docwes’s posterous

A New Year and New Projects..

Well I'm definently excited about the new year. Just finished a house move...(I hate moving btw) but glad to be closer to work. Also, getting to do a new project on the side more to come on that. Thankful for family, friends and my work family.

This new project is really exciting for a couple of reasons.One it will be utilizing Torque3D and i'm a fan of the work garage games is doing over there and the community. I'm getting familiar with the source code seems to be some familiar stuff from TGEA.

I been in the garagegames community since 2001 wow thats a long time lol. Albiet a quiet member but definently been a fan of the platform.

For this year so far i've been, wrapping up some projects at work and working on some new ones at home. 

I'm also working on a web project that will be utilizing revtalk and on-rev hosting. This will be my foray to see just how well the serverside of runrev can hold up to a decent load of traffic and usage.

Will be posting more about these 2 projects as they progress.

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HP Mini 311-1037NR Review: This netbook is awesome

Well i have to say after several happy months with my hackintosh eee-pc 1000HA running osx 10.5.8. I was looking for a replacement for my dying acer laptop with its built in lap oven. As well as a machine i could do my windows game development on. My needs where basic. Be able to render decent graphics with  directx capability and let me run my work ide's and home project ide's with decent speed.

My other goal which was to get rid of the hideous usb verizon wireless card that needed both usb ports plugged in to actually get good signals. Well after searching around and searching in best buy and microcenter. I stumbled across this beauty from verizon recently launched.

So things that most impressed me on its specs where:

• 2G standard expandable to 3G DDR3 1066Mhz
• 1366 x 768 resolution
  16:9 aspect ratio for full-screen HD content playback
• Nvidia ION graphics<<---- Awesome and did i mention Awesome
• Nvidia Cuda<<-- For fast decoding and offloading workload to the gpu as well as
• Supports the new Flash Player 10.1 features such as hardware acceleration.
• 1080dpi HD not that im all into HD movies but its great to be able to watch them and also
• Bluetooth and Wireless capabilities including the wireless N << can u say fast
• Of course built in verizon 3g for internet wherever you are. CDMA/1X/EV-DO Revision A: 800/1900 MHz; UMTS/HSPA: 850/1900/2100 MHz; GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
• 160GB HD not so impressive but u can always replace that.

So my review:
Its really fast.
I can play all my mmo's on it. Including Secondlife, Starwars galaxies, Wow and EQ2 Runs great.
I plan on giving it its full 3GB ram it will help.
I like windows 7 <  cant believe i said that. But its been pretty solid even when i was using it since beta. I still however hate IE which seems to have gotten worse with IE8.
Installations seem a bit slow to startup but once they get going they fly.
Great sound ALTEC speaker along the front.
It pretty light to carry and it has a LED backlit display. Very nice it looks much better than my EEE-PC screen maybe cause the aspect ratio is better, but  it reminds me of a macbook pro screen.
The keyboard is nice has a nice feel to it. I am not a fan of the trackpad thats why i use a wireless mouse.But its decent.
The webcam is good. Much higher quality than i was expecting. I even use it for Facial recognition to login to windows :).
It stays nice and cool. Great battery life about 6 hours.

In short if you are still reading this, you should stop now and go treat yourself and buy one of these they are the best netbook out IMHO.

BTW my hackintosh is for sale:)
EEE-PC great condition it was babied
Atom processor N270
Intel GMA 950
Bluetooth usb included
2GB ram
Airport Extreme 802.11g/n
160GB HD 5400RPM
Webcam
MAC OSX 10.5.8 fully updated with everything working
Sound is flaky though a usb headset is recommended
ILife 08 included as well as some other nice software.
It runs Mac OSX excellently very fast and full quartz graphics. I even had WOW on there.
send me an email if your interested:

Doc~

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HP Mini 311-1037NR Verizon netbook not getting past splash screen?

Okay so let me prefix this article by saying that this netbook rocks. Nvidia Ion for the win. As well as 3G connection. I also have a rocksolid eee-pc, but this is my new baby and believe me it was hard to unseat my eee-pc from the throne..

So my second day with it i came into a weird situation. I booted and i was greeted by a happy HP sign and umm,... yeah it didnt move. No windows 7 logo no nothing. I tried checking memory making sure it was seated securely as requested at the HP support site. Did the battery out, unplugged holding the power for 10 seconds thing. No go. So i packed it up ,(dissapointed i spent a whole day installing all my dev stuff and getting it all perfect for me.) Took it back to the verizon store and the nice sales lady took it out the box and hit power and guess what it booted right into windows SOB, wth hell right.

So I began  troubleshooting why it wasnt booting for me, I took it back to work, did a  backup up of my data to my internal SD card and rebooted. Stuck at HP logo again. GRrrrr.

Well turns out the issue is that if u have a wireless mouse with the little nanoreciever plugged in it thwarts bootup. Try unplugging any usb devices before you actually get into windows and should fix this problem for you. I have no idea if this is the case for other usb devices but certainly is the case for logitech wireless mice.(so much for leave the usb nano reciever in #fail logitech marketing).

Anyways Rock on HP mini and for goodness sake update the bios HP!@!@!

Doc out~

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Quick Shoutout to Lee@thegamecreators.com

                         So In my last post i mentioned im doing a project using the darkbasic pro platform. I have to say that there customer service rocks.
      Lee is not only a brilliant programmer but he's given me one of the best experiences i have had with any gaming community  outside conitec( and thats only cause i used to go down the office personally in san diego and talk with those guys). The more i'm learning about this community the more im impressed and sad that I initially let the bad press blitz forums stop me from checking this out earlier.
      I think I have amassed all the tools i need for my project the next week or so will be spent learning them and getting a comfortable workflow down.
      November I hope to have the Ethonos site up and the WIP screenshots and  boards live.That's all for now more coming soon. Once again thanks Lee and if anyone is interested in learning how to make your own games, Definently give these guys a look.http://www.thegamecreators.com. You wont be dissapointed at the tools at your disposal. Be blessed.

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I'm back~! Project Ethonos is still in process its codename will be changing tho.

So been away for a while and managed to catch the flu this weekend. Hopefully not the swine flu. But, inbetween losing battles to nyquil and tylenol i looked at my blog and realized its been way to long since i posted last and so much has happaned.

Adobe Max what can i say awesome. Rev is launching 4.0 on Nov 11th, I have projects at work launching in november and yes My game world is back under full dev.

With some graphical help from the lovely Ms Lynn and dusting off my 3D chops work is continuing. Im hoping to have the site as well as an alpha up soon. Time is always an issue and although i have vested heavily in a few different engines and platforms i have decided to do my first multiplayer game with DarkBasic Pro engine. Its not the latest but its a good place to tackle some ideas and i'm hoping to target alot of people who may not necassarily be running dual sli GTX 295's. Not for this game at least.

It's more of a test for me to just get one live and stable and fun. Graphics honestly may be somthing akin to a modern day eq1. But, The gameplay is going to be new fun and deep. Playing MMO's since Ultima Online has pretty much solidified what works and what doesnt work. To me there is a mmo begging to have some of the concepts and features im wanting to introduce in this game. As well as sharpen my chops on what works best getting into a code base i know and have written a majority of. It's going to be an indie mmo thats for sure but one im going to be damn proud of. More on this soon.

In other news http://www.franklin3d.com is live its a rev wrapper for the irrlicht engine for revolution. Its in early beta and i'll be picking up my beta copy soon as i can get the stupid demo to compile right. Thats pretty exciting.Okay thats enough for now i crawling back into bed try to beat this flu~!~ Later~

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Ethonos, Opensim, Hypergrids yeah....

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We will miss you grandma

So a slight diversion from my tech talk to pay homage to my grandmother who passed on Monday  the 27th. She was a matriarch and a true definition of love. Today my family and friends gathered to say goodbye for now to her. Her presence will be sorely missed and the earth will be a lesser place without her. She talk us how to love truly and how important family is. So if you are reading this make sure to give someone you love a big hug and tell them what they mean to you while they are living. It was so great to see all of my family some of whom i havent seen in over 10 years. You can truly tell how our grandma lives in each one of us so she'll never be to far away. Love you grandma Gladys.

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GLX2 If your using Revolution and your not using it you should be!

So as i been getting into Rev more and more i have to say by far, the most helpful and useful tool in my toolbox is GLX2. Rev has beefed up there script editor in its 3.0 release but as good as it is, GLX2 is far superior. The most helpful thing for me as a Flex developer when im working in Eclipse and Flex Builder is the ability to jump around my code by using cntrl clicks and bookmarks.

This feature in GLX2 was like christmas. It's called breadcrumbs. When you create functions, it automatically bookmarks them in a sidebar but once you actually use/call/instantiate your function or script inline, its underscored and you can click it to jump straight to the source. Awesome!

Another thing i'm used to as a Eclipse user is auto-intelligence/auto-hinting. What this does is when you start typing the editor drops down a list of keywords it thinks you would be interested in possibly utilizing. So no more searching for that property or parameter. If it's available to your script it shows up. GLX2 also has this its called Clairvoyance. It does just that.(Reads your mind muahahah). You can also edit which words you may not want to see in there at all. There is also no click inspection which is also something im used too. You basically hover over an oobject and see its properties, or inspect it's script.

Now yes this is  a shameless plug for an awesome product but, it's well deserved it has made my transition into rev much smoother and i feel more at home coming from another development environment with these amenities. Thanks Jerry and your team. 

I'm looking forward to utilizing all GLX2 has to offer as i make my first "REV back-end based" Flex application. Flex 4 and REV the possibilities !!

Oh one more thing, There is rumour of a concept editor, i say rumour cause when i went to download it the link didn't work. !! So Jerry if you see this i want in on that alpha Amigo!  More stuff on Rev laterz~

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GC-11 has started. This games challenge theme "Racing".....

So it has begun, a new game. Giving thoughts on it today. The theme is "Racing" and most games have some sort of race in it. Race against the clock, race to finish a quest before time runs out. In my mind i keep seeing a space race game of sorts. Laying the foundation for the game and I have 8 weeks. Time to make it happen.

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