The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

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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