Last Ray of Hope

I just found where to put project and file templates for XCode today, I keep forgetting where it is, so I thought I’d wrote a blog entry to let others know as well.

/Users/<USER>/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/

I’ve tried other ones, but had no luck with them, maybe they changed with different versions of XCode or maybe I was just doing it wrong.

Until recently I have been using RAW Milkshape3D for loading my models into my Athena game engine. But I found out Milkshape3D can export to a format known as COLLADA, which is essentially an XML file that describes the model and its vertices, indices etc.

Rather than loading in the COLLADA .dae files directly (they tend to get rather large), I’m going to use them as an intermediate file format, and use a tool which I’ve named Donatello (after the great scientist and inventor, Donatello of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), to convert them to geometry.

Keeping it this way, any changes I make means I can just export the COLLADA dae again, and not every model.

Well we didn’t get a white Christmas, but at least it snowed in January. Seen lots of awful and some great films recently. I discovered an app on the iPhone yesterday that apparently turns it into a flash drive. Its about 2.50 and called Flash Drive.

Haven’t gotten it yet, but judging by its descripting and star rating, I’m optimistic, I’ve been hoping for something like this for a while now. Downside is that it requires WiFi to work, though I’m not sure if that is required or just a bonus.

On the way to work the other day I came by a sign that I thought was hilarious. Tree Cutting but with a man digging symbol. Maybe its only me who find it funny, I think the falling rocks symbol may have been more useful there, if not like you have to watch out of holes in the ground, they were not digging them up, they were literally cutting them.

I was tempted to sell my limited edition Phantom Hourglass Nintendo DS (there is only 1000 in the entire world), its already tripled in price. Taking into account damage and loss, there probably closer to 900 by now. But I decided against it, I still haven’t completed the most recent Pokemon Ranger, and Chrono Trigger comes out next month.

Plus once I have the feather stylus, I will have all 3 limited edition phantom hourglass items from around the world (I found one of the Australian box thing in a shop in Brighton).

I’ve started to do some iPhone development again, working on one of my game ideas, thanks to my friend Dave I have some awesome music now, so currently I’m working on getting my 3d geometry export from Milkshape3D to render quickly. I wish there were shaders on the iPhone, they’ll probably add them in the next generation.

Speaking of shaders, I’ve been playing around the Geometry Shader in OpenGL. Its really annoying me since there is very little documentation compared with DirectX. DirectX seems to be moving forward, yet OpenGL is moving backwards with 3.0, maintaining it C structure.

I came by this site linked by I think it was 4chan, called Geek Plus Plus. On this website you can watch 90s TV shows, there is Live and an On Demand section. Already wasted so much bandwidth, its like a special TV channel for the 90s.

I recommend checking it out, I’m usually an anonymous user listed there.

And occasionally some hilarious things will happen, like when Freakazoid was on in Scare-O-Vision, it said to enhance the terror, the word Scream will be shown when you should scream, so everyone in the channel started yelling, ARGH.

EDIT: I believe the website is now on PoopDickTV.

I came back the Puffin Books logo the other day and I completely forgot it was the starting point for the super hero puffins I made when I was a kid base on that logo. I originally traced it, then tried to replicate it, but as you can see its image became more basic shapes over time.

Probably my child like mind making sense of what it was. The name of this one is Superspintop, he is a rollerskating puffin with the power to slam into enemies whilst spinning to stop them. I’ve always been tempted to make a game out of them. I made a book on them, a 1000 ish pages, which I can use for data, maps, background, my handwriting is as bad back then as it is now so I should be able to read it.

Perhaps a children’s game for PC, but I think I’ll keep it as a 2D platformer, as that was the idea I originally had, I want it on the SNES.

I was just randomly googling, can’t quite remember what it was, but it was something code related, and I can by this paper on optimising C++.

Optimizing C++

I finally understand how the cache works and can improve my code to suit it.