Family Dogs

Merry xmas and all. I’m too lazy to write much about it, so instead here’s pictures of our household pets. Terry is our West Highland White Terrier. He’s over 14 years old and is starting to lose his sight and hearing, but he can still be as cute and/or annoying as he’s always been. Flint is my brother’s Rhodesian Ridgeback. Young, big, tail like a whip – and excited/happy a lot. Did I mention that his tail is like a whip? Very cute, though – even though I don’t think I’ll be wearing those clothes he’s lounging on…

Not pictured: an old, disturbed budgie and the dead mouse my mom found in the box of xmas decorations earlier today

Impressions from Germany

Essen, Germany. Established ~800 around a Benedectine cloister, developed into a steel and coal mining town around 1830, destroyed 60-90% during the bombing of WW2. Today it’s being branded as a shopping town with its several miles of shops in the city center, attracting people from several neighboring countries.

GDC 2005 Lecture

My talk has been officially added to the GDC page! (Much) more later.

Page Redesign

Alright, version 2.0 of this design is online. It isn’t locked off vertically anymore and is (finally!) 100% 1024×768 compliant. I haven’t made a lot of changes on the outside, the gfx are essentially the same. But the entire underlying structure is new. Nothing fancy, it’s still trusty, hand-crafted HTML. But it’s set up in a way that’ll make automation through PHP a lot easier – if I ever do it. The articles section is still locked off, it will take some time to update them. If there’s one section that makes me consider going to a database ASAP it’s the articles

Most of the sections carried right over. The most notable change is that I split news posts and blog posts now. In the past I was always hesitant to put too many purely personal things on this page, because I also use it as a way to advertise new levels, articles etc. I didn’t want those news to get lost in the midst of unrelated stuff.
I added my backlog of olds news to the page, they now go back to 1999. I’d lost the original HTML files, but the evil ways of Archive.org made it possible to reconstruct everything but the pictures.

As for the look of the page, I’m still torn between doing a complete redesign and keeping the current one. I like the fact that my page doesn’t look like Just Another Blog(tm), but the dark look of the current page can be a bit too oppressive and overbearing at times. I’ll see, the new structure will make it easy to experiment with different graphics.

If anything but the Articles is broken please let me know!

Solaris Base

This is an unfinished (but fully playable) Unreal 2 level (based on the PC Games tutorial I wrote in 2003) that I released to the community. No scripting or particle effects, but the map is fully playable and provides at least 30 minutes of gameplay. See if you can find all secret areas, there’s three dead hidden scientists! More information can be found in the Solaris Base readme.

Download Solaris Base.