Hello,

Hopefully this'll be my first proper blog (for the love of God, don't look at the others). I'll basically be entering random stuff that's happened in the last few months and hopefully it'll end up in a blog of non-taggable length.

Powa

I'm getting some awesome new PC shiz soon.

* A Sapphire Radeon X1950Pro (would be GT, but I can't find any in stock) with an Arctic Cooling fan.

*A new motherboard to support the damn card, 'cause the one I got now is balls =D

* A new case to support the new motherboard (yes, I know it's ridiculous, but I could do with a new PC anyway :))

* 2GB of RAM for the new motherboard, 'cause it's incompatible with the type I have now, but it's the only motherboard I can find that's compatible with my processor.

Life isn't fair :(

Overall, it tops up to about £250. Hopefully, some of the things that I couldn't get because they were out of stock, I will be able to get when I get around to buying these things.

My new PC will contain most of the components from my current PC

My laptop sucks

I hate my laptop now. It was a waste of money. The keyboard's broke, and I never use it anyway. I thought having two computers would be awesome, but it's too much trouble to update both if you're using both. The main reason I was using both was… Well, I'm not sure actually, but it happened. I'll be using my desktop much more anyway because of the added powa soon to come. Therefore, I would've been better off not buying it. Things always seem better until you spend hundreds of pounds on them :'(

Deleteage

I ended off deleting most of my HDD, so, clever me, I put everything I need to keep into a partition that was previously for Ubuntu. Then, retarded me, when it comes to deleting the old partitions, I delete it, forgetting that it's not Ubuntu any more. Phail.

OpenGL

I've finally gotten past the mental wall of learning OpenGL. Whenever I try to learn something, I come across a mental wall. That is, I'll be learning everything okay, but something comes along and dumbfounds me somehow. The same thing happened with C++. I had my C++ book for about three months before everything clicked. I've had my OpenGL book for about that time, and just a few days ago, everything clicked, and it's been nothing but smooth sailing from thereon out.

I managed to get basic rendering done, 3D and depth-testing, evaluators, the GLUT library, Win32 OpenGL programming, etc.

OpenAL

But OpenAL didn't like that. It didn't want that to happen. When I heard of OpenAL, I thought it was a godsend. "If it sounds like it has anything to do with OpenGL, it must be good", I thought to myself. How wrong I was. I eagerly got the devpak, installed it, and went off to find some tutorials. A few minutes later, I've learned that OpenAL is quite young, but that's okay, it sounds like it has something to do with OpenGL (in fact, it seems that it is geared specifically to work with OpenGL (duh, those names aren't a coincidence)). Anywho, first of all, I couldn't get OpenAL to work, even with the default source code, or the online tutorial, and then it somehow seemed to break GLUT.

For some reason, GLUT refuses to link with anything, and it only happened when I tried to use OpenAL. I compiled some OpenAL code for Windows, but it complained about several linker errors. Some of them, I managed to resolve. Some of them persisted, especially a peculiar one about GLUT. I check the list - everything is linked. So, I decide to take out everything to do with AL, even the libraries, and GLUT plain doesn't work. I make a new GLUT project, compile the default source, and it doesn't work. So, there, AL b0rked GLUT, and I have absolutely no idea how :( Oh, well, I'll figure it out eventually. Maybe I'll stay away from AL until it's matured a bit. Maybe I'll use FMOD or something for now.

Any suggestions, peeps? Anyone else had a problem like this? Anyone know a good C/C++ sound library (preferably cross-platform)?

Someday…

Once I learn OpenGL and OpenAL (or some other cross-platform sound library of which I know not yet) I'll have 2 out of 4 on my quest to writing games in C++. After that, it's physics (for which I'll probably use the Newton Physics library) and GLSL (I'm counting GLSL as seperate from OpenGL). And then, hopefully, I'll be at least able to write halfway decent games in C++, and they'll rawk harder than anything in GM XD

GM

Speaking of GM, I've heard that GM will be rewritten to be cross-platform. Well, I've heard that they'll be re-writing it to use OpenGL, and I assume they would only be doing that if they were to make it entirely cross-platform. This'll be a good step. A complete GM re-write would be nice, and, as long as they don't senselessly remove functionality (where were the quad primitives and specular lighting - just to mention a few - in GM? Where!?) I may turn back to using it. Using OpenGL will present YoYo with many opportunities to add GL libraries, such as GLUI for creating user interfaces, and GLUT for simplicity and cross-platform OS communication, etc.

End of Blog

I did it! =D

I hope… The width of these edit boxes makes the height deceptive…