Coder Corner

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24786

http://forums.mapcore.net/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5989&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=870

This recent podcast from Jeff & Casey about airport security reminded me of our current relocation ”issues”. Thing is, we have two guinea pigs at home. Yeah, the same fluffy animals as in G-Force. And apparently it’s next to impossible to move them to another country in an airplane. Dogs? No problem. Cats? No problem. You can take those as hand luggage provided you use an appropriate bag. But for guinea pigs, niet, verboten, forget it.

Of course we got a bit puzzled by this apparently bizarre racism against those cute, innocent rodents. So we asked. It turns out guinea pigs are forbidden in airplanes because they “could escape and eat the cables”. That’s it, that’s the only answer we got.

Hmmm. I don’t know. Are you telling me that the integrity of the airplane can be jeopardized by attacking a maverick cable in a corner, left so unprotected that it is vulnerable to a fucking guinea pig ?!

Yesterday I woke up from what must be the geekiest nightmare ever.

In the dream, I was back to my old Atari ST days. A friend of mine was at home, using my ST to watch demos and play games. Suddenly he complains that the drive doesn’t work anymore, and that all the disks he tries are failing. I check it out, and I realize that the moron managed to insert 2 floppies at the same time in the drive! Shivers down my spine: it’s the 2 disks of Blood, and I’m starting to panic because he may just have killed my only copy. I painfully remove the 2 disks from the drive, then put one disk back to check everything still works. I reset the ST by pressing the small button in its back. The drive starts reading the disk sectors slowly… one at a time… tac… tac… tac… Something’s wrong. The frequency of the “tac” sounds is too low, like one per second. Should be much faster, like when booting Return To Genesis, here it sounds like the horrible Atari ST version of Out Run, which was loading for ever, super slowly. tac… tac… tac… I’m white with fear, the asshole killed my ST ?! tac… tac… tac… It loads ad infinitum, nothing happens… the thing is dead… tac… tac… tac…

The dream blends out, reality blends in. I emerge from that nightmare. Slowly.

Something is still wrong. I still hear the drive.

tac… tac… tac…

Half asleep I turn my head towards the noise.

And I see that loud, annoying, fucking alarm clock that my girlfriend recently bought in a cheap chinese bazar. Tac… tac… tac… tac… tac… That thing makes the same noise as an Atari ST floppy disk controller, and it took a nightmare for me to realize it.

I’m basically looking for a new job. If you want to know the details, if you have a nice position to offer, or if you just want to say hello, please use the previously created email.

Please use this new email from now on. Hopefully that one will remain active each time I have issues with this website.

Baaam!

The demo for “Wanted: Weapons of Fate” has been released. I’ve worked on that one as “lead gameplay programmer”. You can also blame me for the notorious “pussy” difficulty mode. My idea

—

I stopped paying Globat but the website is still up and I can apparently still write posts. They suck even for kicking people out!

—

People quoting Einstein’s “Imagination is more important than knowledge” should use their imagination instead of their knowledge, to come up with a more creative quote.

—

Time perception is not linear.

—

You should apply the “broken window theory” to code, and hence start fixing those “minor issues”. Seriously.

—

It’s nice to be able to compile the game without any support for sounds whatsoever. It means you don’t waste any time loading all those samples while testing/implementing a new feature. Too bad some people in some company don’t understand the “quick iteration time” concept very well.

I’m trying not to follow the trend around me. I’m trying not to succumb to the dark side. I’m trying not to say bad things about Spain. But seriously, there are a lot of basic things that just fail to work here.

This morning, I tried transferring some money from my spanish account to my brother’s french account. Something that took literally 5 minutes in Switzerland.

Here, it took 2 people and 30 minutes to tell me that “it doesn’t work”. They asked me to leave my stuff here and come back at 14:00. They seemed genuinely surprised when I told them I couldn’t come here at 14:00 because, you know, I have to work.

So I’ll try again tomorrow morning. Oh, and the only reason why I don’t do it online is because their website doesn’t work either.

The brain works in mysterious ways…

Go to the following page and watch the video. There are two teams, with black or white t-shirts. They are throwing a basket-ball at each other. Can you count how many times the white team throws the ball? Count one each time the ball goes from somebody’s hands to somebody else’s hands.

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

Got the right number? Check the answer here…

———————–

I have the feeling the same thing sometimes happens when we’re debugging. The bug is obvious, litteraly in front of our eyes, but we don’t see it because we’re focused on other parts of the code, which we think must be the problem. I guess it’s +1 for pair programming.

And yes, that video fooled me big time