Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine has an article about Smoking in Germany in their English section. It’s one of the things I dread about going back there this christmas. One of the lesser things, but nonetheless. Being unable to go to a restaurant and enjoy a meal and an evening wih friends without the continuous clouds of smoke in the air. The smoke in your clothes the morning after you come home from a bar. Cigarettes are everywhere. I wish they could be a bit more be like Norway. It’ll never happen of course.
Month: November 2004
LCD screens are nice
One of my 21″ CRT (Sony G500) died last week, and since the heat in the office can get pretty bad now, I got an LCD. We’re rapidly moving from CRT to LCD, it seems, Mona says she’s ordering two every week now.
It’s really nice. I’ve been experimenting with ClearType, and I think I prefer no subpixel hinting, but I’m just not sure yet. For now, I’ve got it turned on. It makes things look less sharp and defined, definitely.
I’m thinking of getting an LCD for my home PC as well, but I’d really like to rif myself of the TV in one go – having a separate TV screen is really not necessary, I feel, not as long as both Gamecube and PC are in the same room. Which means I want a big 16:9 display. Which is a big investment, still…
RSS Feed working again
Looks like during the upgrade to nucleus 3.0, I broke the RSS feed. Nucleus 3 looks for ‘feeds/rss20’, while Nucleus 2 lookeed for skin ‘xmlrss2’. At least a temporary fix is in place, and this link will have you updated again.
Goodbye Dreamfall, Hello Anarchy!
I’ve changed teams. fter two years working on Dreamfall, the new game in the Longest Journey universe, I’m back on Anarchy Online.
Why? I guess mostly because I felt drained. I’ve been working on that game for two years, including preliminary research, and I needed a change. I felt consrained by the role of lead programmer, too – it meant too little freedom for me. Whenever I ended up actually programming something, it was either some piece of glue that someone else needed, or I felt guilty because I was not doing one of a million other things.
So, back on AO now, and I’m falling into the nice after-expansion time when all the plans for what’s next are new and good, when the reality of time & money hasn’t destroyed all the high-flying plans yet, and the possibilities for what we could do next seem endless. Well, not endless, actually. Anarchy means working on a product that’s already out, for which the player’s idea of what kind of game it should be and what we are allowed to change is often frustratingly narrow, and you simply cannot do everything. In a way, I like that, too. Sometimes constraints are good.
First thing I’m doing: Port the whole thing from VC6.0 to Visual Studio .NET. No way am I ever going back to Visual C++ 6.0.