Journals

Light, without it we wouldn't be able to see. And so it is in videogames. Lights are fundamental, every game have some sort of light, if ever so simple. In todays 3D games, there need to be some way to compute lighting data within 3D space, as volumetricaly most of the light eixst outside of a 2D face where the light is visible. How does the lighting really work in the GoldSrc engine? Does anyone know except for Valve themselves?
This is my theory on how it works:Of course I can't be sure... But anyone should know.

I don't really know why I'm doing this.If you can't figure out what I'm doing from that, its a WIP texture pack using various sprites from NES games.

For those curious:
Kid Icarus - dirt, iron door (the one on the right)
Super Mario Bros. - granite, daisies, mushrooms, andesite
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - grass (and tall grass), oak logs + leaves (those closest trees), sand (not pictured)
Faxanadu - oak door (the one on the left), potions (not pictured)
Castlevania II: Simon's Quest - stone (+ ores)

And a bunch others not yet significant enough to be pictured.
Faxanadu especially will get more. It's too good not to.

EDIT: Caves are a lot more colourful now =3Not happy with iron ore (the purple-blue blocks at the back), but Simon's Quest doesn't have any blocks with a colour quite fitting enough.

EDIT: Liquids! I was tinkering with water, trying to get it to look any good and accidentally made it look cool.That's the water from the overworld of Zelda II and the lava from the Heat Man stage of Mega Man 2, with the palettes altered to match. Lava is much the same.

Mega64: Papers, Please
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMuULPDw-JI

i will not let you to cut me!

I have a new little friend:She doesn't have a name yet. Unfortunately my family don't seem enthusiastic about my idea to call her Reginald.

I'm five years old today!

I MADE A THING. LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF THE THING!

(click on the poster)

So, yeah. I've just made a gaming build on a famous italian website, and I would like to have some feedback from you guys, because this could be my future PC.
For your info, I want it to be good for both gaming and 3D rendering.

Here we go:The price isn't that much imho. But anyway, leave your thoughts and suggestions please. :3

Its interesting how well this song goes with mapping:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNUwMrWeV9o

So Invert-x is properly back, which means an obligatory journal entry to advertise that fact.

Invert-x, if you don't know, is a joint project between Penguinboy and myself in the form of a op-ed website for games and gaming concepts. We write articles about games and concepts we're interested in.

Until recently, we concentrated purely on the gaming world with our 'duelling article' layout (in which we posted an article each on the same topic, which would display on the same page, side by side). Since the redesign, we are expanding the types of articles we post and also expanding into films.

This redesign was a very, very long time coming. It necessitated the move to a new platform (we built the theme from scratch on Wordpress - nothing was salvaged from the previous version, aside from article content) and also introduced a complete overhaul for the Invert-x brand.

We're still working through some kinks and bugs (Wordpress can be mind-boggling at times), but we're pretty pleased at what we've got going so far. Pebs and I have a pile of new content in planning that we're itching to get going.

We're not gaming or film journalists and we never will be: we just write about things we find interesting.

Check out Invert-x.

I now have my Bachelors degree!
Today, 12/16/2014 I took my last final of my Bachelors degree for Electronics Engineering Technology. It was a simple networking course to end it all. A nice relaxing final semester to end a hectic journey.

Through it all I wrote a book, made an automatic beer bottle opener, was one of the youngest inductees into the Adult Education Honor Society, consumed countless gallons of coffee, countless more gallons of beer, and gained valuable years of work experience.

Next stop: who knows.

I'm well aware that you guys have been laughing at me behind my back due to my woefully underpowered system, so I've decided to finally do something about it.
You may remember my previous upgrade - the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti which did extremelyexciting things to my 3D Mark score. As you can see, the overall score was let down considerably by the lacklustre first-generation i7 CPU.

I have remedied the situation with a new motherboard and CPU combo, bringing my score up to a blistering 9898 on Fire Strike - an achievement-unlocking score that is apparently higher than 93% of all worldwide Fire Strike results. Nailed it.So what has powered this ridiculous score?
The main upgrade is of course the CPU - I went for a Haswell Intel Core i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz. It's apparently an overclocker's dream, but the base clock of 4GHz has already blown me away.

Supporting it, I went for the Asus MAXIMUS VI FORMULA Z87 motherboard. It's a real beauty and the upgrade from my previous two USB3 slots to seventeen million (I counted) is invaluable to me as someone who works with video.

I had some teething problems after reinstalling Windows, but thankfully everything has been ironed out and this beast of a machine is ready to splatter games all over the walls.Footnote:
I had planned this purchase for months and saved up significantly and specifically for it, waiting for a drop in the price of these components after meticulously researching them. Don't impulse buy components, you'll miss out on great deals!

So I've set myself a challenge:

From now until mid summer 2015, I'm going to create my own ePOS system.

What is ePOS? It's these piles of shit that every shop and their dog owns:Working in a hotel last year, we were stuck with a shittly little till from the early 00's, maybe even 90's. Looking into the cost of how much one of these ePos systems would be, it's fucking ridiculous what they charge. The cheapest they provide for a glorified touchscreen? £500. I spent less money on my bloody beast of a computer.

I've been learning Java as part of my uni course, and being fairly OK with it, i thought i'd learn a bit of SQL and fuck about with that. From my very, very recent proper retail experience I noticed that their system runs on something called retailJ, a java based system that's in fairly wide use - so writing this in Java isn't a far out idea.
I've made similar POS systems on GMOD and made mockups of the UI and systems using Love2d - obviously as Love2D is a game engine and not something that should be run in an actual place of work it'd be useless.

I've got some idea of what I'm doing, and as well as working in retail I know exactly what sort of stuff needs to be kept in databases and retrieved.

My initial plan is to write up the code, get a very basic version working on my computer. Once that's all done, I'll double check whether my previous employer would be interested in the software ( because even if they don't want it, writing a POS system from scratch is pretty good practice ). If they are, I'll grab a raspberry PI, a shitty touchscreen off ebay, polish the thing up and trial it.

If all goes well, hopefully I can earn myself a bit of pocket money.

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

Saint Augustine

I might visit Stockholm next summer.

I've always wanted to visit Sweden, and now I'll take my whole family there.