Yay!

Another long break between posts. There have been a lot percolating in my mind, to do with modelling ants in software, new jobs and secret projects, but the catalyst for this is...

Aura got her visa! So she'll be touching down in Sydney 3-June!

And it only took 1 day. Damn those Chileans are efficient. In a meeting so back to work I go.

Back to School

Here's something from a few weeks ago... before I had internet and could post from home.

I’ve been back in Sydney for nearly 2 months now. Definitely enough time to get over the culture shock that I was suffering when I last posted and time to catch up with everyone, settle into my new home with my sister and get back to work. Sydney is an amazing city and I’m really happy to be back here. I seem to fall in love with the place a little more every day.

A little back tracking is in order so...

Christmas was lots of fun up at my mum and dad’s place with my crazy nieces and nephew running amuck in true Christmas spirit. Photo frames seemed to be everyone’s gift idea for me this year which was perfect. I’m actually copying my photos, all 39 CDs, onto my computer at the moment so I can go through them all and print out an album. I have the feeling this will take a while.

New Year’s Eve was also great. I went up to the Gold Coast with a group of friends for a week of relaxation after a hard year relaxing. Between enjoying a cold beer, catching the beach and putting on a New Year’s party, we all had a great time and I get the feeling this will become an annual event.

After a few months of being ready to go back to work, I started the freak out in the last weeks, which I’d already pushed back so I could spend more time at the Gold Coast. I finally got back to work and have been having fun since. It was really nice to go back to the same product and group and to be able to contribute, almost, from day one.

Another big thing that’s happened is that I’ve moved in my one of my sisters. I’ve been here a few weeks now, and I have to say, it’s absolutely awesome living with her. She... we have a great house and it’s nice to be hang out her. She’s a total workaholic, like the rest of the family, but we still get to eat together and watch excessive amounts of Battlestar Galactica and Heroes. An added bonus is that she lives in the Portuguese part of Sydney, so I still get the chance to speak Spanish... my Portuguese is terrible, so I just speak Spanish, but people still seem to understand.

Speaking of Spanish, my good friends Ben and Dan, who came and visited in Salvador de Bahia in Brasil, took me to an asado (BBQ) that the South American Society organise every Friday night and it was awesome - great food and then a live band playing Salsa and Meringue. A definite stop for the Spanish club I’m trying to get together... so far we’ve only watched Volver and eaten Japanese.

I have an appointment with an immigration lawyer about Aura’s visa this week, which I hope will go well. It seems ridiculous to me to see a lawyer about a tourist visa, but given the outcome last time, I think it’s worth it. Aura should be out here June and July and I think I’ll go back with her for a little while too. Being apart sucks, but we’re coping pretty well.

Not a lot has changed in the last year and I’ve realised that’s one of the things I like about coming home after time away. The fact that it doesn’t change that much is what makes home home. Everyday away was an adventure in some way, and I loved every minute of it (at least in retrospect), but it’s really great to be home again. I know I’ll be packing up again one day, but for now I’m just happy to sit around with my friends and family and be thankful for their company.

Por Fin!

I finally have internet at home! This is a good thing.

A Sucker For Punishment

There's nothing like relaxing after a long day coding with... more coding. Yeah, this is getting a little out of control. The last couple of days I've been working on Elevation while the sun is up and tinkering with XNA when the moon is out. I played a little more tonight and have a simple model for game objects which was a breeze to put together... I truly do love C# (and Java of course).

I have a bunch of models that I bought a while back for a hover tank game called HoverWars ("If ya can't hover, don't bother!"... I mean, can a theme song get any catchier than that?), so I figured I'd use them for something.

It's a super simple game so if I don't go blind from staring at the screen 24 hours a day I might port it across to XNA.

I also dusted of my Nord Lead 3 tonight. I nearly cried I love that keyboard so much. It's like a little piece of red, glowing heaven... which actually sounds more like hell, but that's a minor detail. Even through a guitar amp it sounds amazing.

In between that all I also checked out A Scanner Darkly. Not great, but not bad. I found it a little boring, but fun nonetheless. The animated looking effect was cool but go boring pretty quick. Right now I'm mainly psyched for 300. The new trailer is absolutely amazing and I love the look of the environments. The atmosphere in them is so think you can almost taste it.

Also, Aura has finally got an apartment and is moving in this weekend. Yay! Who would have thought it would be so difficult to rent an apartment in Bogotá?

Elevation Shots

Iteration 4 - In Game Shot

Click through for some screenshots from iteration 4 fo Elevation.

The two numbers about the passengers heads indicate the floor they want to go to and their current satisfaction.

Updates and Elevators

Some unfortunate people have to put up with spam about Elevation from me, so I figured I'd share an update here while I'm uploading the latest build.

Greetings Spammees!

Here's the latest and greatest of Elevation.

Lots of stuff in this release. The big ones are:
- Externalised UI definitions... you don't really care about that, but it makes my life much easier :)
- Changed the score mechanism. Instead of an average, the score is now the aggregate of satisfactions.
- Count down, constant spawning of new passengers, score updates, game over dialog... it's almost a real game.
- State machine for passengers - let's me do lots of little things like delay satisfaction updates for a second or two, fade ins and fade outs
- Fixed heaps of memory leaks. There's still some lingering around but, I think they're because of some weird C++ism to do with statics that I don't understand since they seem to be in the PopCap framework.

Coming up in iteration 5:
- Combos! Por Fin! Bonus points for delivering 3 or more people to the same floor or to consecutive floors.
- Some special effects stuff
- Other little graphical niceties
- Less stupid, as oppossed to smarter, AI

Things are going great with Elevation at the moment. I'm not ashamed to say C++ and I haven't in the past been the best of friends, but this time around everything seems to have clicked (it only took 12 years) and I'm not having any problems with the language. I'm doing a couple of things differently, like forward declarations for everything unless I really need the class definition in another header file, and it's working great.

One thing that is a little annoying is VisualStudio 2005. After using Eclipse it's pretty hard to look at another editor without moaning, unless it's vi :) They just got so many things right with Eclipse 3. From "camel case" sensitive word skipping to highlighting all instances of the current variable name, and it's fast. There's a stack of tiny features which I daydream about while waiting for VisualStudio's Intellisense database to update. I know there are guys in the dev studio team at Microsoft that play with Eclipse, so please please please put these features in an upcoming release.

The last iteration took about a month on account of ending my holiday, spending some time in Colombia with Aura and getting back into the swing of things here in Sydney. I'm still having a hard time staying awake and am plagued by headaches, but I think I should be able to get the next iteration done in a week.

As I said above, the main feature this iteration is combos, which I'm excited about. Basically you get bonus points for delivering multiple people to the same floor or to consecutive floors. Having a little delay between when people appear and when you can pick them up should let you plan combo runs a little, which is where the real points (and skill) to the game will come in. They should allow for some fun game play, after that it's "special" passengers that do everything from give bonus points to jam the other elevators.

Oh and I had a tiny play with XNA last night. I had a model exported from 3D Studio and rendering in my app in about 3 minutes thanks to the Content Pipeline. It was great! I can't wait to sink my teeth into XNA with the next game.

Home Is Where The Heart Is

I've been back home for a few days now and I love it. It's a little weird hearing English all the time and generally not being in South America, but Sydney is absolutely beautiful at the moment and it's impossible not to fall, or re-fall, in love with it.

I consoled (boom-tsk) myself with being back here by buying an Xbox 360 within 3 hours of touching down. Gears of War is simply amazing; the hype around this game is spot on. I also grabbed Viva Pinata (sorry about the spelling, no "enya" on this keyboard), which is also awesome. There are a couple of things that I think are a little sloppy and load times are too long for a 2nd gen "next gen" game, but those little pinatas are just so cute!

Not too much else to report at the moment. I've started catching up with people and working on Elevation again, so I'm keeping busy.

I finally had a look at the latest beta of XNA and the Content Pipeline in particular is great. Being able to add a 3D model, texture or sound file to your Visual Studio project, reference and load it directly is just amazing. Hats off to the XNA team for some truly great work has concrete benefits to game developers. I'm going to do my next game project in XNA for Xbox 360, so I'm very interested in and excited by it.

Freakin' Out

My wonderful time in South America has finally come to an end.

This morning I got back to Buenos Aires from two great weeks in Colombia hanging out with Aura and her family. We've decided to hold off until June to re-apply for Aura's visa when she's more settled in Bogota and those crazy Australians won't think she'll over stay.

Tomorrow evening I fly out of Buenos Aires with far too much luggage and a heap of great memories. Saludes and thanks to everyone I met alone the way. It's going to be strange going back to Australia, but I'm looking forward to it.

Chau!

¡Que Estupidos los Australianos!

We'll we found out about Aura's visa yesterday, and she didn't get it, which obviously sucks. The embassy sited insufficient evidence she would return to Colombia but I've not given up and we're going to re-apply. Looking back at the application, I see where they're coming from, but it's pretty hard to prove you have sufficient reasons to return to your own country. Based on property and the like I know I wouldn't be able to do it.

Aura went back to Colombia today as planned but I'm flying out tomorrow and we'll try again from Bogotá once she has sorted out an apartment and university. It'll be good to get back to Bogota and Villavicencio for a while and hang out with Aura's family, including her new nephew Juan-Miguel.

Hasta Colombia!