Atheistmas

Had a great Christmas and New Year, marred only by having to work now and again. Presents received were very booky (a good thing) including a number of zombie books and a Hawkwind biography, and plenty of funky studenty clothes; I gave a Buffy Lego collection to the Buffy Fan, and we sat and watched numerous episodes, which was cosy.

Made it to the Glasgow IMAX a couple of times, saw “The Snowman vs Santa” on Christmas Eve and “The Polar Express” just after Boxing Day, both in glorious IMAX 3D. Snowman v Santa was very cool, the battle for Christmas including a direct copy of the assault on Hoth from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, with 50ft igloo walkers replacing Darth Vader’s AT-ATs, cartoony, but more than sufficient and quite fun; but Polar Express was just stunning, the quality of the models and the animation jaw dropping, let alone with the in-your-face 3D.

I’m not a great fan of turkey at the best of times, chicken is fine, goose is nice, but turkey typically goes from lethally-raw to overcooked with no intervening palatable stage, so my Christmas dinner this year was a £5 frozen mini-lobster. Best Christmas dinner ever!

Was really good to meet up with a friend who has moved to “North of LA” and was back on holiday; did a lot of “boy” stuff: drank beer, played pool, ate curry, finished with a game of Lord of the Rings Risk. And we didn’t swap presents – Hurrah for Resisting Santa! Admittedly we did do the “girl” thing of talking, but not “feelings” so much as “how would we program a really good game of cards”.

Lord of the Rings Risk was good fun, though different from traditional Risk in a number of ways. For a start there is a timer – the Ring starts in The Shire and moves over the board, when it reaches the end of the board the game is over; and there aren’t secret Mission cards with your win condition, everyone has the same win condition – when the Ring reaches the end of the board you count Territory and played Adventure cards, removing some of the fun in trying to guess exactly what your opponent is up to. The Adventure cards are fun, though, giving a useful combat or play advantage such as stealing (converting) opponent troops. The Timer was fine, Risk can take a very long time to play, so having a version playable in a limited timeframe is handy.

Finally I’ve spent a hideous amount of time on the Internet researching “Dark Basic DLLs”. DB is a functional basic, adequate for making reasonable (though certainly not professional) 2D and 3D games, but it is a limited language with numerous useful features not implemented. One of the strengths of DB is it is possible to write extra functions in a low-level professional language (typically C++), compile to DLL form (a type of library), and they can be called from DB. There are some incredibly useful functions made by the DB user community, including physics modelling packages and multiplayer network commands. I’ve researched the ones I want to have, DLLs known to be stable, and have gone on a downloading spree. Suddenly the limited language of DB has blossomed into something much more professional and interesting to work with. It means my “Shit Head” will certainly be multiplayer (Internet) and it won’t take me a hideous amount of time to do that.

Jack Black and Ghosts of Christmas Working

I have a few projects to keep me busy over Christmas, plenty of Maths and 3D Modelleing to get on with, I’ve also started work on a card game (Shit Head) which is turning out to be an interesting programming project. The first version will be a player against an AI, the next version will see the options of a number of play styles, then I’ll look to make it multiplayer.

Went to see Tenatious D last week, quite a spectacle. Good fun though perhaps more Jasper Carrott than Led Zepplin.