Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Stencil vole floorboards

cliffski

I was determined to not do any actual *real* work today, what with it being Sunday. but because I love coding, and silly graphical tweaks, I spent the day fiddling with stencil buffers, to no real avail. Originally, I was hoping to do some code where explosions happened ‘within’ the ships rather than just stuck on top. I sort of got it working, but it didn’t look as good as I wanted, so I switched to another idea for different stuff that involved stencil buffers, and wasted hours trying to get that stuff working.

It’s *almost* working now, through another method, but tomorrow I’m back at work properly. Partly because I will lose some time this week anyway due to going to London to give a talk on indie stuff on Friday, and probably spending monday doing my powerpoint presentation for it. That meant *buying* Microsoft office 2010 to install powerpoint*. It’s pretty cheap! (if you don’t want outlook) and I haven’t bought a copy since 1997, so I’m due an upgrade!

In unrelated news I’m also meant to be varnishing the bathroom floor, which first means getting some floorboards filled in with new bits of wood. I just know that is going to take ages. The varnishing is trivial, as I used to do it for a living. It’s the trying to make a piece of wood fit another piece of wood that I’m not keen on. Plus… Jack has got very good at bringing live voles in from the garden then chasing them around the house. Grrrr.

*I assume powerpoint files run on pc or mac interchangeably?

6 thoughts on Stencil vole floorboards

  2. Hi, I’m the guy doing the OS X port of GSB. It’s coming along really well, although it has taken longer than I wanted it to. We’ve been through a round of beta testing on a bunch of different Macs. That was a good thing to do because the gratuitous shaders looked, um, a little less gratuitous on some Mac graphics cards (grr, Intel GMA). In fact they were blacking out the whole battle screen on some machines. We Mac guys don’t usually have to worry about hardware variations, but did so in this case.

    Just tonight actually I worked out, I think, the last of the shader quirks to make them compliant with the whole variety of hardware, and am hoping to send out a new beta tonight or tomorrow. I’ve had no reports from the beta testers of any problems except for this shader thing, so I am optimistic that we’re bringing things to a close. And yes, the OS X version will also include the Order, Swarm, and Tribe expansions, and I intend to keep the Mac version on pace with the many cool new things Cliffski is adding to GSB as he goes along.

  3. Cliff- Have you considered OpenOffice? I mean, sure, too late now really, but it works quite well.

  4. *yes, but be careful with the type of office the mac has, it it’s an older version you may need to save in the older file format

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