First of all, I hate Mobile Phones, Blackbarries, etc... everything people carry around in public, shout into, or that beeps everywhere I am. That said, I never approved the Idea of people playing electronic games in public either, because - technically - it is the same thing, and in my rigorousness I could not make an exception.

That said, I recently got to play some GameBoyAdvanced Games - and I was pretty impressed. There are Emulators available for all kinds of Mobile Devices on the PC and I started to check the code for those little gems.  I was impressed and reminded of the "old days", where people, like me, ran to the store to buy the pc-magazine, only to get to the code-lists and to type them into the cube, before we could compile the code and  finally start playing. Size ment everything. And we were amazed how much "stuff" could be expressed by few lines of code. Todays PC-Games are huge, several hundert-thousand lines of code. The average game today exceeds the two Gig-Range. Of course a lot of it are textures and thanks to  programmable Shaders, the actual size of the next-gen games could drop down a bit, because now, the gpu can calculate "on-the-fly" what you otherwise would have stored as a texture map. So, seeing games for the GBA that are around 5MB, which still is big, but not that big overall, wakes "the dragon" in me, and wants me to develop my own games for the GBA/NDS/PSP, rather than for the big systems.

Another working saturday
sketch I did from a black/white photo

I went to my fav tech-library. It is the 100year old Technical Library of the 'DeutscheMuseum' in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.

My intention was to spend some time drawing sketches, warming up by doing some old-school human anatomy, but I was hooked by two-three books on art-theory.

One, called "The Origin of Perspective" by Hubert Damisch is about the change in perspective during the quatrocento, the renaissance period. But the Forword is very entertaining. He writes about the discussions and disputes among french intellectuals during the late 60's and there are tons of references between the Marxist and Structuralist groups of that time. Although the book was written 1987. So, if you are not familiar with the lingo of that time (luckily, or rather 'unluckily' I am) you wont grep a thing about Lacan, Foucault, the Bourgois, etc,etc,... finally, after 5hours of theory, I forced myself to stop reading and did some sketches/drawings for 1 hour, mostly after pics from photo-magazines. You can see them, as usual, under my flickr-adress: http:www.flickr.com/photos/buckybit/
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Also what's happening: I saw a PS3Dev-Conference happening March 1st, in London, UK. It's only for/on PS3-Dev. I hope someone is going to cover it. Have to write an email to the gamespot-stuffers...

yesterday evening I visited a dear friend of mine. He stopped finally playing EQ2 and he started to get interested in BF2. He showed me a level playing vs. bots and than left the keyboard and mouse for me to play. Through the evening we played matches against the AI and watched the other guy play. It was interesting to see how different our gameplay styles are. He was more tactical, very cautious and all in all more defensive while I took a typical FPS-SinglePlayer approach: run-and-gun-style. Only 60sec into the game I hopped on a hostile humvee and fragged the gunner and the driver came out and got his load. My friend was like jaw-droppingly stunned. He said, he never thought one could play this way. This, from a guy who used to play quake2 against me. We had a funny and interesting evening - until 2:00am ... Still, I cannot say I really liked it, because I couldn't figure out how to command the bots effectively (like I can do in UT), and somehow the targets can take a lot while I can hide somewhere unseen, but the cpu would know where I am and wipe me out with one shot.

yes, I am late but I finally devoted myself to do it. The bad thing about it is, that all my work of the last 30 years is gone for good (destroyed, stolen, thrown away). So I have to come up with some new stuff. But then, I ask myself, what for? for whom? I am perfectly aware, that nobody reads this blog or watches these pics. And why should they. I am not interested in other peoples stuff neither, accept I stumble myself over it.

multithreading is no easy thing to deal with. it is all about how to split the functions to make parallel threads. It demands a whole new way of thinking from the programmers. the debugging tools are not up to the task of finding the neuralgic points today. the greatest threat to programming threads are "deadlocks", this means the different threads are waiting for each other to finish their part. most of the libraries have to be converted/rebuild. other potential problems is the access to the harddrive and the videocard. i.e. the opengl and directx-drivers cannot handle more then one thread - so all instructions for the videocard have to be collected by one thread first... a big part of the necessary calculations are handled by the gpu nowadays, so the multi-core cpu-power isn't heavily used. and, furthermore the directx-api is not very good in handling multithreads.

the thing with the ps3 - as far as I, an industry-outsider, see it - is, that all the game programmer have to LEARN a lot of new stuff. things, that they never had to use in the past. things, they only had heard of in an academic way, if ever. they have to learn things from scratch but do not have the time to do it like they would like to, because they have to work on the next games, while learning. all their programming tools, they have built over the past have to be re-designed. the libraries rewritten. the algorithms finetuned for the next-gen processors. re-compiling, debugging, recompiling, debugging... - this must be a pain in the ass.

If you want to learn something about the Cell Processor, AnandTech has IMO the best Article about the hole thing. They discribe all the important issues in a thorough way, but everybody can understand it. You may even learn a little bit of assambly;) see: www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2379

I posted this @ JanePinckards 1upBlog:the dirty little secrets about videogame journalism:it is not about journalism. and it is also not really about video gaming.

Writing about videogames is no different than writing about washing machines or cellphone vendors.... nobody expects another hemingway or jane austen, or, more subtle, another judith butler or walter benjamin. It is a "functional writing", a supplemental advertising text, serving the needs of the productmakers and productbuyers. Very un-poetic, indeed.
As a "writer" or "player" of whatever, however, you are reflecting about the things you do, you sense - you feel and think. so, the question naturally comes up:

do you really believe you are part of an immersive, interactive world, or is it just the poor illusion you are so willingly seeking to dive into, leaving the complicated and complex real world outside your thoughts, overlapping the truth: that you are sitting in your couch for hours

do you really think you have accomplished something by generating high scores/beating bosses or are you rather a pavlovian puppy, that just does what the game-developers allow you to do?  staring at your screen and pushing buttons.
are you controlling the controls or are the controls controlling YOU?are you retreating to a tiny world, where you have the illusion to control things which are simple enough for even someone like you to accomplish? or are you really the savior of the universe, as the games try to convince you? 

nobody asks the real questions, because nobody wants to hear them...

also, as a journalist or even employee: are you defining the limits of what you do, or do you let others define them for you?

Where I (who to my cost already am One of those strange creatures, man) A spirit free to choose, for my own share, What case of flesh & blood I pleased to wear, I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, Or anything but that vain animal Who is so proud of being rational. The senses are too gross, & he'll contrive A sixth, to contradict the other five, And before certain instinct, will prefer Reason, which fifty times for one does err; Reason, & ignis fatuus in the mind, Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind, Pathless, & dangerous wandering ways it takes Though error's fenny bogs & thorny brakes; Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain; Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down Into doubt's boundless sea, where like to drown, Books bear him up awhile, & make him try To swim with bladders of philosophy; In hopes still to o'ertake th'escaping light, The vapour dances in his dazzling sight Till, spent, it leaves him to eternal night. Then old age & experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, & make him understand, After a searchso painfull & so long, That all his life he has been in the wrong. Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies, Who was so proud, so witty, & so wise. - John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Do you get easily seduced by the armature or are you seeking for inner qualities? I am talking about the design of the xbox360. Its not the box, it's the electronics inside that I care about. Multicore-Processors are fine, don't get me wrong. And the GPU rocks. But why then go for the cheapest cooling-fans possible??? Microsoft - as we hear - is losing $126 per unit. They had to think about costs during the design. Which led to something good: the power-brick is actually a smart move. Try to get as much electrics outside the main box - keeps the console some degrees cooler (something designers should do with the pc's). And some really bad stuff: the fans inside are what "patrick norton" from "digitallifetv" called "brute force" cooling (He also said the hole console is like a radiator, because it is not only loud but also pretty hot). Also, the Harddrive is a joke. Whats wrong with some slick 2.5"-HDD (see your notebook)? And finally something nobody (at least "gamer") cares about: the sucker sucks 200Watt. Hugh? Yeah. I know you don't care. But if you are an engineer you look for elegance, efficency, ecology, ergonomics...not just a white-painted casebox.

One of the greatest novels of the second part of the 20th. Century is "J.R." by William Gaddis. Gaddis is somehow a tragic figure. He is probably one of the greatest American Authors - at least his colleagues think so, but he never got the wide public attention he deserved. J.R. is a masterpiece, a piece of fiction as much as a piece of art. The novel is written in dialogue only (except for some short sentences that glue some geographical shifting). But you will not get your usual: "He said-she said"-stuff. Actually you will not get any names at all unless they are spoken in the dialogue. All you read is all you would hear: the different voices. At first it is hard to follow who is talking (although, you get hints and understand through the context) but after a couple of pages (maybe up to 50 at worst) you begin to 'dig' how the book works and you want to start all over again and enjoy the ride. And what a ride it is! People are constantly talking at each other, over each other, interrupting each other. You start paying attention to the different rhythms, idiosyncrasies, talking habits,etc... - those voices easily let you imagine the person behind it, what makes this novel so great. Reading this book is the closest way of how to listen to a musical piece, like reading musical notes instead of english language prose. The novel has three main characters: There is a young man, composer, who wants to write his major work, but gets stuck, is shy, and has permanently to deal with things and people he would rather avoid if he only could. Then there is a writer working as a school-teacher, a man in his 40's, instead of writing his next book, he is stuck in his life and became a sad, exhausted person. He teaches the class Thermodynamics/Entropy and while he tries to tell them what this energy-losing, black-hole-like cosmos is all about the chalk breaks, the words stuck, the world leaks, turning all things into a mass...- somehow one major 'theme' of the book. And then there is J.R., a little schoolboy, who is the misfit in his class. The kind of classmate nobody really wants to spend time with. After an excursion to a big wall-street company the class comes back with one share of the company the class bought as a souvenir- and JR starts to become more interested in the brochures he brought back, than about his baseball-cards or pornmags. He starts to call people up on the phone, putting a handkerchief over the phonespeaker, so he would sound more mature. He starts to trade over the phone and soon becomes a big-time entrepreneur, while truckloads of stuff start to be delivered to his school. The book is hilariously funny, but that would not be enough. It delivers also a critical view to capitalism and our babbling society. Amazingly this book came out in 1974 when nobody new how the economy would boost one day, so the novel was way ahead of its time. Also the book talks about arts and how hard it is to be an artist in a society that does not care about artists. There are lots of sad and melancholic, even some tragic moments, but the humour in the book lets you swallow it and leaves you actually with a lot of thoughts. The characters in the book will follow you for months because they are so lively. In short: if you want to read only one book a year, go for this one! If you want to learn more, I encourage you to go to williamgaddis.org or just google/wiki your way through...

I try to keep my daily life into 2 halfs (online/offline). I realized that I am much more productive, while I am offline (=reading real books, learning things, thinking while walking in parks, talking with 'real people'). But eventually I am stuck with my NetLife: At the moment I am addicted to RSS. I am using FeedDemon and listening to older "ThisWeekinTech" (TWiT) - Episodes /w Leo Laporte, John Dvorak & Co. - also some other Tech/Nerd-TV-Stuff. I was listening to Woz, talking about Capt'n Crunch etc... - and I have to confess: I like Channel9 (channel9.msdn.com) - not that I digg M$ but some devs their are kind of o.k. They just made the wrong choices (=working for da Devil).

Speaking of Devil. I have to do some serious research for myself on the Google-Guys. They are getting bigger and bigger every day while I read IT-News about them. I am getting suspicious. I don't buy their "we-are-the-good-guys"-attitude. Maybe here is the real successor to M$. We'll see.