Hello, Vista

So today Vista finally hit the shelves. And I had the first bugreport from an eager user saying that The Longest Journey didn’t run on his newly upgraded PC. Welcome to the new world.

The past days, I’ve been working on getting the old game ready for Vista, and as a result, it’s installed on my work PC. Which means that I got past the “oh, shiny” impression of it, and got to see how useful it is as a work platform. Spoiler: I’m not impressed.

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Verbieten! Alles verbieten!

This is a hot topic in Germany, so I’m posting in German for a change.


Sind jetzt alle verrueckt geworden? Die Mehrheit der Deutschen ist also fuer ein Verbot von ‘Killerspielen’. Gerade mal 22% der Bevoelkerung sind der Meinung, dass wir als Gesellschaft muendig genug sind, um ohne weitere Verbote auszukommen. Und das, obwohl Deutschland bereits eiens der Laender mit den schaerfsten Jugendschutzregeln ist.

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WordPress

I’m converting to WordPress. Importing my Nucleus database to WordPress is a bit of a pain, to be honest, and I’m writing myself a script to do it. Which is horrible because of all kinds of Unicode/Latin1/python/mysqldb madness.

How much C++ should you know?

At the end of last year, a girl asked me how much C++ she would have to know to be able to confidently apply for a programming job in the games industry. It’s not an easy question.

Most of the people we hire have worked with games before. Either at other companies, or making games in their free time. These people know that they’ve got enough experience, they often have specialized knowledge (like 3D graphics), and the question doesn’t really arise for them. For someone who isn’t coming from the games sector, but has maybe done consulting or some other programming job before, I didn’t have a ready answer, but I found one anyway that I’m pretty comfortable with:

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