process on Wednesday, of course. So, we’ll see what’ll happen.

All of the code was unit tested significantly; so, there really shouldn’t be too many problems. I already know where the majority of the “bugs” (not really bugs, just broken things) are in the level editor. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to fix all 2 of them. Then, there are a few features I’d like to add and finish adding.

Regardless, we’ve hit “CRUNCH TIME.” We’ll just have to minimize it as much as possible while maximizing our output.

Hey, if you’re a good 2D artist Send an e-mail my way!

First: Happy Orthodox Easter!

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way:

I’ll post the results of the US Finals in the category of Game Design. I should’ve posted this sooner, but being away in LA during classes tends to make work pile up. Regardless, here they are now:

In First Place: Ecocism! (I called it!) Their game was the most original and fun to play. So, the two students from Washington DC will be splitting a $5,000 check and have their game on display at PAX! Awesome!

Second Place: Latrop. No surprise. Their game was actually finished and complete. Of course, in my opinion, it’s also frustrating and not rewarding enough. It’s alright in co-op mode.

Third Place: Clean the World. Well, this was expected. Their game is incomplete and gameplay is virtually non-existent. It’s just not a worthy game yet.

Anyway, I have to see a man about roasting a lamb.

I’ll post soon on Splash! development!