Update

I'm not dead. I just post too much at 3DRealms and I forget about this blog.

Anyways, I'm going home for the long (kills bug on desk, damn things) weekend by train. Should be interesting. I'm going to take the train all the way from my parent's cottage in Parry Sound back to Waterloo. $50 about for the ticket, actually not that bad considering the distance. The bus would certainly cost more, and be less comfortable.

I submitted a entry to a contest located here, and sortof applied for a co-op job too, lol. I hope they're interested! Anyways, I found the site via the Reality Engine. I just checked the site to see any updates in their client's games, since I'm a fan of then engine, and I noticed the contest. As you can see from my previous post, it should be right up my ally. I hope I win, like I won that Myst 4 contest. Did I tell you about that?

Well over at the Ubisoft boards for Myst 4 and 5 there is quite a vibrant community. I got involved with the news about Myst 4, and they love having ther contests. They usually have an undisclosed member of the Myst team make all sorts of puzzles and things for the community to solve. Usually the reward is screenshots and info, but near the release of Myst 4 they had prizes. Basically, everyone would independantly solve puzzles, submit the answers and get points. Only 10 people per puzzle could get a point, and at the end of the week the points were tallied and the top 10 got a prize. After the 4 weeks the points were tallied again to find out who gets the grand prize. I didn't get the grand prize, but I did get a free copy of Myst 4 for getting in the top 10 of week four. Unfortunitly, there was some trouble with delievering the prizes so I didn't get it until a month after it was on store shelves. Furthermore, with Myst 5 being a real time rendered 3D game, I'm worried that it won't hold up to the visually rich tradition of the Myst series, and due to that I've dropped out of the community. :( There isn't much going on right now anyways, they'll just waiting for it to be released like how I want for DNF, lol!

My algorithms for thread safe backgroundable garbage collection and deadlock prood syncronisation/locks are perfected. Now I'm perfecting the code interfaces to them. I'll need to benchmark and optimise it I'm sure at the end. Then on to porting over my particle system to the new memory/object framework, and developing my run time type information library (maybe I'll implement a C# accessor/interpretor as a test). Finally when that's done, I think I'll work on a 2D graphics engine. I'll use it for GUIs and rendering the memory layout of my object networks, which will be cool. I also intend to add shader support/sorting and parallax layers, then some HDR bloom and relief mapping (pair the 2D surfaces with a heightmap). I want to make a game for Maddox based on this platform, and it should visually kick the ass of almost all 3D games and physically kick the ass of your computer, lol!