Richard “legalize” Thomson (the organizer of Pilgrimage demoparty and DirectX MVP) just told me: he has done a 2-minute analysis of our demo engine dingus as a “wild demo”. It took 3rd place in wild demo competition at Pilgrimage'05!

That is pretty funny. I never knew it has so much sourcecode inside! :)

Here I am coding various things and it suddenly struck me: C++ is pretty clunky. Now, I knew this to some extent for quite a time already, but the more I code C++ the more clunky it feels.

I admire it as a low-level language; it’s very powerful and there’s lots of unbelievable things you can do with it (think templates).

But still, it feels like a low-level one. I really want to code by “next project” (whatever that might be) in Lua, for example (especially now that LuaJIT is out).

The company I was working at for some three years, closed it’s offices in Kaunas recently. Well, it was almost a year when both intera and motion parts of the name didn’t already make any sense… At start we were doing computer vision, various game/graphics/entertainment stuff, but in the last year all development was about some computer networks management system. A couple of programmers will stay for some time to support existing systems, but afaik any new development is suspended.

I feel kinda sad, even if I blame the management for the failures mostly (we programmers never blame ourselves, you know :)). Yes, I/we could have worked harder, done better etc., but all the way I (and probably ‘we’) felt that the ambitions were too unrealistic (*), the business plans were too non-existant, the management was just a bit too poor, and some forward-thinking was ‘just a bit missing’.

I guess that’s just my attempt to transfer blame to someone else :)

That said, it’s still sad. Oh well, just keep going on.

(*) Ambitions: “by that time Sony, Nintendo and Konami will be years behind us” doesn’t sound very realistic, does it? :)

Work has really started on the next version of Project Hoshimi for Microsoft. We’ve got to:

• Add eye candy, whatever that may be. They say we can ditch some old harware (DX6 level), but methinks we can’t go really wild (“minimum ps2.0” would be cool, but not in this real world). We’ve got to add some particles, transparent blood cells, lighting fx etc. Anyone has some ideas what could be easy to implement and look extremely cool? :)

• I can’t say much, but it’s about network, client-server etc. Time to learn some network programming for me!

• The guys behind whole this thing have some really insane plans that would rock the christ child if they would really happen. Not a high probability of them happening though… Ok, back to thinking about possible eye candy and the network protocol.

The Escapist is a good read from time to time. This time, it’s Greg Costikyan:

And actually, EA tried to kill The Sims many times before it was finally released. From what I’ve heard (and this is definitely hearsay), Bing Gordon’s comment at the meeting where publishing was approved was: “Well, it’ll only sell a hundred thousand copies, but it’ll get Will off our backs.”

We’re only talking about the best-selling PC title of all fucking time.

Gee, I’d want all magazines to be like this. Focused, to the point and without trivial crap that most of them are 99% full of.