The only problem I got with pizzas is that they do not respawn.
Author: rangermann
Rockstar Vienna closed by Take-Two
I was pretty shocked this morning after reading Niko’s blog and then Jurie’s blog that Take-Two has closed the Rockstar Vienna offices. There is still no official press release by Take-Two, but the website of Rockstar Vienna seems to be unavailable and there is already a news entry on Gamasutra.
So it seems that Austria has lost its biggest game development company which was employing more than 100 game developers. I’m kinda curious about the impact of this on the Austrian game development scene.
E3 Video Coverage
As I am not able to attend the E3, I’m always interested in watching video footages of game presentations held at the show. Recently, I discovered that there is a video download client at E3Insider.com which provides videos at a decent quality. Unfortunately, there is no Linux client and the one for Windows doesn’t work with Wine or other emulation kits…
As good as Eclipse is… (Part #2)
Thermal Inferno
As previously mentioned in this blog, my graphics card is gone. I was pretty shocked when I came into the office last Friday, turned on the screens and saw a completely new screensaver. Here is a picture of the card:
The Cup Warmer Investigation (Part #2)
Welcome to the next chapter of the cup warmer investigation. Unfortunately, this is another one which is rather sad. In the first part, I mentioned my idea to put more heat-conductive paste on the lower side of the heating plate. That’s exactly what I tried this time. I don’t want to sound like Marvin the robot from the Guide, but somehow I think the cup warmer doesn’t respect my needs. It just lets me sit here at my desk working all the time without giving me a chance to prove my cleverness by drinking hot coffee.
In fact, my experiment didn’t turn out to help in any way at all. The plate is still cold at its borders. But hmmm, someone here in the office suggested plugging the device into a standard power outlet…
The jPentris block that makes you angry
We’ve been playing jPentris for some time now and nobody seems to be able to beat GA’s highscore. In my opinion, this block here is the reason why we all fail:
Brain Maintenance
Programming all day is nice, but sometimes it’s necessary to turn off your brain. In order to do so, I started doing fitness sport again. Running, to be more specific. Although it often seems that the tight schedule does not allow such things, I think one has to take that time off. It’s a great opportunity to leave one’s brain with itself for a while so that it can recharge for the next programming session. And no hehe, it’s not that I just want to do something again a certain cliché.
Somehow, it’s a miracle that after running for an hour or so, when you are zapped and your body is toast, your brain starts being creative again. Problems you’ve been bugging around with for hours are solved in just a few minutes and you’re fully motivated to hack some code.
Off topic: Potato chips are definitely one of the greatest inventions of mankind.
In Memoriam: The good old coffee machine
Yes. It’s true. The good old coffee machine died a few days ago. Every morning it woke me up with some fresh brewed coffee. Every morning in the past months if not years. Actually, it gave all team members some caffeine rushing through their veins to survive all the dev-times. Finally, after 14699 cups (not a joke, the machine has a counter) it decided not to heat water anymore.
Somehow this seems a little suspicious to me. First, I got these problems (grml and grrr) with my cup warmer, but now even the coffee machine refuses to heat water for my coffee. There is something cooking…
Touching old code…
…oh I hate it. Especially if it was written in a great hurry back then. Do you know the surprise when you look at old and dirty code, asking yourself if you were the one who wrote that crap? I’m currently in the situation of improving some things of pre-alpha stage software I wrote last year.
First, when you start reviewing the code and playing with it, no danger seems to emerge from it besides a strange feeling of uncertainty. Then, however, when you alter the first line of it, all hell breaks loose. The requested features for the new version depend on changing a lot of stuff in the old code, or updating the third party libraries results in messing up the whole thing. Or even worse, your own code just breaks apart and stops working and you have no idea why.
That’s the point where you start thinking of rewriting it from scratch, but then end up in just doing some patchwork to get it up and running again. For at least another year or until the next feature requests arrive.
For those of you thinking something like “oh no, we’re never gonna play a game by this guy” – no worries, I wasn’t talking about game related software this time, but of one of the software projects I had to work on during my studies at the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences.