Ahhh... much needed server maintenance

Well the next few weeks are looking very busy, so not surprisingly I ran low on partition space on the primary cvs server. I'd say that it seems like these things always happen when I'm busy, but in reality I've been watching the partitions slowly fill up over the past few months.

Up until now I haven't had the downtime to poke around with the server, but after taking an extended weekend for the holidays I decided to take the time tonight (rather this morning) to move the partitions around. Luckily I was using less than half of the array, so not much work was necessary, though I moved a lot of data around trying to keep the frequently used partitions near the start of the disks.

All in all, things went smoothly, taking only approximately four hours. I imagine I'll need to work out a few ownership issues with cvs after the data move, but hopefully nothing else was mangled in the move.

It's nice to have this out of the way after spending the past few months trying to get work done and hoping there was enough space.

Blah... it's 4:30 am, time for bed...

-John

Kitchen continued...

Well among all of the other things going on this week I managed to sneak in a few hours of work on the kitchen today. I'm still working on a combination of the accent and ambient lighting - so far I've dropped a few recessed lights into the ceiling to add accents onto the cabinets and to add some fill lighting into the corners of the kitchen.

Unfortunately the down-lights are being overpowered by the primary light, so although they fill out the room's lighting, the accent on the cabinets is lost. I wanted to change out the down-light bulbs to halogen spots anyway, which are brighter and whiter at the same wattage. If that doesn't completely balance the lighting I'll also lower the luminance of the primary light.

Here's a quick photo, which also contains a few test spots for the new wall color:



I can't wait until those cabinet doors go. :)

-John

Ahhh.... no more fluorescent lighting

Well after a disappointing weekend working on the kitchen I managed to come up with a solid foundation lighting layer, and already the chosen color scheme looks better - I can't wait to start painting. :)

For a point of reference the kitchen looked like this (excuse the mess):


Though acceptable it did have a very "fluorescent Grandma" theme, and frankly made finding and matching paint colors practically impossible - never mind the kitchen suffered from a total lack of depth.

This weekend I followed my own instructions and worked on the house instead of sitting in front of the computer. Unfortunately things didn't go very well. In an effort to keep the project simple I tried to limit my work to replacing only the light fixture. Of course this meant the lighting looked exactly the same with the only change being varying degrees of color and intensity, which is not what I was looking for.

It's rather sad that during the entire weekend I suppressed my natural instincts regarding lighting setup and theory. Why? I don't like to assume that my semi-related skills (in this case game lighting) translate into what I'm working on, in my mind thats how disastrous projects start. What I didn't take into consideration is that I developed my game lighting theory based on architectural and cinematic lighting theories, so naturally the common elements transfer back over into architectural lighting.

This afternoon I decided to go back to the basics and picked a three point lighting scheme for the kitchen (yup, I love three point setups, it's a classic that can be applied to damn near anything) involving task, accent and fill lighting.

Step one, layout and setup the task lighting. For my setup I went with a simple under cabinet low voltage halogen light system and line voltage halogen lights above the sink.


I also setup a preliminary fill lighting test, though I haven't worked on the accent lighting and the fill light is way too harsh, it at least points out where things are going and what needs work.


Anyway I need to get back to work during this week, but I'm already looking forward to the weekend.

-John

Started forcing myself to take the weekends off

Recently I started forcing myself to take the weekends off. This isn't as easy as it seems. As a full time indie my office, and therefore my work, is only a flight of steps away. Obviously this makes commuting terribly convenient, however it also makes it far too easy to just swing by for a few lines of code, to check the email, or to read what's going on in the community.

Lately I've become moody and relatively short tempered, largely due to the amount of energy I'm putting into my work without any breaks other than sleeping and eating. Clearly this isn't conducive to actually enjoying my job, something I became a full time indie to do.

So now I sit and read, watch tv, or exercise, anything to distract me, but all the while I still think about going downstairs and working. This clearly isn't working...

For those who feel that being a full time indie would be the greatest job ever I say this; keep working your day job and being an indie at night, then nothing will ever shatter that wonderful dream of what being a full time indie is like. For those looking for an effective way to shatter that dream, try going indie.

In all fairness my indie career was a "job" long before I was full time, so ideas of a fantastic independent career didn't even exist in my head. Going indie was more about knowing that my day job sucked, that every one I had respect for quit long ago (or was considering it then), the actual work was becoming boring, and that I enjoy creating games and game technology, so, after working out the finances, going indie was a no brainer.

But now I'm faced with how to keep myself from thinking about work on the weekends. I know there are a lot of options, but the weather just became cold, and things like watching sports is right out (unless I'm looking for an early nap).

So I'm stepping up work on remodeling the house, which, though it sounds expensive, really involves very little money and instead a ton of elbow grease (frankly I don't have greasy elbows but I'm hoping I'm still qualified). More importantly a lot of fiddling around with things means less time to think about work.

The remodeling project has been in the works for well over a year now, but has stalled on several occasions due to things like; working my job 40 hours a week while being an indie 40 hours a week, preparation for IGC 2004, preparation for IGC 2005, quitting my job and being an indie 80 hours a week, and difficulty with paint matching. Paint matching? How difficult is that? Well with a relatively open floor plan and questionable lighting in the kitchen, very.

After many attempts at finding the right wall colors I decided to address the real issue and the kitchen lighting is going to go. Why didn't I do that before? I'm generally into constructive remodeling, you know adding things to a room, like paint, crown moulding, and art to name a few. I'm not very fond of de-constructive remodeling, which seems to be all the rage with most guys. You know rip something apart then figure out how to fix it - not my style, if I need to remove something (notice I even use the polite term "remove") tremendous amounts of planning and research goes into the process, and usually a few test runs when possible.

Anyway seeing as all the color problems stem from the bad kitchen lighting, addressing the lighting is at the top of my priorities, and with colors already chosen for the rest of the first floor I think things will come together rather nicely.

-John

No matter how hard you try there's always someone...

Not surprisingly there was a vocal minority (actually one guy – there's always one) apparently outraged by our work on Constructor – how dare we create a solid tool for the community.

People like that really have no idea what goes into shipping a product. Two years of fighting with half-baked and poorly designed 3rd party products practically forced us into making Constructor, but apparently we're doing a disservice by creating a solid product.

Ironically while arguing that point the argument was also made that we should have created it sooner (yup, same guy). :)

As usual I'm sure the hardcore indies will take advantage of Constructor, while people like this complain that “only the big indies ship games” - that's because the big indies use the available tools to their advantage.

Cool new info on Constructor released today

Today Matt Fairfax of GarageGames posted a blog that gives a glimpse into our team's work on Constructor, Torque's next-generation interior editor (CSG editor like Hammer). Constructor is set to light the indie gaming world on fire as the only easy to use, cross-platform, interior editor that's priced for the indie budget.

The core Constructor development team reads like a who's, who's of the GarageGames community, and consists of Matt Fairfax (GarageGames), David Wyand (GnomeTech), and of course me (John Kabus - Synapse Gaming).

Check out Matt's plan:

When will Constructor ship?

-John

Finally found time to start a blog

Now that I've entered the euphoria of post IGC development (ie: relaxed schedule and reasonable development plans) I decided to finally create a personal blog as a home for all of my rants, stories, and technology development info.

This year's IGC was amazing - XBox 360 stories aside, I managed to ramp up five solid demos and a ton of new technology for Synapse Gaming's flagship product: the Torque Lighting Kit.

Some of the latest advanced features include:

• Dynamic Range Lighting
• Detail Mapping
• Mountable Lights
• Realistic Dynamic Shadows

Special thanks go to Christophe Canon, and the Monster Island, Illumina, and iNterstices teams for their awesome in-game content.


Overall it's been an amazing year for Synapse Gaming - the company has grown leaps and bounds, and IGC is an excellent indicator. At last year's IGC the Torque Lighting Kit (TLK) was considered a cool set of tools and technology that only the big players were using. In contrast at this year's IGC nearly 80% of the games shown were using TLK, and the rest were 2D or non-TGE games. :)

For this year's IGC GarageGames asked me to give a few presentations including a "what's new in TLK" during the Friday night kick off session and the breakout session "Advanced Lighting: Illuminating your game". I was amazed at how much I enjoyed doing the presentations (after the initial nerves of course), and I'm really looking forward to doing it again next year.

Anyway even more amazing stuff is lined up for the coming year, so stay tuned...

-John