We are working out what I need to have done on the Sleepwalker and Truth projects over the next two months. I am recruiting a web administrator. Hopefully, the web pages will experience some much needed changes soon.

I see that someone is using Crusher to export Quake 2 models to Unreal Tournament. I think it is time that Crusher gets an update. I plan to carve some time to fix it and release a new version sometime this weekend.

I know somebody is reading this because I received the most cryptic email yesterday. *shrug* If you send me questions, please be more specific than “show me how to program”.

CODING TIP: Do Not Fear the Profiler. So now that you have written your program, you would like to optimize it to run better. A profiler tool helps identify the areas in which you spend the most time and of which you call most often. These areas are good candidates for optimization. As an aside I would love to see debuggers and profiling tools for the next generation of in-game scripting languages.

Profiling tools work by doing two things. First of all code is automatically added by the tool to the prologue of each function. When the calling program enters a function, the function name and program time are recorded in a file. Secondly, a profiler has a clock-driven information gatherer. At regular intervals the profiler examines the location of the program instruction pointer and records the function in which it is located to a file. This data is then analysed to produce a call graph and do statistical analysis.

Armed with this analysis you can target those functions where optimization will give you the best payoff. I will mention optimization techniques in future plan updates. For a good discussion of graphic code optimization check out M. Abrash’s Black Book of Graphics Programming.

Ok, this has been bugging me. AOL has a voice that says: “You’ve got mail.” You know the voice. It was featured in a movie. But is it correct English?

Shouldn’t it say either “You have mail” or “You’ve gotten mail”? What rules of grammar give us “You’ve got mail” => “You have got mail”? Of course you wouldn’t have gotten mail until you actually read it.

So I think “You have mail” would be the proper thing to hear. Leave it to AOL to elevate preverted English to ranks of big budget movies. Or, maybe that says something about the movie industry. Or, maybe I was just bored to tears with “The Talented Mr. Ripley”.

“We all of us live too much in a circle.” – B. Disraeli

Last night I compiled and ran Unreal Tournament in Linux on my TNT2. I have to say I was not impressed. I have to agree with whoever at Epic said, “[Linux UT] does not rock.” My Linux game session was stripped of its windows header and a stuck at the absolute upper left hand corner of the screen. Whenever I was shot in the game, my screen turned black for a few seconds. Also, the intro fly-by showed mostly blackness until about five seconds into it. I think there might be issues with texture management. Alas, I already have too much on my plate to consider fixing it. *sweats*

Our quota issue was worked out quickly. So far I am pleased with the service we have received from dreamhost.com.

Flu? We are experiencing an outbreak of the flu here. My mother called me yesterday to see if I had picked it up. Fortunately I have not yet. But I am not out of the woods, so to speak. Flu season lasts until March. *crosses fingers*

CODING TIP: Write debug code. Experienced developers know what I mean by this one. It is a fairly common mistake for inexperienced software hackers to produce code that does not have debugging statements. Retrofitting debugging code can be a chore. You can save time and suffering by writing error handling into code as you develop your software.

Guess what? Our forum software is not Y2K ready. Oh well, we are planning on reorganizing the site anyway.

A programmer sits alone in his office quietly writing software for a clinic/neighborhood services organization. Out of the corner of his eye he spots a shadow. Glancing up he notices somebody standing in his doorway. “Tom,” says the figure, “you are not going to believe this. Our database serves three different sexes.” X-Files episode or my life?

This weekend I had to opportunity to play Unreal Tournament over a LAN with TerrorX. We played a few CTF games as well as team deathmatch. AmberEyes’ latest creations, namely DM-TetanicGrip and DM-Strangelove’sRun, were very cool. TerrorX particularly liked flying the Redeemer around the Strangelove’s Run map. We added bots to both our teams. This evened things out quite a bit. Overall, I must say that it was the best experience I have had in multi-player game to date.

I spent over seven hours making a new map page for AmberEyes yesterday. After I finally had it uploaded at 2 AM this morning, the provider’s host machine told me that we had hit our quota. Ugh, I apologize in advance for any glitches we have in service until I get this straightened out.

I wrote a tutorial, crushtut.zip (250 kb), showing step-by-step the process of exporting a model from Crusher and importing it into Unreal.

Blitz asks: Unreal demands that the dimensions of skin textures be equal to a power of two. If anyone knows a good way of addressing this problem, please send me email at blitz (at) gazpacho (dot) .net.

A new version of Crusher is online: crush16b.zip (52 kb). It features fixed flat shading and the ability to export to Unreal file format. Review the readme.txt file for instructions on how to import an exported model into Unreal.

I already have a request to write a tutorial with step-by-step instructions and screenshots. This is a very good idea which I am considering.

A little known fact: some freely available skinning and texturing tools save PCX skin files in uncompressed format. You can do a check for yourself. Open the PCX file in your favorite paint program, such as Paint Shop Pro. Now save it as a PCX file under another name. Compare the sizes of the two files. If the new file is smaller, chances are that your skin tool is being wasteful.

The latest source code, cr-v16bsrc.zip (155 kb), implements the run length encoding (RLE) outlined in the PCX file format specification. The skin files exported from Crusher have valid Quake 2 palettes and use RLE for lossless image compression.