Another geography rant

Posted by Astryl on Aug. 15, 2012, 5:46 a.m.

Right, taking my cue from [furry], I would like to point out that South Africa isn't some horrible hole with no infrastructure, an infestation of mercenaries and a racism problem.

Nope.

Ok, maybe some racism still persists, but where doesn't it?

Be honest.

Anyway, read this:

http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/132487/the_south_african_game_development_.php?print=1

And something you may not know: We have a freakin' EA dev studio.

Anyway, thought I'd put that out there. Now let me get back to my work.

What I'm doing to relax

Though I'm at work right now with nothing much to do, I've been working on a minor project at home that i was intending to blog about. It isn't a game, nor is it a normal application…

Nope. I'm coding, for -fun-, an OS from scratch. Eeyup.

Before you start rolling around in fits of uncontrollable laughter, I already have a kernel, with only a single segmented memory manager at the moment, but with full access to te entire potential 4gb address line of a 32 bit CPU.

In addition to that, I have some of the parts of the C standard library made (notably, memset, memcpy, malloc, free, putch, and puts), which I had to code from scratch.

I also created a fault message display module, that creates a wonderful Blue Screen Of Doomtm (Not to be confused with the more common Blue Screen Of Death).

Anyway, pics when I get back to my PC.

Comments

Toast 12 years, 3 months ago

I have a question related to South Africa - what's up with Lesotho? That's a messed up situation there.

Astryl 12 years, 3 months ago

what about Limpopo while you're at it? Quite frankly, I don't know much about those areas, because I'm far removed from them. Every town has its problem zones, including mine.

JuurianChi 12 years, 3 months ago

Generalize and fantasize.

Making games until the day they die.

Toast 12 years, 3 months ago

Up until recently I didn't realise just how poverty-stricken South Africa actually is. I thought the opposite of the popular stereotype - I thought it was just as developed as Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand, which was obviously incredibly naive. It's certainly developing and I don't underestimate how little time the country has had to recuperate and grow since the end of apartheid.

Astryl 12 years, 3 months ago

We're not that poverty stricken; we have, like most countries, a subset of people who can be classified as 'poor', another that fall into the 'surviving/well-off/content' category, a third who fall into the 'rich' category and finally you get the bunch that fall into the 'politicians with an abnormally large and somehow tax-evading paycheck' category.

Also, as far as development goes: We have a moderately well maintained road network, water supplied to most towns/settlements, ditto for electricity (Though it costs a lot), our own oil processors, natural gas sources, a major gold-mining, silver-mining and diamond mining industry, car factories, and that upcoming 40mbps residential VDSL connection.

What we haven't got that most other 'developed' contries do (Or had):

> Nukes.

> Swine Flu

> Pointless lawsuits.

tower07 12 years, 3 months ago

"Taking my cue from tower07"

…What do I have to do with any of this? :P

EDIT: Ohhh, usertag. Funny. xD

flashback 12 years, 3 months ago

Quote:
And something you may not know: We have a freakin' EA dev studio.
We've got Bioware.

Astryl 12 years, 3 months ago

True.

Trade your EA owned studio for our EA studio? :3

flashback 12 years, 3 months ago

Nope.

We also have Ubisoft Montreal, if we're going by country (I was just going by city).

Astryl 12 years, 3 months ago

Oh well.

Apparently EA is opening another studio around here; the current one only focuses on Sport games, but apparently they feel there is enough local talent to harness.