I moved into a house with Gavin, Tony, and Nate in Fitchburg. I’m free of the drudgeries of the crumbling UW-Madison campus, it’s boisterous inhabitants and parking tickets. The rent is the same as I was paying on campus except I now enjoy a huge house, yard and there’s a park across the street.
The partially finished basement has become an amazing rec-room. A new 7.1 Surround Sound system, courtesy of Tony, compliments my 1080p TV nicely. BluRay movies on the PS3 are awesome, and games are even better. We’re thinking of replacing our aging media system with LinuxMCE. There are some cool videos that show off it’s amazing features.
Which brings me to Linux.
My installation of Windows exploded quite a while back and I took the opportunity to get back to Linux. In the past I’ve always found myself crawling back to windows for some reason. This time, however, I’ve been very satisfied.
Tony turned me on to the wmii window manager. It’s got all the features of my old fvwm config with all the features I never wanted to even attempt configure in fvwm. Tiling window management and the dmenu have greatly increased my efficiency while working on my various programming projects.
Which brings me to my new game engine.
Catharsis was growing out of control. Trying to allow for every possible use of the engine caused the source code expand to over 60,000 lines of C++. The entire engine had become much too bloated and difficult to work with. There were also features I had never gotten to adding and would be difficult to integrate into the engine in it’s existing state.
When I switched to linux I decided to write a streamlined and economical version of Catharsis named c2. I wanted to make the engine usable and small. C2 is about 2,000 lines of code, 5,000 when you count utility libraries. Those 5,000 lines of code amount to an engine of about the same capability as Catharsis plus a few extras. I’ll leave the details of c2 for another post.
Which brings me to BioShock: Go play it!