It’s pretty awesome.  It got my theme and layout downloaded right away, and it’s a cool little WYSISG editor.  I’m not gonna lie, it’s gonna make me update my blog more often. 

Also, I got WordPress updated to it’s newest version.  I keep forgetting to do that, but thankfully it’s easy to update.

Well, with two points of advertising, we are at 181 players at the moment. Which is alot. I’m excited.

I got it free through MSDNAA (thanks OSU ), and it works pretty good.

The installation experience was painless, stuck the ISO onto a boot USB drive, and then reformatted my C drive. Formatting a 250gb drive took seconds, and then installation was around 30 minutes or so to unpack everything off the USB drive and install it. It autodetected and installed my video and mobo drivers during installation, and flipped to my native resolution in the middle of the installation. It was pretty sweet.

I haven’t played any games on it yet, but I am totally happy I upgraded from XP to Windows 7. It’s slick.

Coolest feature by far is the Snipping tool. I drag a box in my desktop and it screenshots it. Freaking Awesome.

Borderlands

The FPS and RPG made a baby. And it looks awesome. It’s on Unreal 3, and you level up and stuff. All the weapons and bad guys (and map parts) are procedurally generated. They have something like 5 million guns. It’s kinda awesome. It comes out October 20th

Starcraft 2

Who isn’t looking forward to this game? I have always been a fan of Blizzard works. This looks like it’s going to finally trump Warcraft 3 in the amount I’m going to play it. For reference, I got Warcraft 3 the day it was released and I still play it to this day.

Natural Selection 2

I loved the first Natural Selection, and I’m very very very happy Unknown Worlds is making NS2 on their own engine. It’s gonna be pretty awesome if they manage to pull it off again. I’m an old NS fanboy, so, I have high hopes.

Brutal Legend

It’s an Xbox 360 game with Jack Black as the main character. He is a roadie that gets sent to a world of hard rock, where he is like a god or something. His guitar is a explosion generating metal machine, and he wields a giant battleaxe. There is a bunch of cameo appearances as well, with Ozzy, Lemmy, and a few others. It’s pretty awesome looking.

Watched the entire season of Firefly. Really sad that it only lasted like 14 episodes. It was a VERY good show, and makes me want to watch Serenity again. My favorite line is when they discover that River Tam can read minds, and Wash is like “Mind Reading? That’s like, Science Fiction or something” and Zoe responds “Wash, You’re on a space ship”. I laughed pretty hard at that.

In other news, I did quite a bit of work on Empires, adding custom tracers, Lightning tanks, and watching Ark make laser rifles. Also, Resist scripts are fully in, and I’m getting alot of good feedback from it, working through bugs and little naggles, and finally getting it in. It’s really good to set up things this explicit, with specific resists for each weapon type. It gives us far more room to balance Cannons vs Missiles, as well as creates some interesting tactics to watch out for.

Also, The Rattle did an interview of the Empires team…That should show up in a few days. Lots of good questions, and some even better answers from the development team. Look forward to it.

I’m also working on a psuedo-AI/pathfinding/brainmagic algorithm for a quad-rotor robot. It’s a flying robot that’s supposed to find it’s way around a room, and find a picture. I’m doing the planning and navigation part, and I have to make it completely automated (no interaction from humans). It’s gonna be AWESOME.

~Kylegar

Workin on Empires, added damage types. I’m also writing up a fairly large devblog post for the empires devblogs, so I’ll link that soon.

I’m on spring break. Huzzah!

Yea, it’s pretty cool.

Uni is going well.  Learning java and stuffs.  Pretty simple classes, but, it’s fun.

Saw Curious Case of Benjamin Button the other week.  Pretty good movie, I like how much it made me think about what life would be like if I was growing younger instead of older.  I got choked up on the part where he had to leave his family.  It was pretty sad.

Did some coding on my Eee.  I’m getting tired of typing std::cout every time I want to print something, so, I moved what I was working on to a 2d rendering window.  I think this is actually going to become my 2d engine more than what the other set of code I was working on is.  This is a simple world with a dynamic size, and a camera object to look at it.  I also wrote a base static tile and a base moveable tile object, that I’m going to derive everything off of.  For drawing, I just have a 64×64 sprite, but, it should start taking shape the next few days.  I have all the source code on my Eee, since I think I’m going to try the beta of Windows 7 on my desktop.  I have heard nothing but good, and I have the iso burned to a disc…I just need to install it now.

Yea, thats about it.  I have a ton of classwork to do, but I think I’m going to go eat first.

It was alot of fun.  2009 is going to be a blast.

I’m suprised I don’t have much to say about how epic this year was… I moved to a new city, Empires took off, I’m writing a 2d isometric game engine…

and yet I have nothing to write.

Happy New Years readers of Kylegar.net…the few that there are.