Well the game engine has been coming along nicely. I’ve been working with a guy named Charles and we’ve developed some really cool core engine components so far. Up to this point it’s been nothing but the core windows components and basic support for the DirectX SDK API.

I wanted to have full support for dynamically switching between full screen and windowed mode while in the game. So we got that feature running, also there was some other related features to being in full screen and clicking on some other window in the event that the user has multiple monitors but the game is only active on one monitor. Similarly the game engine must also handle an ALT+TAB out to another application or window, and from windowed mode the game should pause rendering when the game is minimized or placed in the background.

We got it to pause the game rendering but the game itself is still executing and eating up the CPU. When the game engine is not active of course it should not be eating CPU power because the user might have to do something important like writing a blog post, or responding to some important e-mail or making a quick edit on some web page. Since most video games require the full attention of the computer hardware games are developed with a very high priority setting for executing on the CPU. Just because the rendering is paused doesn’t mean the priority level has changed so we still need to implement a system that will drop the priority level thus not requiring large amounts of CPU time to do nothing when the user wants to work on something else for a bit, or step out for a quick lunch between levels or whatever.

Current mood: melancholy
Category: Life

Last nite was the most irritating Friday I’ve had in a long long time!

After waiting all week for my favorite TV show on every Friday night, my roomates decide to throw a pre-party before they head out to the bar. Thankfully we have DVR. The only plus side was that TJ decided to have a little jam session with his friends. He’s good enough that it actually sounds really awesome. So it’s kind of like having a live band concert in your living room, just for you. Kind of cool, but it wears off after a few hours while waiting to watch my favorite TV show.

The only draw back of having a live band in your living room, is that its loud! Which tends to draw complaints from the neighbors. So the police showed up after everyone else had already gone to the bar. I gave them the proper information of course and they asked me to warn my roommates about future violations. So when Britney called me later that night to ask me to move the wine coolers from the freezer to the fridge ( I did this), I warned her about what the police said about future noise violations. Then I went to bed and put my ear plugs in for the night.

I slept very well, except for the ringing in my ears.

Oh well, it did go away after awhile, and I did sleep ok.

The exciting part about life is I’ll be going to Washington DC for the International Mars Society Conferance. I’m presenting there about Orbiter Space Flight Simulator, and more specifically Orbiter Mars Direct Project. I still have some 3D modeling to finish for that, and some texture maps.

I also have to finish that boat Farr40 model today if possible. I had originally modeled the ropes for the railing, and the struts for the big arch thing in the middle of the boat using NURBS lines, and I just gave them a mesh thickness. I thought the mesh would export with all the other meshes, but it didn’t. So now I have to remodel those parts of the boat.

Also some optimization routines that I ran on the mesh after the modeling was finished screwed up the connections between some of those mesh segments. So I have to adjust those as well.

It’s really kind of frustrating that some of these projects have to take so long, and so much time! I just try to get them all done at once but they never seem to get finished just when I think they are about to be finished. Then there is more work to do