Wipeout Pulse
One week until the newest WipeOut release for the PSP: Wipeout Pulse.
The game Wipeout Pure was the first game I had for psp. And I still think it is one of the best game, if not the best. Easy to learn, hard to master singleplayer mode and pretty nice multiplayer combined with awesome graphics. New downloadable tracks kept the game exciting And now the successor will be released soon.
Today I preordered the UMD. Even if I am not a game, I am really looking forward to get my hand on the little silver disk. This is one of the games that has the potential prevent me from studies and coding :)
When I understand the news about the game correctly there will a multiplayer mode over the internet. This would offer some nice racing sessions. Downloadable content will ensure the long term fun but if StudioLiverpool is clever they will release a track editor or exporter, because this would make the game immortal.
My NVIDIA History
I am often in the discussion why I prefer NVIDIA graphics cards. After posting about my new MacBook Pro a guy came to the chat and told me, that I am an idiot, because I talked so negative about ATI cards and those cards where much better.
Well I grow up with NVIDIA cards. When I was in my gaming age, I began with a Riva TNT until the Geforce 4 series and I was always happy with the performance and stability. So there was no reason to switch.
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My favorite web comics
There are some pretty famous web comics I read, like Dilbert or User Friendly. But there are some other pretty funny strips. Today I want to present two of them.
xkcd
This comic is updated three times a week. The author is a physicist who is working for the NASA. The strips are about programmer’s strange behaviors and paranoias, relationships, math and science.
John and John
This comic is created by a crazy dutch named d!o. Usually he releases one or two strips per week. The humor is not for decent people. Mainly it is about sex and pron.
My new PowerBook
I know that it is called MacBook Pro, but after 3 years of using a PowerBook it is hard to change. Optically there are not much chances. The small FrontRow reveiver and some other plugs, two hooks to lock the display and the buildin iSight camera. A major design difference is the size and the weight. It is even lower than my old PowerBook and it weights less. But the dimesions are a little bit greater and this causes that it does not fit in my old neoprene sleeve.
The main reason for buying it was that I now can develop 3d stuff while I am outside. I always hated the ATI card in the PowerBook. My new system has a Geforce 8600M GT with 256MB. Not as powefull as the GTX in my workstation, but for me the feature set is more important.
I never had the feeling my old notebook is too slow, but the new machine is way faster: the boot process, the workflow, the searching and exspecially the compiling, everything. I liked the power pc architecture but also like Intel processors.
The camera has an awesome quality and scroll with two fingers is so nice. Well, I had iScroll2 installed, but it is so soft and you have to keep more distance between your fingers. FrontRow is wonderful when I lay on my bed and can control music. The most diffucult decision was: glossy or normal display. Well glossy displays have pretty nice colors, but when the sun shines on the screen it is like a mirror. I usally use my notebook in the university, in a train or even outside, so I chosse the normal display and I am totally happy. It is bright and colorful.
I will write a seperate article about leopard and its new features and problems. And for all the guys that was waiting for: I also continue Quake 2 dev soon.
Quake 2 Crash
I am pretty far with the Quake 2 PSP development. Nearly all of the maps load successfully. But unfortunatly I over write some bytes somewhere and I need help to find the error. I have not much experince in debugging psp code.
So if there is anyone who has good psp debugging skills, please contact me. Tyranid seems to be busy at the moment.
I also have rewritten the model loading and drawing code. Saves some bytes and is much faster. The unloading code is also working. You can switch between the maps now. This is imporant for singleplayer and multiplayer gaming.
Dashboard always in foreground
The dashboard is a really useful gadget in Mac OS X. But sometimes you want to have a widget always on your desktop, not only when you focus the dashboard. So here is another trick. You can access a lot of hidden Mac OS X features with the command defaults.
Enter this line in the terminal and restart your dock.
defaults write com.apple.Dashboard devmode YES
When you now leave the dashboard while you are dragging a widget it will be on your desktop like a normal application window.
Fun with Mac OS X windows
Did you know you can animate the minimizing, Exposé and Dashboard effects in slow motion when you hold down the shift key? Pretty old :)
But did you also know you can freeze a window in its deformed state and you can still use it? It also works with playing videos and other kind of windows.
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PSP GU hardware bug …
Not only the clipping is really bad implemented, there are some bugs with texture scaling too.
I need some more research before I can post more details.
Tremulous Antidecon Mod
Some of you might know the Quake 3 based game Tremulous. It is a team based first person shooter. Two races, aliens and humans with different abilities play against each other. Each team has some structures. I sometimes play Tremulous in my rare leisure time.
One of the problems in Tremulous is that some people join the server, destonstructs some important buildings and leave. Usually the “deconned” team loses. This is a serious problem on some servers. So I have written a very small mod to face this problem: the Tremulous Antidecon Mod.
The concept is pretty simple. After some minutes of gameplay new players are disallowed to deconstruct for some time.
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