I borrowed a power meter from the Library the other day and tested my new computer with it. It used less power then I thought it did. The box draw a max of 260W, but it was the monitor that really stumped me. Standby mode does absolutely nothing to the power usage when the computer is on.  Has anyone else out there had a similar experience?

A few years back I put money down on a condo, and it is supposed to be ready in a couple of months. Its about time I figure out where to place furniture and what colours to paint the walls, so I’ve dug out the old 3D model that I made based off of the floor plans and started to mess with rendering it in 3DS Max. I still have to perfect the lighting and I haven’t spent much time on the materials, but its coming along.

I managed to complete Dirty Split yesterday. It’s a short game, but it’s fun and the voice acting is really well done. The puzzles got a little frustrating in parts, but they were all solvable without looking up the answer in an online walkthrough. Some times game developers seem to throw in puzzles which require a lot of random clicking if you don’t think exactly the same way as them. One thing I would have liked to have seen was at least the appearance of choices if not actual choices. You run through all the options until there are no more and then you move on to talking to the next person. It would have been nice to see some side quests of some sort. Maybe in their next game.

On a side note, on April 1st Microids announced that Syberia 3 is on its way. While it was an April Fools joke, I hope they’re working on it. I’d love to see another part to the story. If you get a chance to play the first two they’re a little slow, but well worth playing.

Over the past two days I have received a couple emails from a company apparently working on a TV show for the Discovery Channel on Nostradamus.

I’m assuming they are contacting me because of the false prediction that was going around the net in September of 2001 taken from an essay written by another Neil Marshall. Although he lives/lived in a nearby town and went to University at a similar time as I did, I can assure you I have not written any essays on Nostradamus. If I did, they would be atrocious.

I can only hope that they are going to make a show about debunking the predictions. I wonder if Neil Marshall the horror film director is also getting these emails. I could do some 3D animations and he could direct the show.

…or it is just a new spam email that is getting through my filters.

I’ve been on the look out for an Adventure game engine which will enable me to just focus on a story and graphics without messing around with a programming language and I just happened across one while searching for something unrelated.

Wintermute looks promising.

The interface leaves a little to be desired, but it appears as if it is capable of creating a 2D or 2.5D adventure game.  I haven’t tried importing the raincoat girl yet, but the 2D portion of it looks like it works.  I was able to create a simple room in which the default character could walk around and as it walked into the screen, it automatically scaled in size.

Try out Dirty Split. Its built using Wintermute and it’s pretty good. The art in it is much better then the default stuff that comes with the engine.

I started a new job on Monday, so updates to this blog will likely slow down a bit. What I’m working on is all under NDA agreements so I’ll only be able to talk about small projects I’m working on in my spare time. All I can really say is I finally have the generic title of Game Developer which is a position I’ve been trying to get for a long time now.

Here is V1.0 of my Deviant Art RSS feed gadget.  It doesn’t have that many features, but it gets the job done.

[Download the Gadget]

Simply find a collection on Deviant Art which you like, take the RSS page URL and paste it into the settings dialog box. You can set the time that you would like each image to show up in milliseconds and if you want any adult images to show up or not. Click OK and it should just start with the latest images first. When it hits the end, it will cycle back to the start.

I visited the AGO today to check out the building now that the new renovation is done and I noticed that they have these little touch screens beside some of the paintings which have a half phone attached to them so that you can listen to audio describing the works. You can also dial a 1-888 number and then enter a three digit code to listen to the same audio on your phone.

As it turns out, with my luck, I came across one that crashed. It dropped out of the audio application and back into Windows Mobile. Internet Explorer showed that it was running some sort of Asus hardware with GPS ability.  I tried, but it didn’t have a net connection.  My guess is it was something along the lines of this or this in landscape mode.

Followup:  Just in case you feel like hearing about a random work of art, the phone number is 1-888-244-4184.  Enter 210# if you want to hear about St. Johns Head or any other random 3 digit number followed by a number sign.

I ran into a snag the other day with my Gadget and was forced to look into using a debugger.  Unfortunately, I was unable to figure out how to do it with Visual Studio Express for Web Developers.  If anyone knows how please let me know.

I did however find another way to write out messages and it’s a lot cleaner then the VBScript from JavaScript method.  The trick is to follow the instructions here and install a small application from Sysinternals which shows debug messages.  After thats done you can write to the window by typing System.Debug.outputString(msg); in your script. It’s no debugger, but it’s useful none the less.