Blog › November 2006 Archives

Progress on the coloured squares
After repetitively banging my head against a wall (and then having a frustrating time with game programming), I'm finally starting to make some progress with my coloured squares. Or Torq2, as I like to call it.

Soon I'll be saying "we" are making progress, because a friend has just joined me on the project - which makes it, I hope, marginally more likely that the game will be finished one day. We've previously worked together on the little known driving game known affectionately, to about 3 people, as "MouldCar", and not known at all by anybody else.



Anyway, here's a screenshot of the current status of Torq2. It really doesn't look like much - but that actually represents the bulk of the work for getting the terrain engine up and running. It's quite scalable and will be able to support huge landscapes through an elegant LOD scheme.
30 November, 2006 at 01:14 0 Comments
Christmas cheer
Is it just me who finds this story amusing? 10,000 Asda Christmas trees are being recalled due to a potentially lethal electrical problem. The spokesman said:
"I think the important thing is just to illustrate the three products that this has affected - no other products or Christmas trees or fairy lights are affected in any shape or form."
Yes, I agree, Mr. Asda, that is indeed the important thing here. The important thing is certainly not, for example, that in 25 years, children will have forgotten that Christmas trees actually used to be made of pine needles and bark, and required soil. Or that, as a symbol, the Christmas tree has its origin in pagan cultures that pre-date Christianity by quite some time. Then again, that last one is more directed at Christmas itself - an odd mish-mash of a holiday that pretends to be Christian but was heavily influenced by earlier festivals.

Incidentally, indulging in a small amount of research has indicated to me that there are several reasons for actually wanting a fake, sorry, artificial, Christmas tree:
  1. They are necessary in some rented homes due to the potential fire danger from a dried-out real tree, leading to some landlords banning them
  2. They may be necessary for people who have conifer allergy
I suppose, grudgingly, I should allow these special cases, but that kind of thing does set me off on the usual "modern world" grumble session.

I enjoyed reading about the first "designer" Christmas trees that were sold in the 1950s and 60s. They were made with aluminium-coated paper attached to metal rods; it doesn't take a leap of imagination to realise that if you put a light too close to the paper it was rather flammable. Fortunately for us all, Christmas technology has moved on a lot since then.

Before anybody says that my hankering for the old days of real Christmas trees is not environmentally friendly, I would like to point out that artificial trees are often made out of PVC, a toxic material that is often combined with lead. They are non-recyclable. Real trees, on the other hand, are completely recyclable, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during growth, and the crops are generally replanted after cutting.
26 November, 2006 at 03:40 1 Comment
When is a choice not a choice?
In talking to a good friend of mine last night, who was raised in a similar environment to me, we reached the (fairly obvious) conclusion that you can't make a choice unless you have two paths open before you.

To put it more specifically: if you parents subscribe to a particular religion, such as Christianity, and raise you as a Christian, with the expectation that you will "become" a Christian at some point (hopefully early on) in your life, without really giving you another option, then can you really be a Christian? Because in those circumstances, "becoming" a Christian is not a real choice - it's more of an inevitability. And yet most Christians would agree that choice is something that God grants to humans.

It seems to me a paradox - if you are raised by Christian parents to be Christian, can you truly be a Christian? I would genuinely like to hear an argument against this conclusion, if there is one.

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24 November, 2006 at 09:40 1 Comment
They don't call me Tim "Michael Schumacher" Jones for nothing... actually they don't call me that at all
Anyway, I didn't win, so I didn't live up to my middle name. I came a close second, which simply isn't good enough! Next time, perhaps. I've just got back from my company's annual go-karting outing (otherwise known as "ram as many managers as you can into the tyres before you get your P45").

16 November, 2006 at 00:52 1 Comment
Flaming Lips


Another post, another gig! This time it was the Flaming Lips - and they seemingly spared no expense to put on a great show. Psychedelic lighting, thousands of balloons, and shirt-vibrating volume were the main ingredients, which worked well with their slightly oddball music. I thoroughly enjoyed it, if only because I got to play with exceedingly large balloons.





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15 November, 2006 at 00:28 1 Comment