Category Archives: Technology

01/09/2020 – We Got A Puppy!

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First day we got her and she fell asleep on the grass.

Not to suddenly become an animal blog, but I just felt like posting about the adorable and equally bitey creature that has now entered my family and I’s life.

Her name is Summer, she’s a Retriever, and we’ve had her for a few weeks now.

She likes to bite my feet and clothes and sleeps a lot, when she’s not terrorising me.

But now onto other things; my brother managed to obtain an Oculus Quest. Being the curious lunatic that I am, I decided to see if I could get the Oculus Link stuff working and then maybe think about playing some VR games (Mostly Half-Life Alyx, I really want to play that).

While the Oculus software was setting up on PC, I cleared out a space in my room to do VR in. Using the Quest side of things, I set my playspace and ended up within my brother’s home screen.

I’ve goofed around with mobile VR before and I had a very mixed time with it. The lack of tracking often left me with motion sickness. But this; a significant improvement, a near generational leap by comparison. The sense of presence I felt within the Quest was a night & day difference to the pure headtracking on mobile VR/cardboard.

First thing I played on it was SUPERHOT VR. I’ve played the PC version before and thoroughly enjoyed that version. The VR version on the other hand was a bit too limited, especially in the small playspace that I had. I more or less couldn’t move either within the environment or in real life. Basically doing that arm rolling dance move that you might find in a typical 70s disco scene just to get the game to actually progress time. Not great.

During my playtime with that, the PC software finished installing and I prepared to begin the operation of Oculus Link. Which proved to be exceedingly difficult.

At first, it didn’t play ball with my front USB 3.0 ports; kept saying they were USB 2.0. Then I moved it to a 3.1 port on the back of my PC. It worked for a brief moment, but then disconnected.

Following that, I restarted my PC and then tried again. Mercifully, it worked and I managed to give Rez Infinite a go with VR on. And it sure is Rez. A oversaturation of images and sound with a banger of the soundtrack attached.

We tried to give Tabletop Simulator a go, but then my brother accidently quitted out of the Link side of things, which just led to more disconnection errors and an inability to reconnect. I eventually gave up and called it a day.

Which brings us to today, where I tried again. I started by power cycling the Quest. My brother never turns the thing off properly (Leaves it in standby), so I figured emptying out the memory might help. The computer was already refreshed from yesterday. This time, the whole thing worked flawlessly.

I goofed around in SteamVR, placing items around my virtual room. My favourite part being a two monitor PC setup, with a toilet as the chair. Fun stuff.

Games wise, I gave “War Remains: Dan Carlin Presents an Immersive Memory” a shot. It’s a very short VR experience that I decided to try out as I’m a fan of Hardcore History. I’ll talk more about in the upcoming Den post.

Now that I’ve gotten it working, I’m a bit more impressed with the current state of VR. I just wish I had more to do with it. I hope there’s a sale of Half-Life Alyx soon.

-Adam

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