Category: personal

New Look, New Journal, New Posts

I’m slowly combining my two journal spaces – one of which I barely used (formerly drilsej.com, which now just redirects here), and one of which I slightly-more-than-barely used (my gamedev.net dev journal, on which I will likely still mirror any game development-specific postings).  This is all funnelling into a brand new domain, drilian.com.  This very site!

There are a few reasons for this:

  1. While I really like posting on gamedev.net and its journal space, there are some things I really dislike about it (for instance, when I stop posting for 6 months, my dev journal becomes an empty desert wasteland, which can be considered annoying.  Who wants to visit a blog frontpage and see no posts?).
  2. I never really used my main webpage (that I’ve had for 10 years now) for anything except occasionally posting projects that I’ve worked on.  I’ve merged that stuff onto this page – it’s all now in the same place as my journal.
  3. Not that I post a lot of personal information (for instance, my wife constantly laments that there are no mentions of her on any of my webpages – and hey, now there is!), but I always felt a little weird posting non-development posts on gamedev’s journal space.  Now I can generally post whatever I feel like posting and not feel all weirded out.

Likely there are other reasons I’m not thinking of, but that’s okay.

I’m certainly not going to promise updates of any frequency, sadly, as my work (and, I’ll be honest, gaming) schedule has prevented me from doing a whole lot of spare-time development recently (where recently is somewhere in the 6-month range.  Note that the previous post is from MAY).  However, I am going to (slightly) formalize my post format a bit.  Mostly, I’m going to start using article titles that actually reflect the post subject instead of a hideous mass of puns.  This all comes complete with my “no trans fats” guarantee.

Hopefully, for those of you who have read my gamedev.net journal, and for those who watched drilsej.com (did anyone?), and for those who are new, you’ll all find something of interest here.  And hopefully I’ll have interesting stuff to post for the forseeable future!

Welcome to drilian.com.  Enjoy!

One Year Later

It’s done! Finally, after over a year since its completion, Mop of Destiny gets its own webpage!

I had a really difficult time trying to figure out what the webpage should even look like, so I just kept putting it off, until last night when I was almost asleep, I had that “eureka!” moment immediately before dozing off. Luckily, I remembered my idea in the morning!

Also DrilNES 1.10 is released. I fixed up a few very minor emulation issues, added support for all of the 6502’s “undocumented” opcodes (i.e. the opcodes that just happen to work even though they’re really not supposed to), and modified the display a bit.

Now you can even make it look like a crappy old TV, if you choose! For, uh..nostalgia’s sake.

Enjoy!

Seriously, I Was Bored

No real dev updates. I’m still working on the behind-the scenes stuff. I got a bit bogged down with the asset management – turns out, handling on-the-fly asset streaming on the 360 using XNA is a tricky proposition, due to the garbage collection (which triggers every megabyte or so of allocation, grinding everything to a halt if your heap is too complex) and the XNA content management system (you can’t dynamically unload any given individual component – it’s all or nothing).

Because it’s been rather frustrating, I didn’t feel like coding tonight.

Instead, I did some image editing based on a dumb idea I had.


Click to enlarge

That’s all.