The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

That when you are working with DirectX you have to specify a BackBuffer width and height that match your client render window area or else you get really strange results such as blurry text, bad translations and odd scaling effects?

Well, I apparently didn’t so I wasted hours upon hours over the last week trying to fix a “text rendering” issue that I thought was somehow a bug in DirectX.  Now that i’ve got that sorted the new version of DeedCAD is coming right along and will hopefully be ready to go later this week for demo release!

It is getting toward the end of the month now so i’m in “conserve money” mode since I spent too much on my radio controlled airplane after I got my tax stimulus check.  I guess I could say that I was contributing to the economic recovery but that would be lying, I did it because it was fun :-D.

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I watched The Dark Knight on Friday night in Asheville with some friends and it was a great experience.  The movie was really good, although i’m still not ready to admit that it was as good or better than the first one like many have said.  I think I need to see it a second time as it was a lot to absorb and I was distracted some during the movie by people around me.  I may just wait until it is out on DVD so that I can watch it on my own schedule.

I think the movie was just a touch too long actually, and the pacing could have been a bit better.  The scenes with the Joker were fantastic and Heath Ledger did a phenomenal job.  Sadly, Batman as a character was actually given less screen time in this movie than Bruce Wayne and the Joker!  Either way, i’m still looking forward to the next one which hopefully we won’t have to wait too overly long for.

I got my Radio Controlled plane fixed on Saturday night and was able to take it out after church and fly it through two batteries.  My younger brother was in town and one of my friends from work came out to watch me fly as well.  I was able to do lots of aerobatics with it, loops and immelmans, hammerhead stalls etc.  Having that 3rd channel for elevator control is really nice.  I can’t wait to pick up a full 4-channel plane eventually though, but that will have to wait until I find a money tree.  You wouldn’t happen to know where I can get a seedling would you?

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An unlikely combination unless you count City of Heroes and Batman together of course.  City of Heroes is running a double XP weekend starting tomorrow morning and it should be a fun time.  My friends and I have been pretty busy lately so we haven’t had the time to play in the last few weeks so this weekend will be a good time to get back to it since we can make up for some of the lost time with double experience for everything.

DeedCAD’s major overhaul of the rendering system is coming right along and the new DirectX code is making everything nice and flicker-free.  The only silly thing is that DIrectX cannot do anti-aliased lines.  In fact, most graphics card will not even allow to do it even if DIrectX supported it by default.  Part of the reason for this is so that companies like Nvidia can make more money by selling workstation level graphics cards (such as a Quadro) that allow for anti-aliased lines.  What we may end up having to do is to render alpha-blended bitmaps so that we can still use GDI+ to draw the nice pretty colorful lines and just use directx for the manipulations.  One problem I can foresee of doing it this way though is with scaling.  If we are using textured quads to display bitmaps, you can’t just “stretch” it really large and expect it to look pretty!

The Dark Knight comes out tonight at midnight for those of us regular people who don’t get to see special screenings (can you tell i’m jealous of one of my friends yet?).  The friend in question did confirm that the movie is really good if a bit too long.  Given how much i’ve watched the first one (13 or 14 times now) I don’t think I will complain about the movie running too long since i’ve been waiting a good while to see it now.

Sorry for the lack of regular updates lately but it has been really hard to find any free time the last couple of weeks or so.  Work has been extremely busy (in the summer - go figure!) and i’ve been doing contract work at home.  Things aren’t going to get any better as once DeedCAD is re-shipped out the door another PHP project is going to be rearing its head.  Oh well, thats life when you actually have clients who want you to program stuff!

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If you are at all familiar with the Xbox 360 game then you are probably familiar with the Gears of War curb stomp.  That is what Sony fanboys world-wide felt like today when Final Fantasy finally jumped to the Xbox 360 as well, instead of being a Sony exclusive game (as it always has been ever since Final Fantasy jumped from Nintendo to Sony).

This ends a long saga of exclusive Final Fantasy titles going to Sony and at this point I think the 360 actually has more Square-Enix titles in the pipeline than the Playstation 3!  The 360 is going to get Star Ocean, The Last Remnants, Final Fantasy XIII, and Infinite Undiscovery.  Right now as far as I know the PS3 only has Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Versus XIII.  Versus sounds like a really interesting game but Final Fantasy (the flagship product) was really the only thing that ever made me want to own a PS3 and now I don’t have to.

Also, I think the argument that the PS3 is worth having because “blu-ray is the future” is a total crock.  Blu-ray sales have flat-lined ever since HD-DVD got kicked off the market, while downloadable content in the form of HD movies and TV shows have been rising steadily for the last year.  I think Microsoft may actually have it correct when they say that people are moving away from physical media and more toward the ability to just select what they want from a massive on-demand library of HD content and then be able to watch it in a short time period.

One way Microsoft is helping 360 owners and Netflix fans is by tying the two services together.  Now Netflix subscribers will be able to get access to everything that is in their “instant queue” via the Xbox 360.  What this means is that 360 owners don’t need to buy the set-top box that Netflix has been marketing and instead will have their 360 perform that capacity.  Also, it looks like you will be able to watch the content together with your friends who are in the same “live party”.  I haven’t seen many details on how that will work but it is all tied into the new Mii-ripoff that Microsoft has implemented as part of the massive revamp of the 360’s core look that will hit this fall.

All in all it was an exciting news conference and covered a lot of games that i’m looking forward to including Resident Evil 5 (full co-op and 360 exclusive DLC), Fallout 3, Fable 2 (full co-op 360 exclusive), GTA IV 360 Exclusive DLC, Rock Band 2 (on 360 first in September), Portal 2 (360 exclusive for 2008) and Geometry Wars 2 (offline co-op and tons of new modes).

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