It's been a while since I last posted but Space Crusade has not ground to a halt... it's just been going really slowly as I haven't had the competition to drive me.
I have still not been working towards anything specifically Space Crusadey. I've mostly been tweaking my window manager: layouts are easy to create now and are far, far more intuitive than - just off the top of my head - Swings.
I've also done a fair bit more with my Direct Input libraries (as driven by the eventing I need for my components). As I basically haven't worked on them since 'varsity they we're icky and inconsistent but look much nicer now.
More importantly is that Dave has dug up a Space Marine for me - you can see the squad in the screen shot below... and ... this is where life got interesting. Each marine is only about 7000 polys and they were rendering significantly slower than they should have. So whilst installing the NVidia debugger - to find out what's wrong - I bascially stuffed up my computer and only re-installed it last weekend. All is coming back to normal but that put a significant dent in my development time.
On an unrelated note the XBox 360 has finally been launched in South Africa and I attended on Friday. As this is the first time I've actually seen a running 360 I must say I was a bit disappointed. I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the later XBox games and the new XBox 360 games. Microsoft really did release this console prematurely - I remember when the PS2 came out is was streaks ahead of anything PC's could do at the time but with the 360... well my PC looks better and has less annoying load times.
It wasn't all bad though - I bought myself a 360 PC controller and have been happily MAMEing ever since. And on that note I'm going to see if I can't beat the third stage of Dangun Feveron on a single coin.
Later,
Andrew
I have still not been working towards anything specifically Space Crusadey. I've mostly been tweaking my window manager: layouts are easy to create now and are far, far more intuitive than - just off the top of my head - Swings.
I've also done a fair bit more with my Direct Input libraries (as driven by the eventing I need for my components). As I basically haven't worked on them since 'varsity they we're icky and inconsistent but look much nicer now.
More importantly is that Dave has dug up a Space Marine for me - you can see the squad in the screen shot below... and ... this is where life got interesting. Each marine is only about 7000 polys and they were rendering significantly slower than they should have. So whilst installing the NVidia debugger - to find out what's wrong - I bascially stuffed up my computer and only re-installed it last weekend. All is coming back to normal but that put a significant dent in my development time.
On an unrelated note the XBox 360 has finally been launched in South Africa and I attended on Friday. As this is the first time I've actually seen a running 360 I must say I was a bit disappointed. I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the later XBox games and the new XBox 360 games. Microsoft really did release this console prematurely - I remember when the PS2 came out is was streaks ahead of anything PC's could do at the time but with the 360... well my PC looks better and has less annoying load times.
It wasn't all bad though - I bought myself a 360 PC controller and have been happily MAMEing ever since. And on that note I'm going to see if I can't beat the third stage of Dangun Feveron on a single coin.
Later,
Andrew
posted by Andrew at
8:33 pm
6 Comments:
I just don't think you've seen the Xbox360 at it's best. Remember, XBox360 was released over a year ago everywhere else - it's GFX chip must've been finalized quite a bit before that. Technically it's specs are still better than the card that you have.
The place where you will *see* the difference is on an HD screen which makes the games look super crisp. Obviously, increases in graphics programming methods have been smaller compared to the increases in polygon and shading budgets.
I'm still keen to see the PS3 though.
By
Justin Paver, at 6:08 am
Hello again! ;)
You know what? This is all black magic for me:P
Whatever...just dropped by to say HI!
Cheerio for now!
Filip
By
Anonymous, at 9:09 pm
Yo! Still around, just snowed under with work at the moment (I should be in the office at the moment)... Anyways,
Cheerio
By
Andrew, at 12:56 pm
Yeah I'm with Jus on this. The problem is a lot of the demo kiosks in stores have been set up wrong. The Samsung HDTVs they're using are sweet, but in some cases they're using standard def composite cables (which will look awful on any LCD) and in other cases they're using the HD cables, but the res and widescreen settings are wrong, so the image is being distorted-SA sales people, you just can't win!
By
Flint, at 5:18 pm
Just to let you know space crusade is the of the best games i ever played on the amiga and im trying to get to play it on the pc but no joy :-( so keep up the good work buddy im rootin for ya.
By
Anonymous, at 12:01 am
Thanks for the post, I never played the amiga version though... The PC version runs fine under dos box.
Also now that SA's bandwidth is slightly less crappy I may be able to post comments without them getting lost... So I can say that I know that Dan changed all the TVs at rAge just before the XBox launch which is whys they were all crappily setup. Figures...
Later!
By
Andrew, at 9:34 pm
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