New job

So I’ve been working as a grad for 2-3 weeks, and I have already been moved!

Not far, still this same company, same role. I’m still even sitting in my same desk. I am just working on a different product.

I took an hour out of my busy schedule today to see how ultimate frisby works (Dark would probably be impressed). It is quite good fun, but the tactics of playing are still beyond my abilities. I learn’t a few strategies, and they make perfect sense, but they just don’t work out in practice. Maybe it is the fact I am crap, but i suppose it is a team effort.

Work is keeping me busy. I am doing Install and Migration testing, and at the moment am working on the Linux IA64 release. Which is quite good fun, although I did spend ages today looking up the ISO coounty codes to find out what the code for korean and other languages was. At the end of the day however, my team leader comes over and informs me that she has some news. She said that I would either love her or hate her for it. It turns out that the Linux IA64 architecture is being reviewed, and might not be a supported platform (which means there is nothing to do as it won’t be released for it!)

So much has been happening, that I don’t quite know what to write about. I will never remember it all.

The commute isn’t too bad, although it is long. If anyone knows a good RSS reader that will pull the articles offline for me to read on the way that would be really nice. That way I could have SlashDot, BBCNews and other articles to read, instead of playing Warcraft III or DungeonSiege on the way to work!

Other things I plan to do with my commute is sort out a better way of writing blog posts, instead of saving them to file and then struggling to remember to post them when I have internet (no wifi on the train 🙁 )

My newest project (if it ever gets going) is to write a computer game.
My inspiration is the old MagicCarpet game, but I don’t want to be recreating it (for more than just legal reasons). It might turn into a bit of an rpg game in the end, or it might be more aimed at multi-player.
The hardest part will of course be getting started. I have to work out a game engine, and there is no way I have the time to write it myself, so I am looking at CrystalSpace. It is a multi purpose, LGPL’ed game engine, that can do wonderful scenerey landscapes as well as some really cool visual effects. It is pretty much on par with Quake III in terms of graphics, although might not be as optimised, but it is licenced in a way that I can distribute it fine if I choose I want to try and sell the game later.

The one part I have to figure out is whether it can do these wonderful landscapes (I will try and post some screenshots later) and normal buildings together. If it can’t, then the landscapes become useless without having some castles and towns etc. I would quite like to do some internal buildings too!

The coding I can (hopefully) learn, but I doubt I have the skill to make all the artwork (even if I can make some decent maps). So if you are tallented with computer art (both 2D texturing and 3D models) and fancy working on a game, let me know! Also, some music for the game would be nice eventually too, as well as sound effects.

I suppose I will just have to get a compiler installed and get a simple game engine running, and try to get it all working. If only Micro$oft didn’t charge so much for a C++ compiler I could get started now. I don’t think compiling under cygwin will be very good, but I might not have a choice, as it will be far faster than getting linux on my laptop!
The end game will hopefully be for windows and linux, as the CrystalSpace is cross platform, and has a how-to on cross compiling, so it shouldnt matter what OS you run, you should all be able to run a BETA (if I ever get that far!)