My Motivation is Lacking

Or put another way..
I do not yet have enough motivation to trawl through the myriad upgrading problems presented to me by the upgrade of Xna 3.1 to Xna 4.0 game Studio.

Still i feel every day more and more resolve, only not enough yet to actually boot up studio and stare at the current issues. Last night was close but lost out to spending time with my wife.

So the last week or so has still been busy for me. Playing lots of Cataclysm which i have been enjoying rather more than i expected. I have also been Kinect playing with Dance Central a lot. Boy is that my kinda game. In fact for me it is my GOTY. I even parted with 6 stinking dollars to get 2 downloadable dances, bah! I hate you Xbox (well not really). al i need now is to get a few more friends gamertags that actually play this game. Comparing my score to one friend is ok, but not enough darn it! I need to beat or be beaten by more people. It is also great cos my wife, son, and daughter also like to play this game. Truly awesome. I hope one day it will be able to actually play two at the same time (not like the take ya turns as it is now).

Maybe tonight will be the nigth i power up Dev Studio. I feel i have more resolve and also a few more tricky ideas of simple thing to try that i believe will solve my current issues. then onto new ones.

Laters

My partner in pain is back

Yup, it is true. My newly married aprtner in pain and of course work buddy is back from Vegas. Now a married man and ready to help me through the data mining i have to do for my current conversion at work.

He is a top lad and as i expected having someone else look at my code would reveal the bits i had been missing, and this held true and he pounded out the thing that i had missed. Of course i could be sad i didn;t notice it, but i am not. I am actually rather happy for a couple of reasons. Number 1 is that i now don't have to keep banging my head against that wall. Number 2 is that he came back after a week of getting married and was very quickly productive. This is a great feeling i'll bet.

Now i expect we can manhandle the data and the only major issue we should face will be the parallel workflow that we really need to achieve asap.

So the moral is, you can find excuses to be sad, but when something good happens. Try to see it that way.

G'night

Getting Stuck

Sometimes it happens that we think we have a bug. We can spend so many hours on this bug only to discover that it wasn't a bug at all. Today or more accurately this afternoon i had one of these experiences. I am going to share this in hopes that it might just inspire others (and maybe myself) to not waste as much time as i did.

Here is a basic timeline
1. Afternoon starts at about 1:30pm and i am working on repacing some graphics. It is going well but i need more artwork from my artist.
2. Shortly after chatting with the artist i realised i can work on some difficulty circles. These items mark for everyone to see what level of difficulty you are playing at on the game in The Midway.
3. The code was very simple and i changed it out very easily for our new coding style. This will save memory and make it run faster, woohoo! a Double win! (love those)
4. Added the new smaller assets and code and busy testing it. (2:15pm)
5. The numbers on the circles look great, however the colors lok a lot muted. That is odd.
6. Spend 1 hour trying to figure out what i have done wrong. Did i alter the shader somehow to break the colors?
7. Went for a walk to ease the fact that i have found nothing at all to help me out and suggest what i am doing wrong.
8. 4pm and still looking at the models and textures. Decide it's time to go back and see what it looked like originally. but i go half way, including old stuff and some of my new stuff.
9. BAH! the colors still look muted. now to go the whole way back.
10. Discover it looks EXACTLY the same as the new version. ARGH! It is the lighting and the angle i was viewing it at.
11. So annoyed at having wasted several hours on something that was great. Now it is about 5pm or so. Grrrr

I wish in hindsight i had not refered to how my memory visualized the colors on the circles, and had instead gone and looked at a real live version. This would have saved me several hours of confused pain.

Good luck in your issues, real and imagined!

G'night