I went for a walk through parts of Stockholm this morning, mainly sticking to the side streets which I prefer, at the un-godly hour of 11am (I revert to a nocturnal pattern when I have no particular time constraints, although it soon snaps around when I actually have to do something in the day). I’m cat-sitting Karin’s cat while Karin’s parents are on holiday for a few days and it is nice to be back in a city. Although I still prefer London (more bizzare places to settle down for a quiet drink and contemplation session), Stockholm is a lovely city. Probably one of the nicest in the world. Although the fashionistas are everywhere if you choose your walking you can find some really nice, quiet, old, atmospheric places. I got mildly lost as usual but soon found myself at the edge of the city and managed to get some direction back. I must get a digital camera to start taking some pictures of the places I find.

Every time I stay at Karin’s parent’s appartment I always, without fail, break something. I’m not sure how I manage to do this with such unfailing frequency. So far I have broken the bath tap (actually off the wall! While still running.), a tea strainer and possibly a glass. This time it was the fixings for the bin on the cupboard door under the sink. So now I have to come up with some ingenious solution to fixing a wire basket thing to a small wooden door. My life just keeps getting more interesting!

My work on my various demos is once again progressing well and I hope to have my portfolio online with demos and documentation within a month and a half max.

Well, I guess thats all the really interesting stuff reported…(!)

(I hope to write something about Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube soon, as I completed it nearly a week ago now and it is well worth talking about, from numerous perspectives.)

While my parents were sorting out their bedroom they found a disk containing a backup of what I think is the first graphical game I ever wrote! It was a 2D platform game (called “Sprog” for some reason) written in C++, compiled using Borland C++ 3 or 3.1. The archive dated from 1994 but I have a feeling the code was originally written in 93. Sadly no executable is present and I will have to dig out my old Borland C++ 3 disks to compile it, but still it is pretty cool to find it after 10+ years!

It is amazing how things change. Sprog used a screen resolution of 320×200x8, approx 0.06MB a screen. Today, frame buffer sizes frequently top 4MB! Also I had to smile when looking through the code and found the section marked “Detect VGA Card”! Ah, things were so simple then!

Well, I’ve finally got back to some 3D coding in the last 2 days. About time too!

I wrote some architecture code for the landscape system of the Scorched Christmas 2 project that I am now involved in (The code is not checked into CVS yet, but will be sometime soon). I haven’t worked with landscapes for a while so it was a nice change.

I plan to finish off my “water” demo this coming week and then I plan to refurbish my demo harness to use my own existing 3D library more instead of D3DX as my own library (called “plex”) is quite complete and provides some useful functionality that is not present (and not in the remit of) D3DX (like physics & various collision detection operations). I am having issues with how to generate the ocean water for the demo. I’m not sure of the best way to go as it needs to be fairly flashy but due to it’s size you cannot do some of the funkier things with it. I think I may end up creating another water based demo showing a smaller scale body of water and interactions with it. Jos Stam has written some interesting papers on this topic and I have wanted to play with his ideas for a while now.

I sucked the ‘8′ key off the keyboard of my laptop with the hoover today. Funny thing is, this is not the first time this has happened.

At least I recovered it OK, after ripping open the hoover bag and literally wading through wads of hair, dust and dirt. (A slight exageration there maybe. It was bad though.)