Oh how this brings back memories! :oD
More here – > http://www.davetuckerfilms.com/
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My mother’s Xmas care package arrived yesterday with the usual fare of socks, chocolate and various odds-and-sods. This year it also included this bizzare this little fellow.
I think I’ll call him “Darth”…
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To use one of Malin’s expressions; “Plane failurrrrrrreeee!”
I installed Microsoft Flight Simulator X about a month ago and on-and-off I’ve been playing my way through the missions. They start off fairly basic – taking some old fart’s Piper Cub to a fly-in, landing a Learjet on some far-away Island – but then seem to get more and more bizzare….
The Tokyo Executive Transport mission seemed fairly normal – take off in a Jet Ranger, land on a root-top helipad, pick up some VIPs and ferry them to another airport where a private jet is waiting. However what I wasn’t expecting upon landing was that my co-pilot was actually a British secret agent, that he wanted me to switch to a Lear Jet and follow the VIP’s plane halfway out into the pacific ocean. Oh, did I forget to mention the Ekranoplan that suddenly appears beneath you? Or the secret ring of mountains concealing the overlords evil lair? Oh may of also forgotten to mention that you have to land where theres nothing but water – but I wont spoil how… ;o)
Moving on from the surreal, I thought the Yakutat Mail Run mission would be easy enough. It seems however this is a test of how many failures does it take to make someone fly into the ground? Let see….
- Frozen Pitot tube – check!
- Vacuum failure – check!
- Loss of attitude indicator – check!
- Fog with zero visibility from 8000′ to 0′ – check!
- Loss of local radar so NDB procedure approach – check!
- Left engine failure and fire – check!
- Bear on the runway – check!
Jeez, all they needed was some snakes and we’re really in business!
I just wish they’d put all the energy coming up with this missions into making FSX not suck. It’s not *that* much better than FS2004 in my opinion and is a complete resource hog on my system which is by no means under powered.
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Ugh, finally…
I managed to finish my Valve Developer Community Wiki article on Phong materials at last. The freelance job I was working on distracted me for a couple of months. :o(
In short, the article covers how the Phong shader which appeared in Half-Life2: Episode One works, how it fit’s into Source’s shader tree and how to use all the parameters in your own mods. Yes, it even includes how that elusive $phonfresnelranges command works.
Of course it’s a public wiki so it’ll probably get the hell editied out of it (any bets on how long until someone “American-izes” it?) but it should provide some info for those who want to know how to utilise the Phong effect.
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I have the final meeting today between all parties concerned prior to my return to full-time employment. After 2½ years of sickness and one false start at re-joining my job it looks like I finally get to start doing things for real.
I’ll be glad to be working again, earning a wage and having a routine but I’m still a little nervous as to what exactly my new role at the company will be and if I’ll be able to do it. My biggest fear is that circumstances won’t be ideal which will result in me getting sick again although the plan is to start back part time and steadily increase my hours and responsibilities over the coming year.
I just hope I end up doing something I like. Shame we’re not a game company. 🙁
(Image courtesy of Trois Tetes)
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I was recently tipped off that another mod was using my Waco glider model and had posted pictures of it in a media update. Hilarity ensued.
Don’t steal my stuff. I’ll find out and name and shame you. Oh, and also be sure it’s not a model thats been done for a large software producer. They have much larger legal departments…
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Nem has been busy updating GCFScape and HLLib and has included much better defragging of GCF files than Valve’s own. To quote from Nem’s post:
Interesting to note that Valve’s own defragmenter claimed 0% fragmentation when Nem calculated almost 10% in some case. Nem continues:
I know myself that some of the slow load times with Steam have frustrated me so if in some cases you could be gaining 20 seconds or more it’s certainly worth a look!
You can read the rest of Nem’s post and more details of his tests and results here and download the latest GCFScape and try it for yourself.
I wonder what Valve will make of it…
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There has been quite a lot of coverage and discussion in the press of late about “serious games” – using computer game technology for serious purposes such as situation training and education. It’s really encouraging as it’s something I’ve been interested for a long time and started to get into a while back.
I picked up on this article in particular as it mentions a couple of projects I’m familar with.
First of all it mentions Tim Holt’s GNNViz project which I’ve been lucky enough to follow the development of. Tim has done some amazing work getting real world terrain and forestry data into existing game engines – no mean feat. Tim’s had to write a number of custom tools to transform the data types and custom shaders to give a realistic appearence to all those thousands of square kilometers of terrain.
Secondly, the article touches on the on-going development of “PULSE!!” which I mentioned in a previous post here. I hadn’t heard much of if after the initial demonstration so it’s nice to see it’s continuing to be developed.
With a lot of negativity towards games (e.g. “Bully”) and their social impact in the press it’s encouraging to see more articles like this one promoting the positive uses for the technology. That said, from my “insider” info the number of serious games in development or discussion is growing so maybe 2007 will be a boom year.
Start buying stock in Transmodrify now! ;o)
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As if my month couldn’t get any worse…
About an hour ago (as of time of this post) the hosting company where the Ham and Jam website and forums are held has been “hacked” by what appears to be a group protesting about the US involvement in the Middle East. The irritating thing is that I had just decided to sit down and back-up the server in preparation for a move to a non-US host when this happened.
The first problem was a 500 server error followed by the actual website itself not responding to requests. I figured that if I it was a config error with the server I should still be able to get in via the control panel and FTP to do the back-up. It was when I logged into cPanel that I got the actual hackers message itself.
More than likely they got in through the recently announced cPanel security hole which is scary because the same whole is being used to inject code into sites to deliver worms via Internet Explorer to unsuspecting users.
At the moment I can’t say when the Ham and Jam site will be back up and running but it’s certainly pushed forward moving things to a new host. I just hope I can recover the files from the server and more importantly the database dump.
This doesn’t affect Ham and Jam development as all content is kept elsewhere, however it does mean effort has to be redirected to fixing this problem rather than working on the game as the forums were a key method of co-ordinating the team.
UPDATE: Gaah! They’ve done what I hoped they wouldn’t – they’ve progressively drilled down all the sites hosted by the company and replaced the index files with their message. This now means our homepage and forums are displaying their crap.
UPDATE 2: Well I seem to of removed their crap from our site but our admin panel is still hosed. :o(
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We got some bad news over at the Day of Defeat Forums a couple of days ago. One of our moderators, Christopher “Tekkobra” Mckinzie apparently died after a weapon related accident. At the time of writing we still don’t have any firm details of what happened exactly except that it was a weapon, assumed firearm and that he sustained fatal chest injuries.
Chris was a financial advisor in Texas and was just about to make the big step of starting his own firm. He had a fiancee Claudine and two children. Sadly, I have to admit that’s all I knew of him and apart from the usual banter we exchanged in the forums we never knew each other outside of them. He was a good moderator, kept the trouble makers in order and contributed to the forums a great deal both in topics and debate and that’s how I’ll remember him most.
It was something that Tim, another moderator, said in relation to this that really stuck with me this week:
“It really puts some things in perspective – seeing more that everyone here is a real person with real lives (and sorrows), not just some nickname and sig on a forum.”
Here’s to you Chris…
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