ogre
It’s always gratifying, and a little weird, when I see books being written about OGRE- it just serves to illustrate (if any more evidence was needed) how far the project has come since I created that first ‘vertex coloured triangle’ rendering test on my home computer 12 years ago. I’ve been retired from the project for a while now, but I still get asked my opinion about things sometimes, and Packt were nice enough to send me a copy of this new book by Ilya Grinblat and Alex Peterson, OGRE 3D 1.
Well as planned and as discussed in my previous post, last weekend we switched ogre3d.org from a dedicated server running Apache, to a virtual private server running Nginx. How did it go? Well, surprisingly well in fact. I say ‘surprisingly’ not because it was a casual throw-of-the-dice affair - I did a lot of preparation and testing - but because I’m old enough to know that nothing ever goes completely to plan, and we didn’t have any (cost effective) way to test the full server load ahead of turning it on.
I don’t blog as much as I used to, for reasons which are somewhat relevant to this post - rather you can usually find fragments of my consciousness floating around the Twittersphereinstead, since its enforced brevity requires considerably less of my time to populate. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I believe that if you’re going to write a blog post about something, you should probably make sure it’s written in a half-decent way, and that’s fairly time consuming, particularly when you’re ever so slightly anal about language as I am.
I’m still getting the odd comment on my post in April about my back & why I was retiring from Ogre - thanks again to everyone for the best wishes. I haven’t posted any updates since then, both because I don’t want to ‘count my chickens’ too early, because I’ve been busy, and because I don’t want to be too self-indulgent; but it’s been 6 months now, and I figure some people might like to know my status, because it really has changed a lot.
Wow, talk about a ‘bolt from the blue’ here: I woke up this morning to find that I’d been included on the ‘Game Developer 50’ in the November 2010 issue of the long established Game Developer Magazine. It’s entirely, completely bonkers to see my name included in the same list as the likes of Sid Meier and Gabe Newell. Just, wow. 😮 Obviously my inclusion was based on my 10 years working on Ogre- it’s somewhat ironic that I was a GDMag subscriber when I started Ogre originally, and did so with the intention of creating my own games with it, inspired by what I read in those pages.
In a complete and total surprise, my cousin presented to me yesterday the result of a grand conspiracy in the Ogre community to commemorate my time as project lead - a specially designed, unique Ogre statuette! Thumbnails below, click for more detail… <a target="_blank title=“Sinbad holding the statue by sjstreeting, on Flickr” href=“http://www.flickr.com/photos/35150516@N03/4823660431/"><a target="_blank title=“Front of statue by sjstreeting, on Flickr” href=“http://www.flickr.com/photos/35150516@N03/4823661079/"><a target="_blank title=“Back of the statue by sjstreeting, on Flickr” href=“http://www.
Yesterday saw a triple-whammy of sugary Apple gaming goodness: Steam for Macwas released, meaning all the games you own on Steam that are ported to the Mac can also be played there, free. Torchlightwas a day-1 release on the service, meaning Ogre (and therefore code written by me) was among the very first on the service. Portalbecame free (for Mac and PC) Wow. A great day for Mac gaming.
For 18 months I’ve been told by a succession of doctors and physios that I didn’t have anything structurally wrong with my spine and that my bouts of back pain were simply ‘standard non-specific back pain’ - ie muscle problems that I should just take NSAIDs for and exercise more. I’d been a bit skeptical because the problems were occasionally quite extreme and seemed to be always centred on one particular location (the joint just at the bottom of my ribcage), but after getting many opinions and one set of x-rays I went along with it.
I’ve had requests to post the OS & browser stats for the OGRE site, which I didn’t include in my previous demographics post, so here we go. A caveat to start off with - as a programmer-oriented site our users are obviously a little different in their choice of tech to the population at large! Operating Systems Not really a surprise there, Windows dominates the landscape, with Linux and OS X pulling up the rear.
Ok, so a new clause in the Terms of Service for Apple’s newly announced iPhone OS 4 is understandably causing some consternation around the internet: “3.3.1 … Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).