Journals

My birthday was the other day, so as a present to myself I got to fly one of these.It was a load of fun, and I'm now thinking of saving up and training to get a pilot's license when I get home.

To live is to die.

Due to reasons, I suddenly have a lot less free time than I once did. This is going to make having a set-in-stone regular schedule... well, probably impossible.

I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to continue the streams from here on out. I intend to continue, but I'm going to have to become more flexible with when I do them, which I'm sure will be less convenient for anyone trying to catch them. If it comes down to it, I may have to make them shorter, too. Will just have to see what happens.

For now, TWMV is on hiatus until I can work something out.

So, here's the situation.

I'm going to order the parts on the start of July. Here are the specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Memory: 8GB DDR4 2667MHz RAM
Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix B350-F Gaming
GPU: Asus Cerberus GTX 1050 Ti
Storage: 1TB 7200rpm HDD and 250GB Samsung 860EVO SSD
PSU: CoolerMaster 600W or something
Case: MS something

Can't remember all of them. My seller recommended the PSU and the case while we were discussing that on Viber, so.
Since I'm sure people will start asking stuff about MS, it's a Croatian brand with good cases, but horrible anything else. Their PSUs go in flames because e.g. if one's rated at 14A it can usually handle barely 11A or so, so they're unreliable. At least that's what I've read and seen.
Their cases are pretty good on the other hand.

Sadly, the motherboard doesn't have PS/2, which will make installing Windows 7 a bit more complicated. At least I'll get to use Windows 10 as a daily driver though. I usually don't like change, but I guess I'll have to face it. I felt the same way when going from XP to 7, yet I had a good time.
Worst-case scenario is that I might use Windows 7 in a virtual machine. We'll see.

Now, other news: I discovered that my monitor can go up to 75Hz if I drop the resolution to 1280x768. Gosh, it's so good. Word feels smoother, Excel feels excellent, PowerPoint feels smoother, Notepad feels smoother... it feels like heaven. Now if I could only reach 75fps in games, that would be great. :v

I had a dream, it was both crazy and beautiful. I had launched Terragen Classic and saw an advanced yet clean and well arranged interface. In addition to the usual editors (which got a massive overhaul), there were also editors like character editor, model editor and game logic scripter. I spent a lot of time in this dream fiddling with material and atmosphere editors. The former had full PBR and procedural creation matched with Terragen's usual material properties. There was a nifty window with an example scene - selecting faces on it adjusted the material to slope of the face and its other properties. The atmosphere editor had a real time preview window, enormous amount of sliders and even more preset examples that were great on their own. I had tears in my eyes when working with that suite.

A man can dream, but a question is: What if Planetside made game dev tools?

Neither of these pictures was originally mine, but I juxtapose them to warn everyone of the similarities. History is repeating itself.

This is a double journal.

Teh Epik Master Plan Part III

On the 23rd November 2017, I convinced my dad to let me use his debit card. Then I bought myself the Valve Complete Pack for just €10,52.
Success. However, the quest still continues as I'm yet to open my own bank account.

And this year, it might finally happen.

(man, I've got Convertible Marks, pfennigs, euros, euro cents, Canadian cents, and Croatian lindens, LOL)

So, I've been collecting money for the past 5 years for my new PC, and then something unexpected happened.
My aunt from the US sent me *$20! Now I can buy an SSD alongside the 1TB HDD, a Ryzen 5 1600 instead of the 1400, and a 1050 Ti instead of the 1050.
(maybe extra 8GB of RAM, 16 in total)

I knew that this day would come. The day when my patience and perseverance finally pay off.

So, my plan is to spend a part of it on the PC, and save the rest to my soon-to-be bank account (otherwise my parents would keep using me as a bank, like they've been doing for the past 7 years). The days of lag and global warming caused by my laptop will finally be gone, and I'll enter a new age, a better age.

I'll likely re-purpose the 2005 HP Compaq as a home server or something. My 2007 laptop will finally get retired. The grandpa deserves it after all these years.
It will be a dream come true. Funnily enough, June is the only month where I have dreams anyway. I've dreamt in the past about buying the parts, I've dreamt about taking the part boxes to my dad's car, I've dreamt about using it. Now it's time for those 3 to become a reality. For some, it's pride month, but for me it's the dream month.

I've Survived

6th of June, 2018, 10:25
My IT professor says "Please don't make any trouble in the classroom, I'll be away for 10 minutes."
And then all hell breaks loose. I even drew UwU on the board.

approx. 11:05
The professor returns and the board is cleaned. "Alright, since we don't have much time, I'll take a brief look at your presentations, and I'll see if I can bring 2 students so they can actually present what they chose."
The classmate, whose IT homework I've done yet again and again, got an 5 (or an A, if you will). Then I knew I could sleep in peace, knowing that he doesn't hate me and that my reputation is not yet ruined. As for me, IT was already concluded as a 5, so it wouldn't matter even if I got a 1.
The professor finished taking quick looks at the students' presentations. He asked: "Alright, who wants to present us their homework?"
I raised my hand almost instantly. "Alright Admer, come on up.", he said.

My presentation was a history of Microsoft operating systems. At one point, I reached Windows ME.

The text doesn't matter, so I won't really translate it. I was talking about its (in)stability and I briefly mentioned Windows 2000.
And then, something unexpected happened.

"Oh, I apologise, we're having some technical problems."

The professor started laughing so hard. And my classmates thought it was an actual BSOD, so they got worried.

11:40
IT class ended, and I was told I won't have any further classes for that day. My summer break had officially begun.

7th June 2018

I arrived to school at 9 in the morning. I had to meet with the professor and the principal. We went to the ceremonial awarding, and I happened to have won 2nd place on an IT competition hosted by the Pedagogical Institute. They also hosted the awarding. It felt nice to be a part of it.

And that's it. I'm free until September. :3

*It's not actually $20, I just won't tell the true value.

Blender's prehistory
Traces (1988) on the greatest PC of all time the Commodore Amigahttp://zgodzinski.com/blender-prehistory/

I remember once, when I was young, my Grandfather was telling me stories about the war. He told me one story that always stuck with me.

One day, in the midst of the European invasion, he had leapt into a Spitfire and flown over enemy lines. He had then jumped out of his plane and parachuted down to a flag held by the Germans. He took out the four man squad single handed and then defended the flag is it gradually crept down the flagpole, turned into a British Union Jack and then started to climb slowly back up.

Unfortunately, he was then shot and killed by a German sniper who had run up to him, jumped into the air, span around and shot him without looking down his scope.

When my Grandfather respawned, he was surprised to find that he was now figthing for the Germans, as the battle had been pretty unbalanced up to that point. He leapt into a German Tiger tank and got back into the fray.

I'm sure by this point you have figured out that this is not a true story. However, a couple of days ago, EA and DICE released the Battlefield V trailer. The trailer features, most notably, a British female soldier, with a prosthetic arm, fighting on the front lines. Naturally, everyone reacted to this in a perfectly reasonable and level headed manner.

DID THEY BOLLOCKS!

The amount of bile I have seen surrounding the content of the trailer almost makes me ashamed to be a gamer... Countless people have slated the footage for not being historically accurate, which is what the Battlefield franchise is known for (There is a game in the series that includes bipedal robo tanks... but let's gloss over that for now)

There are literally zero videogames that offer an authentic World War One/Two experience because it would be fucking MISERABLE. But the idea that including female soldiers with prosthetic limbs fighting on the front lines is offensive and disrespectful is a fucking joke! It's a VIDEOGAME for fuck's sake, not a DOCUMENTARY! It's supposed to be entertaining! Not historically accurate.

• - - - -

For those that are genuinely interested by the way, my Grandfather was an engineer in WWII and while he didn't see a lot of combat he worked on Spitfires primarily, and did a damn good job of keeping them in the air.

Discovered an ancient gem: 3D Studio 4.0 (DOS, 1994)One of the pre-rendered images that came with it:Now I'm getting a sudden urge to move from 3DS Max 2016 to 3D Studio 4. Lol.

Got myself a new motor! My trusty old Kia Rio from 2009 packed up and I've been using my wife's car for three months. Not great. Ordered a new one in February, but was told the second week of May would likely be the earliest I would get it.Welp, the second week of May has arrived, and so has my new Kia Rio 2018. The difference is pretty incredible. Central locking, electric windows, bluetooth connection for my phone. I know none of this is particularly impressive by today's standards, but consider that this is moving over from a car that had wind-down windows and no air-con.Yeah, pretty happy bunny today.

I will become a godfather tomorrow!

(
The number of gargantuas in Half-Life
-
number of ostensibly friendly apaches in Half-Life
+
the number of tentacles in Half-Life
+
the number of living scientists in the Xen chapters of Half-Life
)
*
the number of Ospreys in Half-Life

********

I mean, there's no real way to cloak the purpose of these journals, but hopefully I can at least give some maths that needs to be pondered rather than just looked up. (I hope I got the right numbers!)

Finally finished with my BSc!!! (Well, apart from a demo that I need to give tomorrow.)

Time for me to log back in to twhl.info and see how's everyone doing.

Is the Core finally released??? Is TWHL v4 finally ready??? (My computer is still displaying the old version but I guess that's a cache problem... right?)

Has anyone seen "Ready Player One"?

Why does the end credit mention "Valve Corporation"? I didn't spot a single character from any of the Valve games in the film.