Most useful set of (mostly not free) Blender Tutorials (2.6) so far

Here:

http://www.lynda.com/Blender-2-5-tutorials/Blender-2-6-Essential-Training/87088-2.html

There are flashier ones, but people speak too fast, like gerbils. And quack. The above is not narrated by a quacking gerbil. And it’s very well organised, starting with how you make a fresh start. Wish all tutorials realised that should be one of the very first things they teach. People are more inclined to experiment if they know how to undo any mistakes and/or begin again. There are many lessons organised into logical chapters, which also helps!

ooo and while you’re there at lynda.com the parts about the company are worth a look – can learn a thing or two about business at the same time 🙂

Some of the tutorials can be viewed without cost.

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Autumn

is gorgeous this (Wurm) year!

[07:35:22] It is 17:21:20 on day of the Ant in week 2 of the starfall of Dancers in the year of 1022.

The trees are lovely and this time the ground doesn’t look like cornflakes!

April fruit salad (Wurm Online, Star Trek Online, Creatures 1, Guild Wars, Aion, Forsaken World, EQ2 …The Guardian)

I had completely forgotten about Creatures 1

You wouldn’t believe it from the wonderfully tranquil posts but in fact most of my belongings are in boxes and quotes are rolling in for work to be done to this house. Well, not rolling. Amazing how many people don’t want work. I’m still chasing for quotes. Anyway it’s a weird way to be living. Yet another situation with which a desktop could not cope. Of. The lappy moves happily from one work area to another, and even out of the house when needs must. I have no trouble blogging, gaming, working on …Thingie, checking Reuters or doing anything computery I normally would. When I tell people I haven’t watched tv since 2009 they get a strange blank look on their faces right enough, but the internet allows me access to Reuters which allows me to watch the markets’ reactions to news as well as see what’s going on, I’m fine for news and if I want to watch something entertaining I usually can do it on here. I think the tv still works, but who cares. The computer access is probably why I’m not a screaming madperson. Home improvements are such a trial.

Theres been a huge dejunk which I’ve enjoyed terrifically and I like having life reduced to basics. It reminds me of the old days. Various old days. I’ve had the peculiar joy of back to basics during several stages of my time, though a stint in the bush was the best by far. Would do that one again anytime! That was when I was at school – we really had a fabulous education.

I’m still de-junking. I think I’m addicted.

Having cohabited with various individuals at various stages, I’ve inherited some of the daftest things – which I suddenly realised I neither need nor want. I have found no less than six dead toasters all of which were kept to be fixed sometime. Less obvious examples abound too. Old diaries. Man, I doubt anyone is ever going to be interested and I have no intention of wading through them. I had the verbals badly when I was young and looking for lerve – and its all total rubbish hahaha! I mean who cares if X had a nice colour hair in my last year of high school 🙂 which reminded me of the cap of a certain species of mushroom. All grey and gold sheened etc etc. Heh. Out. Anything I want to say about my life I’ll say now I think. I’ll keep the diaries from when I was sailing.

So there’s that going on. My Wurm begunner’s guide will have to wait it’s turn. I manage to game here and there, but nothing deep or sustained. It’s fruit salad gaming. Very nice, very light, bit here bit there.

So here’s what I’ve been up to.

Wurm still has the flickery ui thing, I kind of just cope with it now. I’ve not had time to test some things out for the devs – will do soon. Umm all the spawns are unicorns and my fishing rod keeps breaking. I still find farming my fields very soothing though, and just generally pottering about on my land. Last night spent some time making some leather armour – very satisfying. Should be good enough for hunting wild green dogs and when my fighting skills are up some, a unicorn may fall – the hunting alt is a wuss remember.

Star Trek online I play quite often. For some reason it always puts me in a really good mood. I’m only a Lieutenant I think, and a very inept one at that, but that doesn’t bother me any. I just have to commend a game where I can go and play a mission without doing homework and have a really good experience which leaves me smiling and happy. If it had housing I’d probably spend even more time there – I like the trekkiness, the graphics, the sounds. I want to own my own bit of it!

Creatures 1 – I had completely forgotten about Creatures until I was browsing GoG. Creatures 1 and 2 are downloaded and I’m once again spending 15 minutes here and there with the Norns which in Creatures 1 rather fatally don’t know how to eat. It’s a problem. I think I’ve managed to get the Encyclopedia Nornica working, but I suspect my Norns are doomed, doomed I tell you – What an amazing game though.  Will blog about sometime – if I ever manage to get them to eat something. Creatures is something like an ultimate tamagochi. Your little Norns do all the tamagochi stuff, but with a lot more independence. You can leave them to it and they will get on with exploring their very pretty world (at this stage with disastrous consequences) and eventually breed (maybe). Or you can intervene. And they are without doubt the cutest ever digital beasties – not in the sickly, referenced “about something else” way anime is cute, but just plain cute. The real deal. Their toys are fun, their world is pretty – and the Creatures community is a long way from dead, I am pleased to say. Player-made tools are available to enhance your little Nornic world – not explored many of those yet, the Encyclopedia Nornica I already mentioned is my first COB I’ve ever imported. Except I managed to inject a christmas tree too, I seriously don’t remember how I did that. Age…

Guild Wars has mostly been played by other people in here – I’ve not spent much time with it. This is partly because I (with the purse strings) buy copies and make accounts for supervised play – and the account I reserve for myself gets kidnapped/begged for/given away… this time I have made a secret one and am bopping around pre-searing Ascalon with hope in my heart! Perhaps for once I’ll actually make it over the wall before someone realises there’s another account in the house. It really is very popular in here.

Aion I tried to download. And tried again. And tried again. And fiddled a bit and tried again… well, to be honest if they can’t even sort out their launcher there isn’t much hope for the rest of it. The game downloads ok, the launcher downloads ok – then it informs me it needs one patch and goes into a world of its own, hanging at various percents. ah who cares. It’s 2012. I want to download, install, see if it runs and see what I think. Four steps only. I don’t want to revert drivers, disable firewalls, open ports, edit inis, unistall p2p stuff that they “need” (they have apparently stopped using Pando Media Booster now, but I don’t care anymore.)  Might try again sometime if I’m bored. Which is unlikely.

Forsaken World – play most days before bed – nice graphics, nothing too demanding, can let my head unravel happily in pleasant surroundings and pheumonia-inducing beginner garb (modesty does improve somewhat as you earn more gear – but the armour is never armour).

That used to be the slot for EQ2 but I don’t find that so appealing nowadays. Looking at the box from the outside, yes Sony need cash (it turns out). Under current management I am not convinced that this lovely game even has a future – and that puts me off playing it. Its badly priced, communication with customers is abysmal and on top of all that Sony, like the Guardian seem to think console and hand-held gaming is the only real gaming and that’s where their efforts will be concentrated. On a side note the Guardian video games section should be called Console and Hand-Held Games – if you just read it and nothing else  you’d think the pc as a platform was nothing more than a blip. Hahahaha! Tell that to Warcraft. It’s from that hidebound era when the pc was srs b’ness toy on which mployees did not play! My laptop indeed looks like it should belong to some go-getter in a suit (until you spot the raid-ravaged keyboard), but it has a few tricks under its hood like 4g ram and for Intel a notbad graphics chip with still unexplored potential. I’m not sure if people are still modding drivers for the chip – last time I looked people were, but those are sites you don’t want to visit without bug spray and full armour. In other words don’t go unless you know what you are doing re malware, registers, assembly code and preferably sandbox the entire journey. My apologies to any legitimate operators out there, but even finding those is perilous.

And that’s about it – plootering with other games but most I’m still at the “learning the controls” stage, not much to report. Nor do most games lend themselves to story-telling. I’m sure I’ll find another one that does sometime, but mostly there isn’t a lot to say about one’s personal journey – you play through the quests/missions – maybe fight another player, perhaps defeat a boss – all the same as anyone else = its very “lite”.  It’s when you creatively interact that stories happen. EQ2 has some potetial via housing for that, but not a huge amount. Likewise Creatures has a little via the breeding and (mis)adventures of Norns, and possible the creation of COBs. It’s something I’m actively on the lookout for. Lietenant Dgirp of the USS Potato is happy on her rails though, as are my new Vampire in Forsaken World, and the tourist Warlock in WoW – they are just not very interesting in themselves, though they sometimes point me to general issues I’d like to write about or think about.

I like an afternoon nap, me, actually

so roll on with the duelling definitions. Once, long time ago, I had the luxury of being able to discover what my natural sleep patterns are. Not many people can say that! Anyway mine turn out to be sleep a bit, get up do stuff, sleep a bit – with no other reference to day or night, and sleeping/waking for varying lengths of time. The weather, hot weather = have a longer snooze, rainy weather = have a deeper snooze. Cold or mild weather, get out and about. Not that long ago I also took a child to the zoo and observed pretty much the same behaviour. The animals slept a bit, got up and wandered about a bit… I am not alone!

I don’t actually know anyone else that’s found out their personal sleep patterns. Mostly we live with them being interrupted to the point of being unobservable I think. On the weekends I always plan for an afternoon nap because I now happen to know that’s likely to be a natural thing for me. Here’s a list of things that send me off beautifully (apart from people not debating which field the prize pig should be in because they can’t figure out what a pig or a field is.) Some are quite noisy, oddly enough:

* plane droning in the sky on a hot summer afternoon
* muted sounds of joyful pvp from computers around the house
* hot water bottle in small of back
* sound of rain outside through open window
* scent of herbed roast slowly evolving in the kitchen
* having been out earlier for a long walk!
* clear (well pretty much) concscience 🙂
* daydream about fluffy pink clouds…. and

that’s it, I’m away again.  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz z zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

 

Before you can say that you need to define….

Me: “yeah, on ya go”    (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!)

Laptop owners like eyecandy too (+1 to Forsaken World)

I’ve been meaning to write about Forsaken World for a while. It’s a game that lives firmly on my hard drive. I like playing it, it causes me no grief or stress, and it deserves a good word. I’ve been playing since just after it launched, not bothering with progression, since I long ago stopped mixing playing with work or competition. I do think if you’re hardcore or progressionist it might be frustrating, wouldn’t know, don’t want to know. As a way of spending happy hours not in the real world it works just fine. It’s very different from Wurm (so is everything), bears some resemblance to WoW, is a bit like Perfect World, it was made to make money and I have no doubt it’s doing that effectively but it doesn’t annoy you about it. Quite hard to describe. The model seems to have been make it, ship it, maintain it, add a few things now and then, profit from cash shop = deceptively simple. And it looks good, maybe particularly on the laptops. (I have seen some high enders complaining that their ubersettings don’t give them anything extra.)

standard settings – it’s a miracle!

Many things in life make me happy and that is definitely one of them. When I sit down to play, sometimes it’s juust nice to look at something pretty that doesn’t lag, not a hint of it. But it’s not only that, I think it’san interesting game both to play and to look at as a game.

I may be wrong but I do think this game was put together like Frankenstein from ideas in other games that work, so it has a lot of the old garbage (well I think it’s time to bin this stuff) – sticky guilds, no solo instances (at all!) and various other things which don’t look so happy nowadays. I’m up to 40 on my bard, but most of the time I’m trying not to be turbo-boosted and go faster. Which is quite hard to achieve.

And there are a lot of systems. I’m not sure if they just like systems or decided to try all of them out. At first I was more than bewildered by all the free stuff your bag fills up with. I still hav eno idea what half of it is for and absolutely no way to keep it all for finding out later. Somewhere around level 30 it dawned on me that they intend you to try it out and enjoy it, whatever it is. Maybe I’m just thick!

Tell you what though, its nice. You get a lot of free stuff – allsorts, and there are many different ways to acquire it. Some is permanent and all yours, some is temporary and obviously a taster for cash shop items – fair enough.

And then there is stuff you pick up just by playing. There is generally a lot of stuff in this game. And not a lot of bag space. Having discovered what all those shards are for, for example, – ok, I’m slow, I made an alt who is having fun collecting some to get a few items of gear I missed picking up through main quests and complete an outfit I like (he isn’t doing much else though – no room!) That kind of thing. He has to level slowly too or he’ll outlevel the mobs that drop the shards he needs. The pet system is fun. The crafting system is somewhat thin and totally weird but there is one. You get a daily allowance of vigor (energy resource) which doesn’t go all that far and doesn’t correspond to the vigor bar in your jobs window. It usually says I have plenty left when I run out – I’m probably missing something. Things are restricted in odd places. It’s kind of intriguing. Foreign. Strange!

The movement puts a lot of people off but after a day or two I got used to that. It’s wasd, but not wasd you know it. You can strafe only, no turning, and no way to bind the movement keys, while the camera stays at the same angle. Most odd. You can also click on the ground to move which would be ok apart from then you still have to move the camera independently. So most people autoroute.  I autoroute. I don’t mind it. I like watching the scenery. I can go make a cup of tea while I travel. It’s ok. It’s fine. Nae bother.

There are various reps and factions, a ton of dailies, a main quest line, loads of books, in short more than plenty to do. The instances are actually quite enjoyable – again if you’re competitive they might not be. I find them easy to do and not inhabited by screaming emotional madpeople, but I only bother to do them when it’s necessary to get rid of something in my quest log. I’ve never felt I *had* to buy anything to get further in the game (mind I’m not level capped or doing progression tho). The auction house works fine…, the spells are varied enough (cooldown watching based) essentially it all works without much fuss and it’s interesting enough for me to log in most days. I enjoy running around killing monsters in totally absurd clothing when its this pretty. There is a fair amount of underwear at lower levels though – aww stop it people, underwear is a tired old gimmick by now surely!

Hmm apparently not. Well underwear or no underwear I think I’m going to make a vampire.

All this new stuff! (Wurm Online)

One of the most fun things about this game has always been the way that it changes from day to day, from week to week. It has never been a case of waiting for updates, patches, expansions. Instead things can change mightily from one day to the next, or suddenly not be quite what they were. Even if nothing happens devside, the world itself and its systems ensure that it never gets boring, but frankly after a few weeks of play you get the clear sense that this is a game with an interested team actively working on it. It’s always been like that. Right now we have some exciting stuff going on again …and I don’t have a clue what some of it’s about but it involves many unicorns. Many many many many many unicorns. All over the place. I even own a unicorn now, by mistake. It got trapped at a mine door and I’m having the devil’s own job keeping it fed while I try to raise my animal taming to the dizzy heights required to get it down from there. I fact I had two up there, but one died of old age (somewhat to my relief).

Wurm has the best weather

Then there’s timers – apparently some timers were decreased and the world didn’t end, which is good news. Twitch players have been known to faint upon discovering that an action can take 30 seconds to perform, and quite a lot of actions fall into that category. Frankly, I haven’t noticed much difference – some things even seem slower to me. But I’ll ask my friend Darkren to explain it to me in words of one syllable sometime. I don’t mind. I usually do something else while I do slow stuff anyway. Maybe it was other timers, maybe it is more noticeable higher up. I doubt speeding timers up a tad will do any harm, but I was a little worried. The relaxing pace is… relaxing, I like that. You get enough excitement when a bear jumps on you etc.

At the same time as a lot changes, many irritating things never seem to be tackled. Much excitement then that we now have doors for our houses we can drive carts through. Phew. It was always the most tremendous nuisance not to be able to do that – I’m busy with other stuff, but I have a workshop with a wall missing for that very reason – so that I could drive a cart right in. So, very looking forward to replacing the blank space with a double door, particularly as things should decay (ugh) a little less in a finished building. Yippidididoodah and all that.

Then, we got “rares” now, all kinds of “rare” things, and there are higher grades too – superb or something. Well, I do have a rare tree sprout. I’m not sure what that means. Think I’ll just hang onto it. Rare things are slightly better than normal things, as far as I can tell, shorter timers or better effects, that kind of thing. There are so very many different objects in the game though, and I think what rare things exactly do is still being worked through. I’m not going to plant my rare sprout just yet, I’ll admire it instead – it even has blue text. Very nice 🙂

Fishing rods are snapping all over the place though. There has been a change to fishing. But that might not be connected. Or it might. We have an actual patch note for that – says fishing spots will change with the seasons – pretty cool – and bigger fish will be harder to catch. Doesn’t say anything about how your fishing rod will snap after catching 3 tiddlers needless to say, and I know they are working on it. I do know. But I can tell you I have doggies to feed, and I need fish, and it’s taking wayyyy too long. I only catch small ones, then have to go and make more rods. I’m afraid it will have to be a dog cull if this isn’t fixed soon. Or just let the dogs go. I can’t feed them. The dev team do seem to be blissfully unaware that anyone does anything else apart from playing Wurm.

I think that’s a pitfall a lot of  dev teams fall into though. There are always people who do live online, and they know a lot and progress a lot and need to be catered to. Must be easy to take them as the main focus of the whole enterprise. Us who pay for full time but only log on for an hour here and there… easily forgotten in all the noise – nevermind, I still found a very comfortable niche in the game. And that’s good enough.

What else we got – well for some reason in two weeks time you won’t be able to build boats in carts. Thats a bit nuts because the last person to add something to a boat owns it. Not having some way of building your masterpiece safely is a recipe for grief, seems to me. So there’s a daft one. We get quite a lot of bonkers. Has anyone worked out what the Christmas gnomes do yet?

I believe we are about to experience new animals too – which might explain why the spawns are so strange (and might not). I nearly got killed by a hellhound – those are quite new too. But I found a guard tower, and someone ran out of a village to aid me so it was hellhound, not me,  for supper.

oooo! New models – how could I forget that. Gosh. Yes, all sorts of new models are in. From carts to crops. Lots. That’s another thing making logging in really fun every day – you never know what’s had a makeover. With my older eyes I find the new crops something of a trial – can’t really see when they are ripe. But everything else is well snazzy.

Believe it or not, those are only some of the recent changes. It’s a powerhouse this thing, don’t doubt it!

The Breeding of Blue Dogs Part 2 (Wurm Online)

Poor Bonzo.

The hunting alt is relatively new (about a year, maybe two…) and still fairly wussy. We only just fired the spirit guard who was keeping her safe when building needed done and she’s just about coping, but not much more. The area is not so much overrun by mobs as overrun by leftovers. Like all steppes, this one is on the occasional circuit for some mighty hunters, and some meat wagons. What they leave tends to be old, mean and dangerous. Running around looking for a mate for blue Bonzo was not on the menu. But many dogs wander onto the deed and I thought it would all be ok really. Bonzo is a boy which means the chances of getting a blue puppy from him were small anyway, but I wanted to see how small.

Anyway many dogs wandered onto the deed indeed. And they were all, incredibly, insanely, without exception – males. So Bonzo has been a lonely, lonely doggie. Many a night as we sat near the fire cooking his supper of braised scorpion or whatnot, I’ve turned and given him a hug – “don’t worry Bonzo, I say, “she’s out there somewhere.” At least he has had good, sonsy hot meals.

Then the time came to run a gentle grey mare to the hunting deed from up north, mate for Silvermax, a big black horse bred from wild – they two to start a fresh line of black hunting horses. Dograid by name. She and Max got along fine and have already had their first foal and all’s well, a tiny black horse is skipping about, with “a strong body”. On the way down, at the exact place I found Bonzo, lo and behold, a blue dog. Hot and thirsty though I was, had to stop, hunt some for meat to tame her, and yes, at last, towards sunset I rolled in with a few more bruises on me and a Fifi in tow. But…

Rolf did something to the spawns… so I have since found a Lulu, and a Matty,  and Mimi and … poor Bonzo!

Oldie but Goody

Code Injection in C and C++ : A
Survey of Vulnerabilities and
Countermeasures

Yves Younan
Wouter Joosen
Frank Piessens

Report CW386, July 2004 – Katholieke Universiteit Leuven – Department of Computer Science – Celestijnenlaan 200A – B-3001 Heverlee (Belgium)

Now that’s what I call bedtime reading!

Some stuff about …Thingie

This household, people come and go – sometimes it’s full, others just me. So I have two modes, mum mode and splendid solo.  And I like both, but mum mode is the all time favourite, for sure. I like littlies and I’m very happy to see ghastly teenagers, yay. And I have a soft spot for those who are between labels, and I like the older ones just setting out… and… well adults are ok too etc. An ever changing scene. …Thingie stops anyone that stops in here ever getting bored, but it has a serious purpose for mine own – mainly to cover aspects of education that their education doesn’t reach – which are appallingly many.

The UK, and Scotland particularly I find to be distinctly third world all too often. I have lived in countries with clean hospitals, sewage that is processed not just dumped offshore, and an education that has grown beyond producing workbots. This isn’t one of them. At 11, I expect people to know what the periodic table is, be giggling secretly about at Newton’s Laws of Motion, have produced “hello world”,  be capable of changing a car tyre, and well past “spelling” as a subject. Elements of design could do with some attention and math is pretty grim at school here too. It bothers me that the basics aren’t addressed.

The quest text in games, which I wasn’t always available to read, pretty soon cured any “slow readers” around here. I can’t keep up with their kindles anymore and am endlessly putting away piles of books. Exposure to an auction house or two cured any arithmetic woes. The puzzles in Zelda were satisfactory for introducing a few more interesting math concepts and so on. And as an aside, tackling monsters and defeating them is great for nightmares.

In a world where people are valued only for their unit production, video gaming is of course frowned upon – most likely for the time it takes away from more lucrative (mostly to other people) activities – like work and ….watching tv 🙂 hahaha! Whatever, not my problem, I’m not adopting it – video games are terrifically useful for a lot of things apart from just playing, which is great, and I also think playing is completely underrated in a heavily monetised culture such as what we live in. I have no idea when pleasure became a terrible thing. I think it came along with this “work ethic” claptrap that is poured down our throats, I see radio 4 fuzzily in the distance, let me veer fast!

But not before one quick swipe – doubt very much anyone cares for a healthy population, think it’s more like initiatives to force a healthy workforce being endlessly propagated over the airwaves. What a pleasure it has ceased to become listening to Radio 4. You know, I grew up in a police state and I recognise brainwashing when I hear it. Ok I better stop there.

Anyway so we are making our own video game in here (…Thingie), and that’s why. We’re aiming vaguely for the market at some unspecified point, but it’s keeping hobby status for many years I would think. People are at school, I have other things to do – we work on it when we can. It’s intended as a fall-back for the growing workbots when they spread their wings, so it will have all the bells, whistles, legalities and capacities of a fully fledged product developed right from the start.

It’s a brilliant time to be doing this in fact. On the production side, the very gaps in education I so deplore leave the market wide open for anyone that knows how to teach themselves anything. Equipment isn’t hard to come by, nor information. There are some stunning tools out there, if you take the time to research, explore and then the added time to learn them (and sometimes how to fix them) – and many are free. On the marketing side, everyone is doing us a favour by making games that hope to cherry pick the upper end of the market by targetting the upper end of computers which is pretty daft. And the mass churn of used ideas is to our advantage as well. You don’t need any Holy Trinity, to name an old chestnut. One ranged player with a good snare or tank-pet fits all and everything else is an artificial division of that magnificent lonesomeness, which might be desirable but is hardly graven in stone. We don’t need funding, this hasn’t been very expensive, but if we did, there is Kickstarter. We don’t need marketing, but if we did, there is Steam and maybe GoG – it’s just a really good time for Indie games.

So yeah on we go! We have about 75% of the equipment we need to make this thing, enough to be doing with, and most of it is pretty standard home-use stuff. Another advantage showered upon us by the times we live in is that standards for home equipment are quite high. The main work for me has been endlessly reading and researching to see what works with what without spending a lifetime putting it all together and learning it. That’s a journey I imagine would be different for anyone trying to do a project like this, but the information is all out there.

I had a company before. Somewhere along in my chequered past I made one, which broke even in year one. I then folded it since it had become clear to me that I knew nothing about marketing, and went off and worked first in sales, and later in more interesting marketing. It wasn’t as dire a field as I thought it would be, and I surely learned a lot! So the whole company, office systems, project planning, red tape, accounting blah blah stuff isn’t new or news and can be factored in quite naturally and heh heh educationally.

Well, it’s a …thingy!

Currently, we’re fiddling about with things we’ve found to see what we might use. I think I mentioned Blender for prototyping somewhere earlier. After a lot of looking around we’ve decided its a very good place to start exercising our ideas both graphically and in terms of game systems. I doubt we’ll use it for anything but graphics in the long term (which is already plenty), but for now it’s where we are playing most. Our gingerbread men’s legs finally extruded and we’re on our way …It’s a brilliant thing. And so many buttons! I love it to pieces 🙂 Next up will be C++. I’ve looked and looked at open source game engines and although I’m deeply impressed there is always some gaping chasm that makes them unsuitable for us. Think we’ll just have to bite bullets and make our own engine. Can’t see why not. It’ll be fun! It will I tell you!

Ha well fun or not it will get done. Coding, hmmm you know, I see a lot of posturing about it as I read, and I’m jolly glad I already know how to do it. My knowledge is out of date and I’ll be a beginner again for a while, but the valuable thing I know is that it’s not anywhere near as hard as people would like to make out. You have a problem if your language is limited, bugged or otherwise wayward, so I’m not looking to use anything peculiar or arcane. Bog standard C++ for us (unless I spot something better for the task). The rest is just plain work, pretty much the same as anything else, no mystique, no fanfare. Line by line logic at the fundament, nothing nearly as daft as the theory behind calculus or as subjective as art. There are harder, far harder things to master than coding.

Needless to say we’ll be using laptops as the baseline. We might invest in a notebook to try that, but I think the bigger screen and keyboard makes the laptop preferable. The fabulous capabilities of high-enders is too much of a moving goalpost for a setup like ours. We are aiming straight for the most people, and at any given time most people have less than perfect rigs. That means we still need to find ourselves a few bits of hardware to play with later. Things with whatever gpu/s are looking most popular. For now we’ll stick to what a current cpu can handle. I think. Everything subject to change between now and anytime – that’s why it’s staying a hobby. It’s unlikely we’ll be wanting to spend our free hours on photorealistic graphics anyway.

When I’m in mum mode, I’m cheery and feel all happy, just by the way, and when I’m solo I tend to be grumpy in a contented, comfortable sort of way. And eat pizzas at 4am and stuff. So you can probably tell which it is by the tone of the post 🙂 To keep things moving when other people are involved I also keep jargon down, so sorry if you’re ever hoping for anything heavily technical here. I use it when I need to get through to someone that needs it to understand something – Aw, who’m I kidding – I can never remember generic jargon EPz9065 vdingbat.blah gets converted to “cache-doohickey with the older driver thingie on”, which is just as opaque. But works better.

And that’s where we’re at with …Thingie