random

There are 15 posts filed in random (this is page 2 of 2).

random thoughts on the last thing I did

Easy Does It either took two months or one to complete, depending on whether you count the time spent thumb-twiddling, waiting for an idea to take root. All I knew at the start was that it would take place in a cave (which was ultimately translated to “an underground ruin”). If you trawl through my blog archives you’ll also find a load of posts concerning googly-eyed NPCs called “paddlers” that never made it into the game. (Not this one, at least.) Some ideas take. Some don’t. I never know which is which until it’s all over.

Every time I had an idea, I drew up a design document for it. I found these useful, not as requirements or contracts, but as arguments. Poor arguments tended to vanish.

I wish I’d started writing the script earlier. I left it for the last week of development, and wound up with a set of one-liners that start repeating early on. Does it matter to the game? Possibly. If I’d started earlier, I could have given each ghost a history and a story to tell, or at least something original to say.

Originally, the game ended in one of three ways. You accumulated enough will to leave the ruins on your own, or enough luck to find some powerful artifact that Easy had missed, or enough money to set yourself up for a while. On the last day of development, I decided this didn’t really work for me, because it didn’t address Easy, and it seemed so oddly triumphant for a game that’s all about the little people of the RPG world. So, that’s why the ending is what it is.

I love my brick

Had a bit of an oh, shit moment late last night. I’ve been having problems with my PC not coming out of sleep mode properly. My motherboard, an Asus M2A-VM, seemed to be the culprit, so I decided to upgrade its BIOS.

Yeah, that’s usually the beginning of a good oh, shit PC story.

The upgrade process bricked my PC. No display, no drive activity, not one single, solitary beep from the POST. I had to have done something wrong. More to the point, I had to undo it.

Now, modern Asus motherboards have this “crash-free” BIOS thing where you’re allowed a do-over after a failed upgrade. Put a known good BIOS image on a drive and boot the PC, and some lingering ghost of sanity on the motherboard will pull it down and re-flash the BIOS. I found a new image on the Internet, as it wasn’t on the recovery disk where it was supposed to be.

I haven’t had a floppy drive in almost a decade, but I tried putting the image on a USB drive, which didn’t do anything, then burning it to a DVD, which also did nothing. A light came on the DVD, but that was all.

Frantic, I scoured the Internet for answers, and came across a HardOCP thread I can’t link to because it was on another PC and it was late and I’ve forgotten how the hell I found the thread in the first place. But the gist of the thread was, if you’re upgrading an Asus motherboard and it fails, try pulling out the memory and replacing it with one single stick.

What the hell? I had nothing to lose except more sleep. I yanked out all the RAM, put in a single 512MB stick, and it fucking started right up.

I’m fuzzy on the details, but it has to do with memory voltages, which are settable on Asus motherboards. Most BIOSes default this to Auto, which is fine until an upgrade changes what the default voltage actually is. To support four sticks of RAM, I had to lock it to 2.1V instead of whatever low-ass default the upgraded BIOS thought it should be. What I found funny was that the upgrade didn’t actually fail, it succeeded, and that was the problem. If it had failed, it probably would have been easier to diagnose and fix.

So, that’s what I did last night instead of sleeping. Still, it could have been worse.

Did I ever mention how much I love the Internet?

the great twenty-four hour thing

 I was just watching one of those videos where a game development team has to develop a game in 24 hours. It got me thinking, wow, I wonder if I could do that. Then I recalled that I already have. It was called “working at a startup”.

Chris! We need you to invent a completely new product offering over the weekend or we’ll lose a massive contract!

That happened more than once, actually. Good times.

please do not leave blogs unattended

Much as I hate blogging for the sake of blogging, I figured it was time for an update. I’ve been working on my new game/toy/interactive fiction thing, Pavo, and I will be putting up some screenshots soon. I’m also seriously considering a new theme for this blog. The rounded-corner islands look seemed fresh a couple of years ago. Now, not so much.

I’m also deep into Skyrim, which doesn’t aid productivity, much in the same way that having a hole drilled into your head doesn’t aid concentration. It’s a vast and lovely world, though because of the engine change it still kind of feels like Fallout 3 wearing a Tolkien skin. No show-stopping bugs so far but I wish

the terrain streaming

had been thought out

a little better

and

didn’t interrupt the action every 5

…

seconds.

cut and paste your way to self-awareness

I was reading this rant about the problems involved with copying and pasting bits of code from one project to another—it’s a vector for bloat, and coding errors, and just plain non-comprehension of what code is actually supposed to do—and something odd occurred to me.

It’s becoming more and more evident that horizontal gene transfer played a role in the evolution of life on this planet, even that of higher life forms. Now, cut-and-paste is an inelegant metaphor for HGT, but the idea struck me as amusing: we’re the product of billions of years of genomic cut-and-paste.

Skynet may come to pass, but not by design. It will arise from some POS system that’s been worked over by one too many teams of code monkeys pasting bits of other systems into it.