14 Jun 2006, 17:15
This is too funny. If you are a fan of Psychonauts, you might want to send Microsoft [an email](mailto:backcomp@microsoft.com?subject=Please support my favourite game) expressing your preferences for backwards compatibility support on the 360, but I suggest you get a bit more creative than a straight cut & paste of Tim Schaeffer’s text. 🙂
Rumour has it that Criterion’s Burnout team offered their support to make their XBox game work on the emulator, and ended up releasing a native (and awesome) version instead.
Read more...
12 Jun 2006, 15:57
Programmers and programming teams should strive to use a reasonably well defined and consistent set of coding standards in their projects. These typically include rules for notation (use of case and special characters in identifiers, etc), style (layout of language elements within the source code), and idioms (specific usage of language features).
The benefits of a clear and useful coding standard are twofold: make the code easy to read and understand even in the absence of code inspection tools or previous knowledge, and encourage the creation of code whose performance and functionality are safe, predictable, verifiable and maintainable.
Read more...
09 Jun 2006, 01:46
This new spanish webmag just published their first issue, which includes an article by yours truly. Best of lucks to Bor and all the crew!
05 Jun 2006, 17:14
A History of Violence and Lord of War. It’s a great time to be a movie lover.
04 Jun 2006, 07:17
Over the past few years, I have devoted short chunks of time to reflect on what is my personal ideology. I suppose age is a natural motivator for this sort of process, but there have been other fuels burning that fire. Most notable among them is being accused of ideological relativism; of offering explanations to phenomena rather than solutions to problems; of flagging any subject on which I don’t have a strong position as being too unfocused to be worthy of an position; of using tolerance as an excuse for avoiding a clear standing on subjects in which I am actually not confident, or more to the point, knowledgeable.
Read more...
21 May 2006, 17:24
The MiniMicrosoft blog has been a very popular place for Microsofties to anonymously bring up and discuss the issues that plague their company. For those of us not in the loop, the blog might be just a PR stunt by the company’s HR department, or maybe it’s exactly what it says and has somehow managed to avoid being bombed by Microsoft’s policy-enforcement teams. I don’t know. But they are pounding their chest a lot on the recent announcements by MS executives regarding certain HR practices.
Read more...
13 May 2006, 02:11
While all our attention was focused on the bells and whistles of E3, bad things were happening back in Viena. My condolences to the over 100 guys and gals who are now looking for another job. Special best wishes to ex-democoder fellow and great dude Erik Pojar. It’s eerie that this news comes a week after Take 2 decided to close their Salt Lake City studio Indie Built, and just a few days after they announced the opening of a new studio in Shangai.
Read more...
08 May 2006, 16:01
Inspired by the 48-hour game compo and Jari Komppa’s excellent And The Sky Is Full Of Stars, I sat down and wrote a little minigame, unimaginatively named SpacePaint. Source code included so you can have a laugh. It served as a nice learning tool for the most basic OpenGL, which I had actually never used before (go figure).
Even though the difficulty is not properly balanced, I’m quite happy about the way this strange gameplay concept worked out.
Read more...
04 May 2006, 14:52
From EA’s press release: “At E3, EA will debut of Orcs & Elves, id Software’s first original intellectual property since Quake”
Orcs & Elves are original. Woooohoooo! 🙂
01 May 2006, 17:43
The GameSetWatch people continue to be a great source of interesting reads. This time it’s about the process of creating the XBox 360.
One excerpt surprised me: “Microsoft’s brass was worried that Sony would trump the Xbox 360 by coming out with more memory in the PlayStation 3. So in the spring of 2005, Microsoft made what would become a fateful decision. It decided to double the amount of memory in the box, from 256 megabytes to 512.
Read more...