Newest items first. Notices remain for 12 months.
Long time no update... Since a couple
of weeks, I'm on a new system. Just over 12 months without decent
hardware, man that was rough. My new (P4 2.53, 512 M and a GF4
ti4800se/128, just so you know) system is about ready to use now, I
think all my tools and data are in place. I still haven't properly
taken care of setting up a machine for the kids, or disposing of things
I no longer need in the study room though - it will have to happen
slowly. Meanwhile, I'm slowly getting back the will and energy to
produce documents and code. Cg toolkit and DX9, tons of samples and
data.
I've played through Neverwinter Nights, and really anjoyed it. Kudos
to Bioware for using a personal plot - mild disappointment only for
their not daring to use it without tacking on a save-the-world plot.
Beautiful and athmospheric. I also got Dungeon Siege and enjoyed it
only slightly less. Both were high on my shopping list partially due to
being extendable and mod friendly although I have not yet made much use
of that. I hope to try Medieval Total War too, soon.
My new system runs Debian 3.0 and Windows XP Pro. I really like XP,
it's very nice. For the first time, I have a development system I might
share (and trust to share) with the family. Axel enjoys playing Theme
Park World and the Sims on it.
The agenda for my work isn't changed. Procedural plot generation,
procedural worlds, Axel's Cruyk project remain my focus points.
In private life, at the moment I teach computer classes at
Fyrisskolan (basically equivalent to a US high school), including
Programming (C++ in this case) and Multimedia. Me giving classes in
Photoshop and Flash is ... interesting. I learn a lot of course, even
though I don't see much of it as part of my future. Pondering the
future, I wonder if getting the necessary diplomas for doing serious
teaching might be what I should do. After so many years in industry,
school work feels very restrictive. The reward on the personal level
make it up somewhat, but still... We'll see. For now, I pretty much
enjoy being as good a teacher as I can.
Oh and some local heroes rounded up people in the village to make a
united attempt at getting some better-bandwidth internet access - we'll
most likely be getting fixed IP ADSL in a few weeks. Not a personal T1,
but I will certainly look into setting up something entirely of my own.
And finally, thanks to all my
countless visitors:
Well, countless may be a slight
exaggeration - since I added the hit counter to the Haven front page, it
has recorded 500 visits. For a page with nothing to advertise, offering no
free stuff and with no advertising or promotion, I think it's very very
gratifying and flattering that 500 visitors chose to stop by and read.
Some sought me out in search engines, some must have spread the word to
friends and colleagues. If anything, I would wish nothing more than for
some of those visitors to also drop me a note and tell me what they
thought about the pages.
Visitors come out like this:
- 33% from the US
- 20% from Sweden
- nearly all the rest are from one of Canada, Mexico and Europe
- Over 95% arrive by clicking my signature on GameDev.net
As yet, I do no other tracking than recording hits on the front page.
In the future I want to add better visitor statistics (as an
interesting thing - I don't plan on doing anything with it and
certainly not exploit it or in any way risk visitors' privacy).
Thanks for reading!
Renamed Conflict Design Patterns to Patterns of Drama
, better reflecting what it is really about. The file name is
unchanged. Work is underway with the analysis of the problem. Polti's
list is also being added in its entirety.
As a side note, the size of the document collection, counting
only html files, is currently 757 kb (776 039 bytes, for restricted
version, 60 files) and 568 kb (582 258 bytes, for public version,
45 files). 3 documents exist in different versions for
public/restricted purposes, the rest are identical, are placeholders
in the public version (21 files) or exist only in the restricted
version. 34 images are linked (3.13 Mb total but this is due to one
1.1 M image which will be replaced). The size of documents in other
formats (ASCII, Dia, KSpread) is 77 kb. The tool used to create the
html documents is now exclusively Netscape Composer 6.2.1. Most images
and screenshots were simply taken with "print screen" or Alt-print
screen and saved in Microsoft Paint.
Amazing how the key-tapping adds up.
2002-05-19This text was written in its entirety by Olof
Ekström. For more information about the author of this
page, see Olof Ekström's personal information in the Project Profiles document.
Copyright © 2001-2002 Olof Ekström/Extro
System. All rights reserved.
