I’ve been interested in Rage’s mega textures for a long time now. I’ve yet to play the game but I’ve found this PowerPoint presentation about its technology with awesome screenshots in it. It’s a pretty interesting read.

Today, I did some texture compression testing (among other things). I’m really happy with the scenes overall. They look awesome, at least to me; however, I’m trying to reduce the memory footprint of the scenes as they take quite a bit of memory.

Today’s non-game related highlights include a traffic ticket, a brief fight with water leaks because of a storm, and my cat Blue showing up with a swollen face that resembles a balloon, most probably because of an insect bite.

Oh, before I forget, I’ve also read this awesome article about the production of Metal Gear Solid 2 on Gamespot. Highly recommended. It made me feel a little bit better about the difficulties I’ve been experiencing lately.

After taking a long hard look at the current progress of the game, I decided to halt the development of trailer #2 for now. Because of all the fucked up shit that happened in the past two months I don’t really feel comfortable working on the trailer knowing that I’m behind schedule.

Trailer #2 had at least 10 times more shots than trailer #1. Plus, the scenes were a lot more complex containing vehicle dynamics, several fully rigged characters, particle simulations that contained millions of particles, cloth simulations, etc. In other words, trailer #2 represented a huge time investment. I hope to come back and finish it before the release of the game, not just for marketing purposes but also from the perspective of storytelling, but you never know. As I talked about it in this post, trailer #2 was supposed to cut down the amount of exposition in the game as I didn’t want to spoon feed the back-story through dialogue.

From now on my whole focus is on the game itself. Not on this site, not on the trailer, not on marketing, not on anything else, just on the game itself.

I’m back! Actually, today is the first day that I was able to sit in front of the computer. I relaxed over the weekend. Now it’s time to get tense again.

I’ll fill in the gaps between posts soon. I really enjoyed the timeout from the computer. I plan to do more 1-2 day vacations in the future.

On another note, I’m currently way behind schedule, so most of the day was spent on planning!

I’m on vacation.

I’m on vacation

I’m on vacation.

Besides doing some gardening, I just watched a lot of TV today. Good Wife is an awesome show, kudos to Ridley Scott. Love it. Watched 4 episodes back to back, I got 3 episodes left to watch to complete this season. After that, I was going to watch the remake of The Thing but just as I was preparing something to eat, I saw that there was another remake on TV. Fright Night. I loved the original and heard good things about this remake so I decided to give it a go. I had a blast watching the movie. They did their own thing with the original concept which is what every remake should do I think.

I feel that I need to take a vacation for 2-3 days. I feel kind of tired. During this time I plan to watch couple of movies and TV shows that I’ve been hoarding for the past year, tend to garden and plant the watermelon seeds that I bought.

Worked pretty much non-stop today.

Here’s a photo I took some time ago. The Moon was exceptionally bright that day.

I got a whole lot of boring stuff that needed to be done out of the way today.

Hopefully, I’ll have the whole day to devote to the game tomorrow. Nom nom nom.

Overall a great day.

First half of the day was spent on the road. What’s the travelling all about? Sorry, can’t share that info just yet. Hopefully, in 3-4 weeks.

The remainder of the day was spent on debugging the code of a php/mysql form generator (don’t ask!), catching up with emails and setting up some applications.

I don’t remember how I actually came across this one but here’s a great bit from Eddie Murphy on haunted houses. Priceless.

I’ve been reading Best Ghost Stories of J. S. LeFanu for some time now. I really like his stories because they take place in early 19th century, physiological in nature and most of all they have ghosts in them. Highly recommended, although I must admit they are a bit tame.

It’s kind of sad to see that all of the awesome ghost stories (or maybe even horror stories too) were written somewhere between 19th and the beginning of 20th century.

Today I found GOG and got lost in nostalgia. GOG is basically a DRM-free Steam for awesome games. I lost a couple of hours looking at the reviews and screenshots of the games I used to play 20 years ago. Absolutely fantastic site.

It seems the site opened 4 years ago so you can say that I joined the party pretty early. Anyway, better late than never. Now, I can finish Beneath a Steel Sky!

With no access to my workstation and game files, I had to find some stuff to work on during the past couple of days. One of the topics that I focused on during this time was Software installers.

My research showed that there are quite a few solutions for Windows and not-so-many for Mac. The number of installers that offer cross-platform support is considerably less. Quite a few of the cross-platform installers use Java, which I’m not a fan of, and require the presence of the Java VM. No Java VM equals no software installation. I’ve never liked Java so Java based installers are out.

Based on what I’ve read when it comes to installers, developers are advised to focus on native installers. Native installers meaning, installers created specifically for the native platform. So PC gets a PC installer, MAC gets a MAC installer and so on.

I found one such installer (actually the only one, I guess) called Bitrock Installbuilder. I was pretty impressed with it at first. Then I saw two things: 350 pages of documentation and a $2000 price tag. At that moment my interest levels took a nose dive.

I think, I’m going to make my own installer. It shouldn’t be too hard. I’m not doing anything fancy at the install stage at this moment and I don’t think I will do in the future so all the solutions on the market are probably overkill for my purposes.

It’s almost 2 a.m. here and I’ve just finished with the computers. I was going to talk in detail about the problems but it would just take too long to write everything and I don’t want to think about all this ever again. Here’s some stuff that has happened off the top of my head (in no particular order):

Two 1TB hard disks on the 8 core workstation died on the same day. Probably due to massive data transfer to my Unraid backup server. I was trying to salvage everything game related from those hard disks.

Another hard disk failed on the Unraid backup server. After hours of testing, I decided the hard disk was OK and the culprit was a faulty sata cable.

Yet another hard disk failure. This time a 2TB one. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to save anything from this one. Every file I tested was corrupted. I’m doing a checkdisk on it right now; it won’t be finished for 10 hours at least. There was no game related content on this one thank god.

At least 6-7 hours lost due to lack of proper screws (which required trips to town).

I went insane because of the screw locations on the motherboard (Supermicro X7DVA-8 have the weirdest screw locations ever. I was only able to match the CPU screws with the case.)

Couldn’t install Windows 7 on the Supermicro board because of some bizzare bios problem. Took me two hours to isolate the problem to bios. Bios update fixed the issue.

My new Asus Maximus IV board decided not to boot on my first try. It got me really worried. Took out all the RAM. Gave it a go. It worked. Then I incrementally put all the RAM back. Everything works OK now. Weird (still, knock on wood).

Plus a gazillion problems that I cannot remember right now.

I’m typing this post on my laptop because I haven’t installed any software on the new workstation (Maximus IV).

I find it really interesting that I didn’t go batshit crazy during these days. In the past, I’d have grabbed a hammer and smashed everything to bits. Maybe I’m getting more mature, who knows? The weather is fantastic so I think that played a huge part on my relative calm over recent days. It’s kinda hard to get really worked up when it’s warm and sunny outside. Birds singing their asses off helps too.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk a little bit about software installers.

I’ve slept for 12 hours straight. I’d have slept more if my goddamned new UPS had stopped beeping. It was beeping apparently because the electricity went out. I was just charging it. It wasn’t connected to anything. The sound pissed me off so much that I called the technical service a couple of hours later. The conversation went something like this:

Me: How do I turn the beeper on this thing off?
Tech Guy: It starts beeping when there is no electricity.
Me: The UPS sits next to my computer, I’m pretty aware when the electricity goes off. It doesn’t need to tell *me*. I can’t work because of the sound, it’s too loud and beeps non-stop. How do I turn it off?
Tech Guy: Hmm. You can’t turn it off.
Me: FFFUUUUCCCKKKKKKKKKKK!!

OK the last part didn’t happen but I wish it had. I hope the moron who designed this *feature* gets gangbanged by a dozen aliens.

I’m having a massive number of hardware problems these days. The last two have really been especially stressful. I’ll talk more about it in detail tomorrow.

I think this photo pretty much sums up my whole day (which was physically exhausting). Goodbye old friend.

In this post I’ve talked a bit about Mac system specs. Today I’ve revisited Steam’s hardware survey. It seems things haven’t changed one bit since then. Still, 50% of the Mac users have 256MB of VRAM. Honestly, not being a Mac person, I find it ridiculous. With the prices that they are charging for their computers, it makes absolutely no sense. It’s like they are developing all this fancy user interface stuff and put it on computers made with parts from 2005. 43% of the PC users on the other hand have 1GB of VRAM. Now that’s a number I can work with as a developer.

After some shopping around, I decided to go with an iMac. Almost 50% of the Mac users are using MacBookPros but I don’t want to deal with a laptop. I’m a desktop guy, so iMac it is. Plus, these state of the art iMacs contain AMD graphic cards with a whopping 512MB VRAM (sold here for $1500). In 2012! For twice the price of same (or most probably better) configuration of a PC.

Overall it was a pretty hectic weekend. I’ve ordered quite a few things online including a new lawnmower. The parts for my new PC arrived today. Turns out, I forgot to order a case! I ordered one immediately.

I couldn’t work on the game for even one second over the weekend unfortunately.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out how to install Windows 7 without a DVD drive. I’ve made a flash disk bootable and copied Windows 7 files to it. I’ll see whether I was successful or not tomorrow when I assemble the new PC. People say that it takes less than 15 minutes to install Windows 7 via flash disk due to almost non-existent file access times.

I’m still waiting for my server motherboard to arrive. Until then I won’t be able to access my files on my workstation. Since tomorrow is a holiday, it’ll probably arrive on Wednesday. Fingers crossed.

Updates tomorrow folks.

I’ve entertained some guests today. Pretty hectic day overall. We watched Mission Impossible 4. I thought it was a nice popcorn movie.

I haven’t read any horror books for the past couple of nights. I’m reading a business book called, The Lean Startup. I haven’t finished it yet (50 pages left), but let me tell you just this: it should be a required reading for anyone wanting to start their own business. Period. One of the best business and enterpreneurship books that I’ve ever read (and I’ve read quite a few). There are several case studies about software companies in the book and I think almost all of the concepts are directly transferrable to game development. I’ll talk more about the book in the coming days, until then, if you are interested, you could check out the book at Amazon.