Input from a 2 AM perspective.

I just read Shelby's post on imput and I would like to add things or something *tired*.

I like the idea of information being derived from enviromental monitoring, however you can just stop there.
If a system is automagically adding things to your calender based on a conversation it is listening to, there is really no need for a retarded ass, wait sorry ridiculous gesture for a simple confirmation to add it. If you have gone through the effort of creating an algorithm that is intelligent enough to pull useful information from what is going on, why add a further complicated step?

However the gesture proposed is not defined or explained so I can't argue on that level, I can say however that a key phrase would be tolerable in a system of this degree, crap just got distraec and lost my train of thought um where was I.

In order to have something like running in realtime, it would take some heavy crunching noming threw the crap, so it would be idealy a thin client based system where as there are enviromental sensors such as a cell phone mic or a computer webcam that sends its data in a refined and precise manner to a server that crunches the data.

I had a similar idea a while ago that took this to a much further degree and was much more useful than adding thinks to your calendar. It was a algorythim that takes all the input it can for your life and finds patterns in what you do, it then optmizes and alters your enviroment to better suit your living style.

Of course this kinf of information could have so many applications, for instance if say you had data from most of the people living with in a city, the program could find patters on a larger scale, this information could then be applied to predictive systems, a simple system would be predicting traffic patterns to a such precision that once believed random events would be within a narrow range of possibility.

For this to be effective at a degree as large as a city or bigger it would have to not only collect incredible amounts of data in realtime but it would also have to process this in realtime and not only does it have to do current data it would also be going through  the entire historyn of the system looking for connections and patterns.

So yes I think I just stole Shelby's Ridiculousness title and the more awesomer ide title as well :D

Now back to monitoring GPU temps!

Lolwut?

I don't think I have to say anything, I think this speaks for itself.

http://lifehacker.com/5403256/blockbuster-kiosks-to-rent-movies-on-dissolving-sd-cards

I don't like input.

I don't like input.
Not input, as to a program, but input methods. Keyboards are limited, mice are limited and touchscreens are limited (mind you, I'm writing this on an iPod Touch). I want to be able to input things with bodily motion. Project Natal, that thing for PS3 Sony is working on, ad infinitum, are all excellent, but they don't work, frankly. Don't work. As in, I can't use them to work. I couldn't bring my xbox360 with Natal's controller into work and use it to do all my work, I'd be laughed out of the building and then fired. The thing is, I'm inherently horrible at scheduling. I only know where I'm going to be at a given time if someone tells me. How does this relate to input methods? I blame current input methods as the reason I cannot have an organized schedule. I would love to use Google Calendar synced via Exchange to my iPod Touch as my scheduling system. But each time I try I just give up. Why? I simply cannot enter information to it. I don't want it to be modal, I don't want to type things into it, I don't want to pull out a laptop or iPod or Hipster PDA (don't know what that is? Search Lifehacker) every time an event comes up. I want to be able to just gesture ridiculously and have the event on my calendar. So I am hereby suggesting a constant passive input method; Ridiculousness. Best name ever, I know, but it's just a working title (it's still better than Longhorn, jeez). It constantly monitors information that is around you, like people talking or websites you're browsing, and when you make a ridiculous gesture, it stores that info in a super everything box. This is why it's called Ridiculousness; the ridiculous gesture. The information is then either further processed by you or autoprocessed by an adaptive algorithm that can make decisions on what to do with the information, such as add a new calendar event if someone just said that you're going camping on the weekend after Thanksgiving. The algorithm could possibly also accept specific ridiculous gestures to do certain things, like add a calendar event or submit a programming project.
I will continue to think about this in the coming weeks, and continue writing on this subject, if it so pleases anyone.

Signing off,
Shelby

(*cough cough* Steve, this is partly to explain why I never know what I'm doing at any given time *cough cough*)

I see I made the right decision

Game Development Diaries - 002

Well, after much work on getting WynterStorm running in Mac OS X, it works, and quite well at that. I decided to give up my crazy dream of building a Cocoa platform layer for the engine and just used SFML to get a window up and running and handle events. All the graphics output is handled by OpenGL though, so SFML is used in only one file, which is the Mac OS X specific port. I may give up SDL for the Windows and Linux ports and just use SFML as the core of the engine, but for now I'm just happy to have it successfully compiling and running in both Windows and OS X. If you notice the FPS counter in OpenGL Profiler, it peaked out around 950 FPS during that run. Using a custom FPS counter would likely show a higher FPS as it wouldn't rely on cpu intensive development tools to slow down the program but I don't feel like running the built-in profiler on the OpenGL code just yet. Yes, I said "built-in profiler", as in I have a set of classes already designed for measuring the application's performance, as any engine should, but I have other areas to work on before I focus on speed. The scripting part of the engine, for example, isn't currently working in the OS X build, because I haven't put in the time to build V8 on that platform. For now though, I am quite pleased with the results of the engine and how well it runs on both platforms.

Photoshop huh?

So, apparently Photoshop looks at every thing you open in it. Try opening this file in Photoshop and see what happens.

That makes me sad. :(

Game Development Diaries - 001

This is the start of a new series of posts I plan on doing, as an effort to get several posts out a week. For the past few months I've been working on a few projects, one of which is a Xbox 360/PC game and the other which I plan on being a 2D RPG for Windows, Mac and Linux(maybe PSP if you're all lucky, though no promises). So, without further adieu, here is the workload:

Project Tobias: A project I've been working on with another programmer and a composer/writer. This project is a 2D platform shooter, in a similar style to the Megaman series of games, and is aimed to run on the Xbox 360 and Windows platforms. Currently this is in the design and initial coding stage of development.

WynterStorm: My personal joy, WynterStorm is a cross platform 2D game engine currently in development. It will run on Windows(OpenGL, DirectX?) Mac OS X (OpenGL), and possibly Linux (OpenGL). As of right now the core only runs on Windows and Linux due to dependencies on SDL, and my inability to provide an entire compatibility layer for Cocoa or Carbon. As of Mac OS 10.6, Snow Leopard, several problems had arisen in compiling SDL software and as such I am currently contemplating using GLFW as either the backend for the Mac OS X side, or maybe I'll make all ports use GLFW. If anyone would however like to help contribute a Mac OS X compatibility layer to the project(written in Cocoa or Carbon) I would be ecstatic to have that bit of work out of the way. One goal I have with the Mac OS X port is to not require Interface Builder.

The engine does have a purpose; it will be used as my personal workbench for an RPG I've been meaning to create for many years now.

The picture above is the current screenshot after having implemented Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs) in OpenGL.

I got a DROID

Following my normal trend of "If its shiny, I own it"

I got the DROID

Its a nice phone

I don't do reviews because too many people already do and I incredibly lazy.

The screen is amazing, the keyboard not so much, the top row of keys are too close to the edge of the screen and I find myself using the onscreen KB in portrait than much else.......

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HAL

The name is so cliched that it is perfect, anyway for my house the core of the network infrastructure will be this, rough sketch for now, sketchup soon.




Click for better pic.

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