So, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here. Mostly because I’ve not been writing much code in the last while and real life has been my focus. Since I’ve been gone, I’ve become a software architect at my job, and that keeps me quite busy.
Since it’s pretty dead there (not that that’s unexpected, I hardly update the site), I will be shutting down the forums.
They will be locked into a read-only mode so that any information required is still available.
If you have a pressing Gorgon issue, I recommend using the Github repository, or leaving a comment on the blog (the git hub site is preferable however).
As for Gorgon: Believe it or not, I still work on it. Just at an incredibly slow pace. Similar to time dilation in a black hole or something magical like that.
Is awesome. Seriously. You should buy their products whenever possible.
Best. Customer. Service. Ever.
So I’m trying out Windows 8 (yes, it’s not released to the public, and yes I have it legally).
Dear God, what a mess this whole Metro/desktop thing is. Someone over at Microsoft must have split personality disorder or something. How in hell did they think that was a good idea??
Anyway, the OS does have some really nice improvements and it’s very responsive (except when it’s not… I get random freezes once in a while, apparently it’s something to do with my Intel SSD). And more importantly, after installing VS2010, and the June 2010 DirectX SDK, the new (and presumably old since I haven’t tried it yet) Gorgon works fine. What I knew, and was hoping I was wrong, is that they took out the D3DX library for the new DirectX, and as such things broke horribly under Gorgon because SharpDX uses the D3DX libraries to load/save textures. After installing the June 2010 DXSDK, everything worked again, so there’s that.
I really really really don’t like this metro thing. It’s just horrible with a mouse/keyboard and while I was ambivalent towards the Start Menu in previous versions, I really miss that I can’t group my applications (and I have a lot) under folders. This made everything really horrible to organize, especially with how obsessive I am about organization on my machine.
That said, the desktop is real nice. Love the new task manager, love the new copy/delete dialogs. I even like the new look they put in (they got rid of Aero, or probably more likely, the glass effect).
Sadly, I now have to figure out how in hell I’m going to make Gorgon work without relying on D3DX (yes, I know, I could keep with developing for the June 2010 SDK, but at some point you know they’re going to drop that). Apparently I can use WIC (Windows Imaging Component), but it looks pretty convoluted and I need something that’ll give me AnyCPU support.
All in all, the awfulness of Windows 8 outweighs its benefits in my opinion. Someone really needs to kick Ballmer (I blame him wholeheartedly for this mess) out of that company and install someone with a fucking clue (i.e. we don’t all use/want a tablet, nor do we all want to develop for them).
Anyway, I am not dropping support for Windows 7/Vista from Gorgon. So don’t ask about it.
That’s all for now. Gorgon is still being worked on, a little, here and there. It’ll be ready by 2213.
I recently played around with my own library (see an earlier post about the sun effect) and I found it… well, lacking. In my day job I do a lot of framework/library code for re-use amongst my co-workers and I’ve learned a great deal over the last few years of doing that professionally. There’s a huge difference between writing a database/application framework and a graphics library, but, I’ve always been amazed how concepts from one architecture will map to another and as I developed Gorgon in my own time, I ported concepts to the framework code I write for my job and vice versa. One major difference is that our framework code at the office is always evolving from project to project (granted, the pace of evolution has slowed somewhat), while Gorgon was written, and aside from bug-fixes, it never evolved because I never really used it except to prototype small things from time to time. Until I wrote the Sun thingy….
So, I’ve started to transition some things over to Facebook. This may not go over too well for some people, but life is hard, you’ll get used to it.
I’ve moved the screen shots over to it, and ported the important parts of the wiki to the notes section.
It’s not a replacement for the site as a whole, but for parts of it, it makes sense. The forums will stay in place, and the main page will stay in place as well, but the Wiki and the screen shots section are gone over to Facebook.
You may now commence with the “I HATES TEH FACEBOK PEAGES!!!” commentary…
So, I bet you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to lately… You haven’t? You selfish bastard.
Anyhow, I’ve gotten around to playing with this library I wrote for a bit. I do so little programming on my own time these days and honestly, I never much cared for Gorgon (I felt it could have been better), that I haven’t bothered to try and write anything with it. That my users actually say it’s useful and well written comes as a complete shock to me. Anyway, this last week I mustered up some spare time and I created this abomination:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqPGa6P52LM
It’s not much, but it’s just a little thing I threw together to see if I could get a “bloom” type effect with a star. I did. And there it is. Note how the surface of the star moves around and all that. Neat hey? No? Shut up.
I’ve limited it to 60 FPS on purpose, but it is fairly swift. I think at one point I was getting > 1000 FPS. However, my vidja card is quite beefy, so take that with a grain of salt. So… yeah…. that’s all I have to say.
Enjoy.
I’m sure people think Gorgon is dead. Well, it’s not dead, but certainly not active either. I’m pretty much done with writing for it (bugs being an exception). If you’re interested in helping maintain it, please let me know via the forums. My day job and my social life (which I’d neglected for too long) are a priority right now and I have very little motivation (or time) to write anything related to Gorgon (or anything else).
That said, I do check the forums every day (at least twice a day). So if you have a bug, or need a question answered, I will try to help. Again, because of my “schedule” I may be a bit late in the replies (although ShadowDust702 has been doing a fine job of answering questions while I’m out drinki… er.. working).
Speaking of forums, forum member Cycor posted some code to convert GIF animations into Gorgon sprite animations. You can view the code here (sorry for the late acknowledgment).
So I’ve finally gotten off of my lazy ass and uploaded a new version of Gorgon. This version contains all the bugfixes, and enhancements that have appeared in the Subversion repository over the last few months.
You can read about the changes here.
Then you’ll probably want to download it.
It’s been a while since I’ve last updated, over a month actually. I’ve been dealing with some major real life issues so I haven’t had any time to devote to Gorgon unfortunately and I won’t be able to for a while (at least not until the end of August). I recently dumped the latest batch of code into the subversion repository and it contains several small bug fixes and some new additions (like a polygon sprite).
As always, if you find an issue please log it on the Gorgon issue tracker page.
Oh and to the person who was having issues with keyboard input: I still haven’t been able to reproduce the bug and you haven’t replied to the issue comments, so I’m closing it for now. I don’t need the full project source code, but if you could even whip up a sample project that exhibits the behaviour, that’d be perfect. If you can help me verify it, I’ll re-open it when I get back from vacation in August.
Work is overrated, I don’t recommend it.
I disabled comments because I’m just getting pummeled by spammers and no legitimate comments. So I say fuck it and fuck you spamming cocksuckers.
If you have an urgent need to discuss Gorgon or whatnot please use the forums.
So my US counterparts. You have a new president.
I’m a Canadian, and I’m a very proud Canuck. For the last 8 years I’ve watched the US get flushed down the toilet by incompetence and greed. Because of this it became a shadow of its former glory. And now you’ve gone and elected a man who can possibly repair the damage done by that imbecile, George W. Bush. I sincerely hope he can start the US back on the path to greatness.
I followed the election coverage tonight with great interest. Certainly with more interest than I showed for my own country when our election came around (Stephen Harper’s another imbecile btw, too bad we don’t have a candidate with 0.0000000000001% of Obama’s charisma). I cared so much about it because not only was it the potential end of the reign of incompetence, but also because of the historic connotations brought about by electing the first black president. I’m proud to have been able to witness this in my lifetime. And I’m proud, for the first time in a very long time, of the USA for having the foresight to elect this man. Not because of the colour of his skin, but by the quality of his character.
The USA has always claimed to be the greatest nation on the planet. Tonight, they have taken the first step to proving this to the rest of the world.
Yay! Now I can come visit Seattle. Finally. Btw, Mr. Obama, will you please do something about this stupid passport requirement (I have one, but we were such good friends once, that I didn’t require it)?
Congratulations USA. I wish your country and its people the greatest luck on your road to recovering your status as the great nation you were before Bush.
And thus why I did this. Plus I’m wanting to move away from my gamedev journal, it’s… yeah, it’s just fucking bad.
So from here on, all Gorgon related announcements will appear here and my rants, which are just fucking awesome, will appear here as well. Any future projects will have announcements here as well.
So yeah, it’ll be updated every time a random random number generator in a random country returns 3.5322874. Which is quite often if you have a life expectency of 150,000 years +/- 2.125 years.