Category Archives: Technology

05/01/2020 – I Finally Succumbed To The Botnet

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A fairly entertaining Xmas break. Shenmue III ended up being both terrible and exactly what it should be, Death Stranding was a very interesting game, and my computer broke. Again.

So about a year ago now, my storage drive failed, and soon after my motherboard. This time, the remaining hard drive kicked the bucket. And seeing how Win7 is getting killed later this month, I finally decided to upgrade.

This time, I bought a 4TB HDD to go along with a 2TB I bought to replace the one that failed, and installed a NVME SSD that I had being sitting on since May. And then went about installing Win10.

The first installation had a problem where part of it got installed onto my old SSD, and formatting said SSD caused the whole thing to be completely ignored on boot. So I did it over with just the NVME SSD and it worked just fine after, and then added the SSD after making an unallocated drive.

Today, I spent most of my time reinstalling all my previous applications. It took longer than expected due to my sister visiting and causing the Internet to fucking tank.

Anyway, that’s been my life since Christmas. Not doing much other than fixing this thing. Check in three months from now when something else eventually breaks.

Moving on to the real reason you may be visiting; my next Den post featuring my Top 10s of the year. It’s coming, but seeing as I was dealing with all that bullshit for two to three weeks, I feel like taking some extra time to play some of the games I was rushing to play before the end of the year. Particularly Bloodstained.

Happy New Year. I hope it’s better than last year. Guess we’ll see.

-Adam

08/04/2019 – Bullet Hell Lane Shooter Has Been Shelved

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You’ll find more information on this post.

So after the last post I made; I decided to rebuild most of my PC, do a fresh install of Windows, and reinstall a bunch of stuff. I’m now generally back up and running again and haven’t had too many issues with the upgrade (Except for Metro Exodus, which I’ll get to later).

But looking at BHLS, I decided that it would need to be rebuilt. And then I lost all motivation to rebuild it because frankly, Unity is a pain to deal with.

So today I’ve decided to completely wipe my whiteboard clean and start something new… Or get back to finishing my “Gaming Backlog Sorter” that I was working on at one point. Either way, Visual Studio is gonna get reinstalled. And maybe I’ll fiddle around with Godot. Maybe.

Getting back to Metro Exodus; it runs like shit. Even though I’m getting above 60FPS most of the time, the stuttering is insufferable. It makes playing the game really difficult. I managed to help it by moving the game to my SSD, but the issue still persists. The only real solution is to set the graphics settings on low. So I’m thinking it’s a texture streaming issue or something. Either way, it’s very annoying.

It also doesn’t help that the game really isn’t grabbing me at all. The stealth is awful, the AI is awful, the enemies are irritating to fight most of the time because the visual feedback and bullet sponginess is terrible, and the gunplay is crap. It’s desperately trying to be STALKER-like, but ends up eating it’s own identity to do so. Throw that in with the performance problems and the game just ends up being a real pain.

At least the gun customisation is neat. Pulling up to a encounter, pulling out the backpack, and then switching out parts to take advantage of the situation is one of the few parts I like.

And to end on a happy note: Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry 5 are really good games. Thank you Capcom for finally digging yourself out of that hole and making games people actually want.

That’s it for now. Don’t know when the next post will be, but I’m sure it’ll be a happier one.
I hope.

-Adam

19/02/2018 – Motherboard Failure

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So after months, if not years, of problems with my PC, it finally got to the point where it became more or less unusable.

To summarise; my PSU died and had to be replaced, the on-board sound died over a year ago, one of my internal HDDs died, the USB ports on my rear I/O died, and now my motherboard decided that everything connected to the rear I/O (minus my keyboard and mouse) and everything connected to the SATA ports (Except my C Drive) are no longer recognised.

So right now I’m using my ITX machine. I’ve ordered new parts to replace the Motherboard, CPU, and RAM. I’ll talk about the new specs once the parts get in and once I’ve done all the work to get my rig back up and running. But the most interesting thing is that I’ve bought a Windows 10 install. So that’ll be fun.

As for game development stuff, everything is kind of on-hold right now. My data is safe. I have it backed up in my repo, and I’m pretty sure my HDD still works properly.

I hate computers sometimes.
Or most of the time.
All the time.

Computers suck. Live out in the woods instead.

Tetris 99 is fun.

-Adam

15/11/2017 – UI Design and Flashcarts

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Hello again.

I’ve been busy working on the new game, so I haven’t really had much to discuss for this blog. Again, if you want to keep up to date (Or mostly up to date) with that you can check out the itch.io page. But the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a sort of content creator which lets me make stuff for the game without having the code everything. Unity’s UI is decent enough for the job even with a few weird bugs and specifics. It does remind me how much I hate Unity’s hierarchy system because it doesn’t let you access the children of an object without jumping through some hoops.

Anyway, UI design is difficult when you only have so many tools to work with. You have to jerry-rig it a bit and try and mash different UI components in a way that kind of makes sense. In the system I have, there’s a thing where I define what happens on each specific lane, and to do that I originally had the idea of using tabs, which Unity doesn’t natively support so I had to build my own version of it. Then I realised that for later parts of the game, there would be so many damn tabs that you wouldn’t be able to navigate it. So I settled on a drop down menu instead.

Persistent data was another thing I thought about. One issue was keeping data contained in input fields to stay, which I solved by just toggling which containers of game objects that contained all the additional menu stuff would be enabled at a given time. The other issue I made for myself was whenever I generate new waves, lanes, or lane sequences; it would delete all the information that was there, and put fresh new objects there. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get around to fixing this issue though.

In the grand scheme of things, pretty small stuff, but surprising in what it does to the user experience especially considering how convenient everything is nowadays. Stuff really needs to work and be presentable. You can’t just do one or the other.

Moving on, I got a GBA Flashcart. This one.

I haven’t given it too much of a test drive because I’ve been busy with other things, but I can at least say it works. I have a 4GB Micro SD loaded into it, and considering how small most GBA games are, I don’t think I’ll be replacing it. The good news is that I can now play Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance without the game deleting my save because the battery on the cartridge died.

There’s other stuff to talk about but it’s mostly anime and games, and I should probably save that for The Den. Whenever I get around to a new one of those. I will say (And I sure hope I didn’t previously talk about this) that I read the book Masters of DOOM. And if you haven’t read that book, you should. I found it very difficult to put it down. Excellent read.

That’s all for now, till next time.

-Adam

14/09/2017 – Apparently There’s A Thing Called “Programmer Day”

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It recently came to my attention that every 256th day of the year is Programmer Day. In other words, September 13th (Or 12th on Leap Years).

Anyway, I’m still working on my game, which you can take a gander at the progress I’ve made on the Itch.io page for it. It’s going well, but I’ll admit, I’m behind my personal goal of having it be somewhat more showable. But at the very least, you can kind of see the ideas coming together.

So onto something more recent. I had a PC problem the other day where Chrome would crash on start-up due to an error in ntdll.dll file in my system32 folder. After uninstalling and reinstalling it several times, trying to install Firefox, a couple of virus scans, and mucking about with some system files; I eventually tried using Safe Mode and found that it launched there fine. So after a quick Google search, I decided to do a clean boot of my PC.

No, that’s not a clean install of Windows. More of a turning off of all the additional start-up processes and restarting the PC. Which worked. So there’s a possibility that there was probably a conflict somewhere, that said, I’m too lazy to figure out where. As long as it works I should probably leave it for now.

Other than that, Destiny 2 is out. And I’m playing it.
I wish I could stop.

That’s all for now. Keeping it short this time. Like I said, I post updates for the game on the Itch.io page, so check that out if you want to know what I’m up to game development wise.

-Adam