Oct 26 2008
We spent this afternoon carving pumpkins. My daughters, of course, picked some insane designs which required intricate carving skills. I happen to have a fruit and vegetable carving set, which made the task much easier.
The first step was taping the outline onto the pumpkin. Then, we used a mini-saw to cut out the shape…basically, it just created an outline. We then removed the paper and started cleaning each of the cuts.
Oct 21 2008
I am heading off for the next few days to an SPU seminar that I am running. At work, I spend a lot of my time dealing with the SPUs on the PS3. In fact, if you are using the libswcache libraries in your game, then you are using code that I wrote. The SPUs are interesting beasts for multiprocessor work. They are not as easy as the homogeneous multicore solution for the XBox360, but for raw processor power, not much can beat the SPUs right now.
My work tends to be around making the SPUs easier for developers to use. Software caching (like libswcache) are ways to deal with non-uniform memory systems and making the architectural complexities more transparent to the end programmer. I have a lot of experience with C++, so I have been looking at how templates and auto_ptr’s can help. Libraries like these do not give you the peak performance, but it makes it much easier for the general gameplay programmers to work on the SPUs. I have found that game development is a constant trade off between easy to use architectures which any generalist programmer can code for and extremely high performance architectures which require a specialist.
Oct 12 2008
I spent the afternoon adding Lua to my code. It only took about an hour to get the Lua library compiling and running. The rest of the time was setting up the various hooks to make the scripting language actually functional. I did not have time to add an interactive parser, that is on my list of things to do.
I have used Lua on previous games and never been that happy with it. It tends to run slowly and require more memory than you would expect. Also, most people tend to use it during development by reading in text files and doing on demand parsing. This scares me since I prefer doing type checking and variable checking at a compile time…one typo and suddenly your run-time can blow up. In some games, I have made the memory allocator throw an assertion if someone tried to allocate a var, string, etc. that was not seen before. This seems to stop the typo problem, assuming that the game (and testers) have coverage over every script.
Oct 05 2008
I went for a long run and then bike ride this morning, so I was in the mood to be lazy for a while. I spent the afternoon making fresh pizza dough to cook on the grill tonight. The finished pizza is a ground lamb with goat cheese, grilled onions, and red bell peppers, covered with a rosemary and garlic infused oil. The lamb came from Wind Dancer Ranch. We have been working with Lisa, the farmer, for a few years now and get all of our meat from her. Our freezer is filled with lamb, pork, turkey, and everything else she sells. At this point, we rarely buy our meat from the grocery store. Wind Dancer’s is cheaper, tastier, and better for the environment! Plus, since my family spent all day on Saturday at the Hoes Down Festival, I was feeling like cooking sustainably.