Garry's Blog

My main computer was partially broken. 90% of the time when I turned it on it would do 6 beeps over and over again. I have been putting up with this for a while. I noticed that when rebooting it came up with an error message for a second, something about failing to load at checkpoint “D0”.

So what is it. I rip my computer to bits. Remove memory, same thing. Remove hard drives, same thing. Remove graphics card, same thing. Remove USB shit, same thing.

Today I decide enough is enough. I set out to buy a new motherboard. I’ve never had much faith in the one I have now, don’t ask me why – I just don’t. If I can get a new motherboard that will surely fix it.

So I waddle off to Currys/PC World. Currys have 2 motherboards, neither of them are compatible. PC World have more, but none of them are Socket 1366. So I have a look at the computers. I really need to get this fixed because it’s interfering with my ability to work. All the computer specs are shit – except for one. It’s an Alienware.

At first I’m weary about buying it because, well, the older I get the uglier these cases look to me. Oh and the box is huge. And I mean huge:

But I buy it anyway. I have to put the seats down in my car to get it in.

Get it open, get it plugged in. All works. Unplug it, take memory, blu-ray drive, gfx card and hard drives from my current one, put them in it. Plug it back in, all good in the hood.

I set up RAID, format and install Windows 7. ( Note: It’s at this point that I realise that I’ve accidentally erased my entire iTunes collection – music, tv shows, movies. The lot. It isn’t automatically backed up by my home server because of the size. I emailed Apple and they triggered it so I can download it all again – for free – I had over 1920 files ready to download).

I start piling shit back on it. Visual studio, Steam, you know – the usual. I start restoring shit from my home server. It’s been about 5 hours now, and I reboot it.

Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep

Oh you fucker. Same 6 beep shit. What the fuck. It’s got to be the graphics card. I remove the graphics card, put the one that came with the PC back – and it works fine, boots up normally. It’s confusing because it did the same thing when I removed the graphics card earlier.. I’m thinking the 6 beeps must mean “no graphics card detected” maybe?

So.. in summary.. Today I wasted the entire day and bought a whole new PC because my graphics card is fucked. I am a nobber.

But on the positive side, this PC is nice. I am impressed with the insides of it. No screws to mess around with, just latches. Lots of room, neat wires. Alien heads everywhere. Nice. And at least I know it’s the graphics card now – even if I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with it.

I allowed anonymous access to the GWEN SVN repository today. If you don’t know what GWEN is please have a read here.

Basically, GWEN is all the boring shit in this picture.

What: A GUI Widget Toolkit that can be used in games
Why: Current solutions are too much, or not enough.
USP: Lightweight (no XML readers, font renderers, texture loaders), neat, familiar, skinnable, easy to implement
Language: C++

It’s open now, it’s released under MIT – you can do whatever you want with it. We don’t care. If you do something cool though it’d be awesome if you could email me to get it added to GWEN.

It’s in a decent state at the moment. It isn’t great. I think there’s still things that could do with tidying up – and systems that might be best re-coded – but the basics are there. Basic enough to make that GUI system in the image above anyway.

Here’s a zip with a basic test window to show you what it can do. It uses a standard DirectX 9 renderer.. so your D3D redistributables need to be up to date to run it (or you will get some D3DX dll error)

I made a thread on the forums for people to ask questions and get help with it – you can find it here. It also contains the SVN details.

It’s been a while since I posted anything on Botch. So here it is.

I really don’t know where to start explaining the changes and the progress we’ve made. I’d say about 70% of it has been re-thought and refactored some way.

The world, entities and galaxy systems all used to be in one dll – now they’re split up. This reduces compile time and forces interactions between the systems to be more modular.

GWEN has replaced the old BUI gui system I’d coded for botch.

I made an entity input/output system. Very much the same idea as the one in Source.. Like in a breakout clone – when a ball hits something it calls..

Which eventually calls

You can also delay the messages etc. This is a system that I never found any value in before – but being able to send delayed messages comes in so useful. This is also super modular. For example, if we were to add a new object there’d be no need to specialize it – just hook up a BallHit event and we can do something when the ball hits it. Super!

I also added a system so that objects can receive console commands. This works like normal console commands, so that if you send a command to a clientside object and it isn’t handled it’ll get sent to the serverside version of that object. This probably made the editor possible.

Here’s a video of the editor.. (might wanna fullscreen it)

The editor is a world. Which means it’s kind of a ‘gamemode’. It’s still quite rough around the edges. This video is showing the brush face editing I just coded this week. The GUI is done using GWEN.

It kind of sucks to have to make an editor. You’d think there’d be a standard solution that people could just use, in the same way that people just use photoshop or whatever. Oh well, the hard work is done I guess.

So yeah. The engine isn’t totally complete, but it’s at a stage now where we can start making some real prototypes and experimenting with game ideas and mechanics. Anything else now should be kind of easy to code as we go.

Remember how my car battery was always becoming empty if I hadn’t drove it for a few days. Like when I left it at Heathrow Airport while I was on holiday.

Well the other day I got a letter that said that there’s a problem with the “Honda Civic Hybrid Fusebox MICU”. Apparently it controls a number of electrical systems, and is meant to go to sleep when the car is locked. But there’s some software problem that means that isn’t happening, and the battery gets drained.

So I booked it in to get it fixed (hence the spanner)

Yes, I really don’t have anything else to write about on my blog. Life is good, everything is great. I have nothing to bitch about.

I think I mentioned this in my last post – but I decided to start using my Wii Fit to measure my weight – after losing confidence in my real scales. Today I bought some new batteries for it. Turns out I hadn’t been on it for a while.

The Wii itself was actually at the back of the tv, tangled in a load of wires. Hidden away, like an aunt’s dildo.

The good news is that in all that time I haven’t put a huge amount of weight on. Just 1 pound. I’m pretty happy with that.

I’m still technically overweight – and I know people say that BMI is bullshit or whatever. But I would still like to lose a bit of weight (about 15lb).