Still bringing home the bacon
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life
Well, if you didn't know already you'll know after reading this or this - Rare announced last month that it would be doing some 'restructuring', which is a friendly term for sacking a bunch of people. The whole process has been farcical at best, and has demoralised everyone thoroughly, but the powers that be have now let some people go. Thankfully I'm not one of them (which is fortunate since my redundancy payout would be pennies, and the Midlands isn't exactly bursting with game development studios that would welcome me with open arms), but it's been difficult seeing some of the people I work with depart, especially those that weren't planning on walking out anyway. I hope they land on their feet, and something better finds them.
So there you go, a brief 'behind the scenes' glimpse at the sham of a mockery of a sham that is the games industry.
Pies
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life
Allo!
Well, I figure I should probably get back into the swing of things now. I should probably also explain why I haven't been in the swing of things too.
A month and a bit ago I thought it'd be a great idea to reformat my main computer to install a couple more operating systems and to clean out the crap that always seems to have accumulated in Windows after about half a year or so. It should have been dead straight-forward, but instead resulted in hair-pulling frustration and a lot of CDs in the bin. After several nearly-working installations of XP and Vista I discovered (through use of a helpful little tool called memtest86+) that my RAM had somehow become broken, at the exact same time that my DVD drive broke. This wiped out about two weeks through experimenting, waiting for things to arrive, experimenting again, waiting for more things to arrive, and finally setting up four (yup) operating systems.
Then once I'd gotten my development environment all up and running with the latest versions of my dependencies (Ogre, UnitTest++ etc.) I found out that, in a nutshell, Ant is rubbish for C++ projects. I already ...
A lazy day, for a change
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life, cities-in-the-sky
Great, I've got a completely free weekend with my girlfriend away, perfect chance to get some work done on CITS... but I'm not in the mood, so I've only done some minor tidying work (programmers like me love making code pretty) and finished up some bits to do with people falling off the island that I should have done before (they get 'tidied up' like the buildings do now). The rest of the day was taken up cleaning my bike, sorting out insurance, calling estate agents and other boring but necessary things like that. Tomorrow will be better, I promise!
Now I'm relaxing with a bottle of Tanglefoot, listening to some Frank Zappa (I'm trying new musics... can be quite good if you listen to the right albums. Lumpy Gravy, Hot Rats and Apostrophe are my favourites so far), and probably playing some more GTA4 and Trackmania.
Note: Trackmania is great with retro red-and-blue 3D glasses. Cheers Joe :)
Cuboid fear
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life, cities-in-the-sky
The little cuboid people now have something to fear. If they get hit by a building, they fall off the island to their doom. By "doom" I mean "negative infinity in the Y axis", and by "fall" I mean "get launched upwards for comedy effect".
In other news I've been out and about in Loughborough looking for a new place to live. Seems like a lovely place, if you ignore the North and the South and the East of it.
Professional Crastination
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life
Well, I just made myself laugh. I went to see the new Indiana Jones film with my girlfriend today (it was pretty good). We had to get there very early since Odeon's online booking system broke whilst I was using it (refusing to load any pages at all just after I'd tapped in my credit card details, my favourite kind of broken), so we didn't have seats reserved.
So we were sat there watching the ads and one came on for the new Mini Clubman - a little 'short' entitled procrastination. It was this charming hand-drawn animation about a guy wanting to get his 'things' done, but who keeps finding other things to do. It ends up with him noticing his chair is squeaky, and going to buy some oil to stop it squeaking and distracting him from doing his things.
I hadn't thought about it much until a few minutes ago, when I caught myself kneeling by my upside-down deskchair with a can of WD40. I guess it's made even more ironic by the fact that I'm now writing a blog post about it.
Anyway, progress has been roughly zero these past few weeks ...
Another year, another post
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life
Well, what a fantastic year 2007 was. I passed my bike test, graduated, traveled around Europe, got a fab-tastic job making computer games and moved into a flat with my girlfriend. 2008 is going to have to try very hard to top that.
So, excuses; I've more or less only just got my computer(s) set up at home after yet more hardware failures, which means that I haven't been working on CITS, I haven't been able to update this blog, and I haven't even been able to play games (except on my shiny new 360). Things are starting to get back to normal now though (well, they're finding a new normal). As such, I'll start posting up some more of our travel journal over the coming weeks, and once I've got SVN working on my new fileserver I'll do some more on CITS so I can show you more shiny pictures. Huzzah!
A slightly more exciting update on life
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life
A lot has happened since my last update! Firstly, after receiving numerous very good offers up and down the country, I finally accepted a position as Graduate Software Engineer at Rare in Twycross. It was a tough decision since there were three offers that stood out as being absolutely excellent, but I settled for Rare since they take care of their employees well (being owned by Microsoft...) and it seems like a fun place to work, which is the most important thing I guess. It just seems like such a shame turning down such good offers :(
Anyway, after the weeks of constant phone conversations, interviews, emails and so on, I thought it'd be nice to have a break. This didn't happen of course, since I need somewhere to live. The very day they sent through the contracts to sign, me and my girlfriend rocketed off up North to find a new pad. We looked around Nuneaton (yuck...), Hinckley (eww...), Coalville (oh dear god) and Atherstone (yay!), and long story short ended up finding the perfect flat; it's in the lovely town of Atherstone, it has a balcony overlooking a canal lock, it's spacious and well-presented, and ...
A little update on life
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life
Well, I've managed to find a few minutes to upload some more of our travel journal. I also found a few more minutes to Geotag the photos and re-upload them with the new data. Now, when you click on one and go to Google Web Albums you'll see exactly where it was taken, and if you look at the album view you'll get a nice overview of the route. Very swish!
In other news, it turns out I'm very desirable. I put my CV on Monster.co.uk just over a week ago, and have been on the phone almost constantly since then - everybody wants to get me a job! I've had two interviews now, and both of them have come back (the next morning) with very generous offers. I won't say how much, but I will say it's more than Tim :P I've got a bunch more interviews with many more interesting companies in the coming week, so it looks like I'll be employed very soon indeed!
The upshot of all this for you guys is that these companies want to see sample code and demos, so I've been ...
Welcome home to me!
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life
Well, I'm now back from my travels, fed, watered and rested. I suppose many of you didn't even know that I went on holiday since I forgot to post about it ;) I spent the last 30 days riding round Europe (on my Bandit) with my girlfriend (on her dad's Revere), camping, adventuring and generally having a smashingly good time. In total we managed a little over 3000 miles, in 7 different countries, not including England! I'll have a bunch of other useless statistics on the journey once I've had a play with Google Maps and Excel a little ;)
Anyway, I shan't go into detail about the journey in this post; we kept a travel journal on the way round, which due to shoddy workmanship at the notepad factory will be being typed up over the next couple of days to be posted on this blog. I'm also in the process of sorting out the photos using Google Picasa (those guys really do have a tool for everything), which will probably involve getting them online at some point. So, you'll be able to find out all about the trip very shortly!
If you ...
Looking for a job
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life, cities-in-the-sky
Well, I'm now graduated! I'm now Ben Hymers MEng, and after being made to wear a ridiculous hat and listen to apocalyptic organ music for several hours, I feel I deserve it. It feels great, but at the same time I'm a little sad; university has been my life for four years and now it's all over. This also means I'm now unemployed rather than a student (there is a difference!), so any game companies looking for a new recruit, I'm very available!
On to the CITS side of things; the task I set myself in my last post took all of 10 minutes to complete! I was going to make another post about it, but my site curiously disappeared for a day or so. So, there is now a point to the game, though it's not very hard - you really have to try to lose! I'm going to fiddle a bit with some parameters to get it to be slightly more interesting. But first, I'm going to do a load of tidying up of the internals of the game. My work on Stereoshift increased my knowledge of C++ massively, and ...
Older