State of Decay 2

It’s no accident that there have not been a lot of blog entries in the last several months, but hopefully life will be returning to normal soon. I took the time to clean up my site generator and simplify the site theme, though I expect I’ll probably waste a bunch of time fiddling around over the summer.

In any event, the game is looking good — although I’ve got one HUGE bug I must squish before we go out the door! — and it’s been a real blast to bask in some of the reactions from people who’ve seen the game.

The last couple of years have been kind of a wild ride, professionally — I certainly never thought I’d spend more time staring at C++ than anything else ! — but at least, now that the dust is settling, there should be time for blogging again. With all the crazy stuff I’ve had to learn I’m sure there will be lots to chew over, too.

In any event, the press embargo will lift on May 1st, and opening day will be May 22d. In the meantime, here’s a little video teaser from the company stream with a special shout out to my colleague Jeff Sult, who helped me ferret out a truly insidious bug in the Xbox shader compiler.

PS If you’re wondering… sometimes the Xbox decides to ‘optimize’ exponent operators to use a logarithm instead of a multiply… Which is very nice unless your exponent somehow goes negative, in which case the result is a NAN which can really mess up your PBR G-buffers. Sigh…

The New Hotness

I've finally completed rolling over to to a new, self-hosted blog platform!

The process took a bit longer than I wanted, mostly because it web development remains a messy, iterative process - at least for me.  Since I ended up unifying both the blog and the old Character Rigger's Cookbook as well as on old markdown wiki, I had to do a lot of little scripts to groom the old content into a consistent format and linking strategy.  Add in more than a modicum of CSS noodling and whatnot and my 'couple of weekends' project turned into a couple of months.

However all that is behind me now, and all my future updates are going to be coming up at theodox.github.io  (you can also use www.theodox.com).  If you're subscribed to the current feed, you should switch over to either http://theodox.github.io/feeds/atom.xml or http://theodox.github.io/feeds/rss.xml, depending on your reader; one of the nice side effects of the switch is that the new feeds are much cleaner than Blogger's -- no more CSS gibberish instead of article summaries, thank you very much!)

I'm going to leave this site intact, and I'll try to keep monitoring comments and so on here, but the new site is going to be where all the news stuff comes out.  I'm also going to change the blog.theodox.com redirect so it goes to the new site, so if you're using that in a blogroll you won't have to update it.

PS. I had to touch a lot of content during the migration: there are about 150 blog posts, several dozen wiki pages, and a bunch of articles that all had to be repointed and I'd be pretty surprised if nothing odd slipped through.  Please let me know using the comments at the new site so I can fix up anything that's confusing or misleading.

So, here one more link to the new site, just in case.  Hope to see you there!

Blogger blues

Wherein our author uses blogger to post a blog post blogging about how much he dislikes blogger.

It's late on a Sunday night and I need to get this off my chest.

I really have come to loathe Blogger.  The sluggish, overly complicated, JS heavy theme, the sluggish, too-complex-for-speed-but-too-simple-for-interesting-stuff editor, and the way it stuffs stylesheet info into the RSS feed come to mind. but overall... it's just gotten on my nerves.

So, I'm probably going to transition the blog over to something else.  My current leading candidate for a site generator is Pelican, a Python based static html site generator which seems to be powerful enough for my not-too-complex needs.  Jekyll is another candidate but all things being equal I'd rather stick with a Python-based setup and the final output will be pretty much the same.

I'm a tad nervous about what happens to old links and traffic so I assume that I'll probably transition over gradually with duplicate postings for a while. If any of you have done something similar in the past I'd be curious to hear about how it went.

In the meantime, I'll just add that I've been dealing with the transition in typical TA fashion. I hacked up a script to download all of the existing blog posts as XML, then used the html2text module on the cheese shop to convert the HTML from the posts into markdown text. I'm still going to have to hand-finish every pieces, cleaning up dead links and missing images and so on:  I'm sure it'll be a TA-style spit'n'bailing-wire party for a while yet.

In the meantime I'm all ears if anybody has more suggestions for site generators, or a reason to go with something other than a static site on github.io, please let me know in the comments!

update:  the new site is here

Markdown Wrapup

A while back I blogged about how much I longed for a good Markdown based blogging platform. Since a couple of people inquired about how that’s gone, I thought I’d mention my (meager) findings since then.

Site updates

I've finally gotten around to re-hosting the slides from the Character Rigger's Cookbook talk.  You can also get the original audio on the GDC Vault.

For the tiny handfull of you how were using my Unity course notes, I'm in the process of moving them to a new host.  So the old link at theodox.com is no longer correct (if you follow it you'll get a work-in-progress page; I'm experimenting with a cool new markdown based wiki that is much nicer than the old one at tryscribble.com, but I have yet to make 'real' pages).  I'll announce it here when they go live again.

While moving things around I also added redirect so you can find this blog at blog.theodox.com as well as the usual blogspot link. 

Future Watch: Graphics & Animation Research

I've added a permanent page to keep track of interesting academic research. It's over in the sidebar.  If you're at all into animation, download the videos or the ppt of the paper on gait optimization. It's fun -- unless you're an animator, in which case it's a bit scary.



The list is a bit skimpy atm, I'll post updates as it expands.