The snow started pouring down at 9am.
BSP
This weekend I plan on creating a [BSP file]. BSP files are commonly used for map arenas in games like Quake and Unreal Tournament.
VS 2005 SP1
Microsoft just released service packs #1 for [express] and [TSE] for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.
Microsoft also released a new [DirectX for February 2007].
City of Villains
Tim and Linae have been playing a little of the game "City of Villains".
This is Tim’s Villain, a Matermind named Dread Command:
Snow Day
“Alright!” I took of a video with the camera while sledding the big hill. Watch [the video].
It was a bit of a technical feat to make this video. The camera records a MOV file. So I imported into QuickTime and exported as a AVI. I used Windows Movie Maker to put all the AVI videos together into a single video and output as a WMV file. I used the Divx Converter to convert from the WMV format to a DIVX file. And then I used Flash 8 to convert from a DIVX to a Flash FLV file that plays in the Flash movie.
Games of 2007
Early previews indicate the top games of 2007 will be [Bio Shock], [Crysis] and [Portal].
Wind Storm
We had a nice storm Thursday which knocked out power to one million people. Unfortunately, this outage also took my Comcast High Speed Internet connection with it. And there’s been so much news that I missed in such a short while.
- Top news: Microsoft posted the December 2006 DirectX update which includes a peak at [DirectX 10].
- Microsoft is hosting an XBox Live Arcade [programming contest].
- If you want to compete in the contest, it would be handy to have an XBox Live Arcade compiler. You may find the [Express XBLA compiler] that Microsoft just released useful.
- If you don’t know how to program the console that is ok too. Microsoft just released about how to program the XNA.
- Microsoft released their [Robotics Studio]. Robotics Studio gives the programmer a handy library to do embedded system programming.
Usually people harp on Microsoft, but this week we can see some good news.
Sector13 [Hardware Occlusion Queries (HOQ)]
This week I’m working on stars and the lens flare effect that is seen when looking at a bright light with a camera. When drawing the star billboard I plan on doing a hardware occlusion query to adjust the intensity of the lens flares. The exact opacity of the flare elements will be based on how many star pixels are shown.
Snow vs Snow Plow
An evil snow plow came by earlier today and dropped sand. The local kids were not impressed.
30 minutes later, more snow covered the freshly dropped sand making the road good for sledding again.
Even with sand, [people still have problems getting up even the smallest of hills].
In the interest of having fun, [Linae and I sled down the steepest hill on our road.]
Truck Load of Snow
What do you suppose a truck load of snow is going for on Craig’s List?
[Video of the road all iced over] and [Check a video of the big hill]
More Snow
It’s been snowing two days straight. And now it’s starting to pile up!
[Snow Around the House Video]
Winter Begins
It’s been cold out, but today Winter officially begins now that the snow has arrived.
Portfolio Gallery
I had registered the domain name: [TGraupmann] a while back to host my portfolio and to do some website experiments. I decided to experiment with [SimpleViewer].
SimpleViewer takes an XML gallery file, so I wrote a handy Perl script to auto generate the gallery file:
#perl print '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "n"; print '<simpleviewerGallery maxImageWidth="4096" maxImageHeight="4096" textColor="0xFFFFFF" frameColor="0xffffff" frameWidth="20" stagePadding="40" thumbnailColumns="3" thumbnailRows="3" navPosition="left" title="SimpleViewer Title" enableRightClickOpen="true" backgroundImagePath="" imagePath="" thumbPath="">' . "n"; while (<images/*.jpg>) { $_ =~ s/images///; print ' <image>' . "n"; print ' <filename>' . $_ . '</filename>' . "n"; print ' <caption>' . $_ . '</caption>' . "n"; print ' </image>' . "n"; } print '</simpleviewerGallery>' . "n";
Sector13 [Screenshot]
The arena design is coming together nicely. Lighting is working. The planet has some nice geometry while using a billboarding technique to produce the atmospheric glow. Asteroid materials now use LOD levels.
Sector13 [Screenshot]
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with procedural asteroid fields along with lights and shadows.
Bots and Spam
I killed about 3000 spam comments on my stories with a single SQL statement. Beware any spammer from considering spamming me again.
delete FROM `gl_comments` WHERE 1
delete FROM `gl_storysubmission` WHERE 1
UPDATE `gl_stories` SET comments = 0 WHERE 1
DELETE FROM `gl_users` WHERE uid > 50
Also disabling comments worked wonders.
Fires in Arlington
We were at Grandma Dinwiddie’s 90th birthday in Arlington when the hill over yonder went up in flames in couple minutes. Lots of fires this season and I didn’t see any lighting.
Evergreen State Fair
This is footage taken from the Evergreen State Fair hosted in Monroe, Washington on the night of August 26th, 2006. Viewer disgression is advised. More bugs than you could possibly imagine.
Linae and I had a good time doing the scavenger hunt that we picked up at the gate. We found all the items except for two that were closed.
Penny Arcade Expo
We went to the [Penny Arcade Expo] last night. Strange setup at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA. The event had a $20 one day admission fee. The event filled all three levels of the Meydenbauer. We got a bag of free stuff walking thru the door. The event had bean bags everywhere. Every bean bag had a kid on it playing on Nintendo DS lites. Most of the DS handsets where white. We saw a few teal imports. They had a few panels going, we saw a show on Women in the Game industry. Most of the rooms had consoles going. A lot of people playing Street Fighter and Guitar Hero. One dedicated guy in the courner was playing Geo Wars. They used the big room to play the movie [The Wizard]. Next door they were setting up the exhibits for the Expo for Saturday and Sunday. We snuck in and saw all the exhibits while they were setting up minus the rush of people.
We saw one new style of game called [Eets].
ZBrush
Windows Presentation Foundation
[WPF] is Microsoft’s latest challenge to be equivalent to Flash.
To be able write and install WPF websites and apps you need to install:
(now called [Microsoft Windows SDK])
After installing all that you’ll be able to experiment with:
Here is an excellent that does a good overview of the WPF feature set.
Here are some tools to ease your WPF development:
Gimp Sparks Brush
The Sparks Brush is one feature of The Gimp that makes Gimp better than Photoshop.
ZBrush
It’s been a while since I last experimented with ZBrush.
Old Pipeline Road
Beware
Local small animals and birds look out! Tiggy is on the prowl.