SGreth
Shared on Thu, 02/22/2007 - 15:02...AND I DONT HAVE A WOW PROBLEM!!!!
:D
This past Sunday afternoon I told my wife I wasn't going to play WoW all week. I don't think she thought I was serious because every morning as we're running around the house with the usual morning rush she manages to ask if I logged in the previous night - to which I'm happy to report I haven't. This abstenence wasn't for her benefit but rather for my own. Over the last four days I've been 1) more awake 2) more productive and 3) looking forward to playing WoW this weekend rather than dreading "the grind" that it has slowly become.
Thorium
I mentioned before that I would go over Virtual Coordinate Systems - feel free to skip through this next section unless you are *REALLY* geeky.
GUI's have always had a problems because they were designed for a specific resolution. When that resolution got larger or smaller (as the user changed the res. in the game) the UI would just become really small (if the resolution increased) or really big (if the resolution decreased). Think about a dialog box that is designed to be 400x300 (I know, that's a honkin-huge dialog box). On an 800x600 resolution that dialog will take up half of the screen space when the user scales the UI up to 1024x768 the dialog is going to get much smaller because it's still programed to be 400x300. The person who designed the dialog box wanted it to be huge for a reason (whatever that reason was...).
In order to facilitate controls being able to maintain the appropriate size and location you need to abstract the UI coordinate system from the physical measurement of pixels. I've done this using a coordinate system which ranges from 0.0 to 1.0, inclusive. A coordinate of (0.5, 0.5) would represent the dead-center of a control. Now, when I go to render I can translate that virtual coordinate into an absolute one (multiply it by the desktop resolution) and voila! my control will always be in the center of the screen regardless of the resolution.
There is quite a bit more to resolution independent UI's but that's one of the major components behind it (and currently the part I'm working on).
Safehouse
I'm in the process of researching dedicated source control companies. You can get places for as little as $7/month to house SVN repositories for you. I like the idea of having an off-site location just because I'm a tad paranoid. Not to mention I got screwed when I moved to a new hosting provider because they didn't install GCC, or any of the relatively important linux source files in the base Fedora install....grrrr.
New Rig
I've been poking around newegg and spec'ing out a new rig. I'd REALLY like to play supreme commander but my machine is so out of date it wouldn't even come close to being able to handle it. Of course, I wouldn't build a machine just for one game. I'd also be able to get back into Battlefield, run CS:S at maximum settings, and be all prepared to KICK SOME ASS when TF2 finally arrives. Building a new computer is more fun than shopping for a new freaking car!!!!
There's not a log of things I prefer to do that don't involve nudity than electronics shopping ;)
Random picture of the day:
:D
This past Sunday afternoon I told my wife I wasn't going to play WoW all week. I don't think she thought I was serious because every morning as we're running around the house with the usual morning rush she manages to ask if I logged in the previous night - to which I'm happy to report I haven't. This abstenence wasn't for her benefit but rather for my own. Over the last four days I've been 1) more awake 2) more productive and 3) looking forward to playing WoW this weekend rather than dreading "the grind" that it has slowly become.
Thorium
I mentioned before that I would go over Virtual Coordinate Systems - feel free to skip through this next section unless you are *REALLY* geeky.
GUI's have always had a problems because they were designed for a specific resolution. When that resolution got larger or smaller (as the user changed the res. in the game) the UI would just become really small (if the resolution increased) or really big (if the resolution decreased). Think about a dialog box that is designed to be 400x300 (I know, that's a honkin-huge dialog box). On an 800x600 resolution that dialog will take up half of the screen space when the user scales the UI up to 1024x768 the dialog is going to get much smaller because it's still programed to be 400x300. The person who designed the dialog box wanted it to be huge for a reason (whatever that reason was...).
In order to facilitate controls being able to maintain the appropriate size and location you need to abstract the UI coordinate system from the physical measurement of pixels. I've done this using a coordinate system which ranges from 0.0 to 1.0, inclusive. A coordinate of (0.5, 0.5) would represent the dead-center of a control. Now, when I go to render I can translate that virtual coordinate into an absolute one (multiply it by the desktop resolution) and voila! my control will always be in the center of the screen regardless of the resolution.
There is quite a bit more to resolution independent UI's but that's one of the major components behind it (and currently the part I'm working on).
Safehouse
I'm in the process of researching dedicated source control companies. You can get places for as little as $7/month to house SVN repositories for you. I like the idea of having an off-site location just because I'm a tad paranoid. Not to mention I got screwed when I moved to a new hosting provider because they didn't install GCC, or any of the relatively important linux source files in the base Fedora install....grrrr.
New Rig
I've been poking around newegg and spec'ing out a new rig. I'd REALLY like to play supreme commander but my machine is so out of date it wouldn't even come close to being able to handle it. Of course, I wouldn't build a machine just for one game. I'd also be able to get back into Battlefield, run CS:S at maximum settings, and be all prepared to KICK SOME ASS when TF2 finally arrives. Building a new computer is more fun than shopping for a new freaking car!!!!
There's not a log of things I prefer to do that don't involve nudity than electronics shopping ;)
Random picture of the day:
- SGreth's blog
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Comments
Submitted by okjerm on Thu, 02/22/2007 - 15:43
Submitted by SGreth on Thu, 02/22/2007 - 15:56