The Brad Hole

Beth and I recently renewed the lease on our house for another year. The goal is to buy a house around the time our lease is up next April, give or take a month or two.

As such, we figure with 12 months to go, now is the time to start looking into the process in detail. To that end, we're in the process of cleaning up our finances so we can get a smoking rate on a mortgage. We're making excellent progress there. I've discovered that this process is a launching point for learning about all kinds of stuff for which I hoped to remain blissfully ignorant until I die. Namely, all things financial. The trick seems to be to try and predict as best as we can the state of the market a year from now, and this in part ties into job data, inflation, and all other kinds of junk that bores the crap out of me. But we've crossed the Rubicon now - there's no unlearning this. :-) It's also led me down a side-path of looking at future projections for my 401(k) and Beth's own retirement stuff to make sure all that is in as good a shape as it can be right now.

Parallel to that effort, the other trick is figuring out which part of town we'd like to live in, and if we want a new or used house. The "location, location, location" maxim is important, but tricky. If you're buying a new home, you're essentially looking at living on the outskirts of town to get the most bang for your buck, something I suspect is true for most cities. So we'll have to decide if that's something we will be comfortable doing. Future freeway and shopping locations enter into the guessing game there too. I look back on what my parents did when they moved to Arizona back in '79. They bought a large house, presumably for a good price, in what was then the ass-edge of town in northern Scottsdale, surrounded by dirt roads. Now the area they're in is an absolutely fantastic location as the city has built up around them.

I figure 6-7 months from now, once the financial stuff is in shape, we'll start looking at used houses to get a feel for what's on the market and how they compare to new houses, and then figure out which we're most comfortable with. I suspect that going with a used house may be less stressful, at least during the buying process, since you have more control over the process as a buyer,. You also don't have to worry about making as many decisions as you would planning a new home - "what type of cabinets should we pick? brass or silver door knobs? should the doorbell play the koo-woo-koo-koo ditty from the McKenzie Brothers or something from KISS?"

I'd go with the McKenzie Brothers.

Posted by bradman at 02:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It was recently announced (apparently at GDC) that Apple has embraced OpenAL as their "game audio" library of choice. This is actually the NDA-level news we were given back in January at the games kitchen in Cupertino.

Now that it's public knowledge, one of the immediate benefits of this is that Apple's new implementation sits directly on top of CoreAudio. In particular, it features some Apple-specific calls to perform data conversion of samples to the native format when they are loaded (for performance improvements during mixing) as well as doing positional audio through CoreAudio's 3d mixer AudioUnit.

A few of Aspyr's existing games can benefit from this for almost-free. Off the top of my head, I know both Jedi Academy and Jedi Knight 2 can, although it'll necessitate a Mach-O build and thus kick OS 9 users to the curb. I did some preliminary builds of both back at the kitchen to mess around with the new OpenAL, and hopefully before too long I can find some time to finish them off. Now that Apple has made the announcement public, they've apparently released their code into CVS, so we'll be able to distribute the new library. I gather it requires an update to CoreAudio's frameworks, which Apple has said will eventually be delivered in a QuickTime update. I don't know if that'll mean 10.2 and up or 10.3 and up or what.

Posted by bradman at 05:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

While surfing slashdot tonight, I ran across one of the most interesting and chilling websites that I've seen in a long while.

It chronicles a Russian girl's motorcycle trip through Chernobyl and the dead zone surrounding it. The pictures and accompanying narration are quite sobering. It's a must-read for everyone.

Posted by bradman at 02:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The title pretty much says it all.

The BF1942 announcement ties in with a post I made several months ago. When I first started at Aspyr, I went over to CompUSA to pick up PC versions of the upcoming titles that we had on our slate, namely Medal of Honor: Breakthrough (plus the first 2 games), Call of Duty and Battlefield 1942 and its first expansion, plus a few strategy guides to help limit my suffering. The cashier probably thought I was socially maladjusted.

As it happens, I ended up spending close to $250 on WW2 shooters for the PC in one fell swoop. I hope I never do that again. :-) Of course, for all I know, I'll be dropping $250 on Vietnam-themed shooters this October, given that it seems to be the current "fad" in PC games. Of all the game genres, war-themed shooters are easily my least favorite; I just can't get into them at all. It doesn't help that I've worked on 3 Quake 3 titles back-to-back since joining Aspyr. Thankfully I didn't have much to do on Call of Duty, that was mostly Duane's work. Hopefully "Yugo" will keep me from totally burning out.

Posted by bradman at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I hit another minor milestone in "Yugo" last night. I can now get entirely into the game proper and do stuff, for a very narrow definition of "stuff". ;-)

In fact, all I can do is sit and watch the camera pan endlessly around my guy as his clothes and hair appear and disappear. The non-stop panning and vanishing clothing are tell-tale signs that I missed some byte-swapping somewhere, so hopefully as soon as I can track those down, it'll be very close to playable.

Getting ready in the morning would go a lot quicker if I could pop my hair and clothes off and on instantaneously.

Posted by bradman at 07:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I read slashdot.org on a daily basis, and even though I don't agree with some of the more heavy-handed bias to their story selection, I find it informative and interesting more often than not.

Having said that, today a story was posted that dripped of such heavy bias that it nearly made me sick. The thing is, it's not the story that was slanted, it was the "comment" that accompanied the submission. Luckily, the slashdot moderation system tends to self-correct the worst offenses, and many (in fact most) of the responses to the story thankfully addressed this and did so with humor.

I know it's unrealistic to expect information on the internet from non-traditional journalistic sources to avoid bias, but that doesn't mean I have to like it when it crops up.

Posted by bradman at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over the past week, I finally got around to playing Mysteries of the Sith, the expansion pack for Jedi Knight 1.

I had heard mixed things about it, and also that you played as Mara Jade instead of Kyle Katarn, so I was never really all that jazzed about it. Plus, it's near impossible to get a copy nowadays. But I finally managed to order it from the LucasArts store and dug into it. It wasn't quite what I was expecting.

A few levels lacked a certain polish - notably the first level. I'm not sure how much of that is due to the polygon and texture limits of the engine though. To my surprise, you played 4 of the 14 levels as Kyle, and the story was related to Jedi Knight, so it wasn't a totally disorienting experience. They also added colored lighting to the engine, something we take for granted nowadays.

All that aside, the last 3 levels have you traipsing about a swamp looking for Kyle and a Sith temple. This is where I felt the game rose above the tedium of the first 11 levels and really started to shine. You had to complete the last 3 levels with only your lightsaber and the force powers you'd accumulated up to that point. In my eyes, this separated it quite a bit from your average first-person shooter, as strategy became a large part of the gameplay, as opposed to run-and-shoot. There were also several "jump out of my seat" moments which I wasn't expecting. On the whole, I would have loved many more levels like the last 3.

It also turns out that there's a secret "bonus" level on the CD that you can activate. When you do, you can play as Luke on Bespin, from Empire Strikes Back. It's a neat freebie.

Posted by bradman at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Every now and then, I get a piece of e-mail that makes me question the educational system in America. A new entry for my collection arrived today:

From: xxxx@aol.com
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 16:53:12 EST
Subject: Won't Work
X-Mailer: Thunderbird - Mac OS X sub 25

For some reason it said "I do not have enough access priveliges".I think it's because I'm sign on my Mac as a student, what to do


I have two small requests for anyone wishing to e-mail me.

1. Use a spellchecker. (It'd be great if you'd use a grammar checker too, but that's a pipe dream.)

2. Let me know what the hell you're talking about, otherwise I'll gladly ignore you or (as this case demonstrates) mock you in public. :-)

Edit: OK, I have a third request. If you do e-mail me, and you're not in my address book, you pretty much have to use a descriptive subject title (perhaps that contains the game name) or you run a pretty good risk of being trapped in my spam filter, where I'll never see the message. According to the pobox filter reports, I average roughly 1000-1500 e-mails a day (depending on virus outbreaks) and of those only 70-100 are typically non-spam. (My e-mail address, having made it in the MAME readme and thus on Usenet and on the web, is a big red target.) I'm willing to sacrifice a few random e-mails from strangers who don't label the messages properly. :-)

Posted by bradman at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The project I'm working on now (which is still unannounced) hit a minor milestone yesterday. It's not yet to "first playable" but it's definitely to "first drawable". In fact, it's more than that - it's to "first can-use-the-GUI-and-main-menu-and-everything-looks-pretty-good-except-for-a-few-missing-heads-able"

I'd love to post a few screenshots of the headless models, but I can't until the cat is out of the bag. Hopefully it won't be too much longer, but just in case, I've come up with a cheesy code-name: "Yugo." I'm never sure how obscure these code-names really are, as someone invariably just guesses their favorite game and then tries to find a connection.

Anyway, if you can come up with the game and make the connection that I made, and you're the first to post about it in the comments, then I'll see about getting you a free copy of the game once it's released. Naturally, I can't tell you if you won or not until the game is announced. :)

Edit: I should add that I have no idea when the game will be announced. It could be tomorrow or it could be months away - I have no clue.

Edit #2: In case it wasn't clear, it's not sufficient to just guess the game - you have to describe the association that I made with the code-name. :-)

Posted by bradman at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Last Thursday, my friends and I took our annual trip to Vegas, a tradition we've held since 1990. This year presented an extra (and unexpected challenge) in that the one week the four of us could make it happened to coincide with NASCAR weekend in Vegas (estimated to bring in 140,000 extra people), as well as two large conventions totaling 90,000 people. Finding a reasonably-priced hotel room was challenging, but we pulled it off by staying Thursday and Friday at the Luxor and spending Saturday night at the Flamingo in Laughlin, which essentially signaled the end of our trip.

I've had great luck the past two years with my own little "system" of blackjack. It's actually not so much a system as it is an observation - namely that I'm typically up 50% over my starting total at some point during play. So I've decided that if I hit that point, I automatically get up and leave. Invariably, it happens very quickly. It means that I never win much in one sitting, but over the long run, it adds up. It also means that I don't sit there and gamble the whole time, which is nice.

Anyway, luck wasn't a lady this past trip. I managed to hit my magic 50% stopping point in over half the casinos we visited, but several others put up stiff resistance, and I walked away a loser for the trip. MGM Grand, from hell's heart I stab at thee!

You could definitely tell it was NASCAR weekend. I've never seen so many handlebar mustaches in my life, and the jean brand of choice was definitely Wrangler. I also got the sense that many of these folks had never visited Las Vegas, or certainly had never played table games before.

Still, the Chump Play of the Trip happened to go to our friend Ron, who when given a 13 at Blackjack, hit against a dealer showing a six. He busted with 23, the dealer drew to 21 and everyone at the table lost. However, we can excuse this because Ron was working on 2 hours of sleep at the time.

Posted by bradman at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)