We Have the Rest of Our Lives

So, spring break is in full effect for me, and it has been a glorious one.

I just finished marathoning all of Noein. It was a complete mind-screw in many ways, mostly because of the whole many-worlds quantum theory stuff. It really makes you think. This year I've really been trying to get back into watching a lot of anime, and that plan is going quite well so far. So far this year I've watched Psychic Detective Yakumo, Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt, Bartender, Kimikiss, Nogizaka no Haruka no Himitsu, Noein and rewatched Kanon and Myself; Yourself. A pretty good list for being only 3 months into the year :)

In other news, my video cards are running like absolute beasts. I started playing through Metro 2033 the day I got the cards, and even at absolute max settings at 1080p my cards didn't even break a sweat. I have to say, Metro was a really good game despite some of its shortcomings. For as good as the graphics were, they really should have spent more time on the character models. They looked like something 3 years outdated thrown into an other-wise breathtaking world. I also was kind of turned off by the level of difficulty in the game. There is no reason any human should take 8 shots to the head with no armor on and still live. It just doesn't make any sense. The game was also quite buggy, but those bugs saved my ass a few times so I won't complain.

Where the game really shines in is the story. Not only is it highly thought-provoking, but it's extremely well-written (it better be, since it was based off of a novel!). It really makes you think about what you would do in a situation such as that. Would you die off and let natural selection take its course, realizing that you are no longer the dominant species, or would you fight back against the very laws of nature and destroy the new fittest race?

I got Bullsetstorm when it came out and really didn't expect much of it (I just bought it for the controversy :) ), but it was one of the most fun games I've ever played. The graphics were mind-boggling (UE3 has to be the best video game engine ever made!) and the gameplay was all manner of awesome. What's better than kicking someone into the air then taking off his head with a shotgun blast, all bullet-time style? Yea, that's right, very few things.

I got the Crysis 2 demo and, of course, my 580's decimate that as well. I'm actually really enjoying the multiplayer, which is a huge surprise. It's very balanced and the nanosuit adds a lot of strategy to the game so it's not just run and gun. It may actually finally replace Counter-Strike: Source for me, it's quite possibly even more fun.

In terms of my own game, the past month or so has been all about optimization. One of the things I didn't realize going into Sorrowsong is that OpenGL is a hard beast to tame, and unless you know exactly what you're doing, it's going to bite you eventually. This happened when I tried to run it on any computer not as powerful as my own. Massive slowdowns and horrible frame rates.

Although I have to say optimization has now become one of my favorite things to do. It really requires you to think outside of the box to come up with a solution. I had to do some really counter-intuitive things to optimize Sorrowsong. I also had to do some very awesome things, such as getting OpenGL to straight load the textures in DDS instead of passing them through SDL as PNGs then compressing them live in texture memory. Streamlining my use of Framebuffer objects also was quite the challenge, I had to do some hackish things with alpha blending in order to achieve the same effect without the FBO.

If everything goes according to plan, expect Sorrowsong mid-late next month. I'm getting extremely excited. Now when I look back at Blackfyre I realize how poor of a game it was. With Sorrowsong I've put my entire heart into it and really hope that effort shows in the form of a smooth, clean, fun, optimized, balanced game that others will enjoy :)

In other programming news, since I've been authorized to share the information (wow, that sounds pretty badass), my work with Spaulding this past week was AWESOME:
In the span of a week I wrote a full-featured ECG viewer that supports zooming on all 12 leads (horizontal and vertical), printing, a perfectly accurate graph (where horizontal is 40ms/tick and vertical is 0.1mV per tick), and basic calipers (the weird tuning-fork like things you see) for precise measurements.

It was definitely some of the most fun code I've ever written for Spaulding, requiring a lot of low-level I/O (some of my favorite stuff) and a lot of graphics work (obviously for mapping the actual ECG, scaling, calculating the real-life units of measurement, etc.). It was awesome amounts of fun and I'm really surprised I managed to complete it in only one week.

The only problem I have with breaks is that about a week in I finally get settled to being back home and then I just have to go back to school and resettle. It's a little irritating the say the least. But there's also a lot of great things going on at school as well.

Our DJ crew is gaining more popularity with the rise of dubstep in the mainstream. More and more people on campus are getting interested in EDM, which is very very good news.

The game programming class is all going according to plan, even though judging by the midterm grades some of the students are going to need a little help. A select few, however, are very dedicated and really showing their stuff. They've definitely been making me proud.

I've recently been getting to know a lot of awesome people at school. Not only have I really deepened my relationships with some of my friends I've also gained a lot of new ones, and I'm surprised at how many people genuinely enjoy my company. It does get irritating sometimes, especially when I'm trying to do work, but I digress, it's nice either way.

This year has also been amazing so far in terms of music. Not only did I find out that The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus released a new album late last year, I also found out that it doesn't SUCK like their previous one. It's like they realized that selling out destroyed all good in their music and they've reverted back.

Good Charlotte also released a new album late last year. They're kind of a guilty pleasure for me, since I've been listening to them since I was in 6th grade and they really are more for angsty preteens, but I still really enjoy their music. Their new album has some really good songs.

Trust Company just released a new album and it's really awesome. I got into them a few years back after hearing Downfall in Tales of the Past 3. Their music is really unique and has just the right amount of hardness for me.

Rise Againt's new album comes out in 3 days, but I already torrented myself a leak (don't worry, I've already pre-ordered the album so I'll be getting it legit. I always want to support my favorite bands.) The song from the album that this blog post's title is from is definitely the best one in the album:

I love how it starts off quiet than hits you with all it has. Then the bridge comes in and it's just so damn beautiful. I've been listening to it over and over and am not getting tired of it one bit!

I'm getting really excited for the summer as well. I can't believe I'm almost halfway done with college. Time really flies. This summer, however, is going to be awesome. More work with Spaulding, I'm going to start learning DirectX for my games, I'm finally going to be getting my driver's license and a car (something that I've been wanting for a long, long while), and if it's anything like last summer was I know it's going to be amazing :)

But I'm getting ahead of myself, I still have half a semester of schoolwork, programming, anime and living the dream!