My First Job!

After spending 6 weeks in a graduate development program, I decided not to take the placement offered - and took up another job instead. The job itself happens to be with a general insurance company. I'm not really doing all that much, just really more like data entry. Of course, there's quite a bit to learn about how internally the company works, but it's just a matter of time before I get bored, I think.

I can't really say at this point since I don't seem to mind the work too much, I do it, and before I know it - it's lunchtime. After lunch, I get back, and before I know it, it's time to pack up and go home. Time usually flies when you're having fun - so I guess I don't loathe the work and don't mind doing it. Not yet anyway. Give it a few months and then we'll see.

That's it for my short update for now.

Strange Things to Pass the Time...

I haven't been working on the game, but I have been thinking about how to make cards, so I decided to fool around a bit everywhere, and hacked up the following:

There's quite a few things still wrong, like the illustration, copyright, and among other things, the collector's numbers and logos, and expansion lettering. I intend to replace the expansion lettering with the set's code name, since I don't fancy - XVIII - if we get to the 18th set, and would much rather have - SGC - instead.

The art and wordings came from a Sangraal City PDF release I think. Thanks to Pichoro for giving me a starting point on a Hecatomb MSE template.

Photo: Yet Another Flower

Speaking of My Wii

I realised after I twittered about my Wii that I haven't really mentioned anything about my Wii. I sent it to a technician - who promptly told me some nonsense thing about how I needed to replace the whole drive, and gave me a reason completely unrelated to the real reason the drive had failed - a broken gear.

I know it was a broken gear - because I checked it before I sent it in to be repaired.

He then told me that it would cost AUD250 to replace the drive. Right. It would cost me more than half my Wii to replace the drive. This repair I obviously refused. A complete drive replacement wasn't something I needed a technician for.

And so, I bought a replacement drive for about AUD80, replaced it myself, and the Wii started working again. The catch? The laser on the replacement drive was worse than the one on my original drive.

And so, yet again, recently, I had to exchange the lasers since the one I was currently using, started giving me plenty of disc read errors. (And before people start accusing me of piracy, this was on a perfectly genuine Wii Fit disc.)

I adjusted the POT on the laser, and after a few more times messing with it, I decided the best course of action was indeed to just replace the laser with the one from my old broken gear drive.

And so my Wii is working again! Nintendo either really messed up the QC this round, or something else went wrong. It's my least used console - and it's given me the most problems. One wonders if it'll die way before my other two consoles.

Screenshot: Proof of Concept for Hecatomb

I've actually been building proof of concepts for a PC version of the game for a while now. I've been trying very hard to improve speeds using just the .NET CLR, but it looks like I'll have to begin looking into either making or borrowing a proper image library for this. My own very basic algorithms just aren't enough to keep up - I'm hoping to have it run on 512MB RAM computers, although it looks like whoever's interested is going to need 1GB to run this well - it currently runs using just 8MB of RAM - but it can easily balloon if I decide to preload resources into RAM. We'll see.

Oh yes, card images copyright Wizards of the Coast, or Hasbro, or whoever owns them. Definitely not mine.