Latest Posts

Bureaucracy rocks

Published by Matthias Gall

I am currently working on a review of Diomidis Spinellis’ book “Code Reading – The Open Source Perspective”. I found a nice quote at the beginning of chapter five, “Advanced Control Flow”:

“It is necessary for technical reasons that these warheads be stored upside down, that is, with the top at the bottom and the bottom at the top. In order that there may be no doubt as to which is the bottom and which is the top, it will be seen to it that the bottom of each warhead immediately be labeled with the word TOP.”
(British Admiralty Regulation)

Had a good laugh when I read that 😉

C64 MTBF 20 years

Published by Matthias Gall

MTBF is “Mean Time Between Failures”, and a recent article will lead to a slight increase of the C64’s MTBF. It states that on old C64 was responsible for the electronic displays on the main station of Dortmund, and it lately quit its service after 20 years. The funny thing is that they need to repair it, as a new system would cost three million Euros. An expert from Munich was commissioned to repair the computer, but he did not arrive yet. Rumour has it noone in Dortmund knows on which rail he’ll arrive.

Christmas Code Contest

Published by Matthias Gall

We held a little gamedev contest between christmas and sylvester, and I handed an entry in, too. The goal was to create a little game using graphics from Reiners Tilesets only.
contest-8
This is a screenshot of my entry. The programming language was unspecified, and so I decided to write a little MMORPG (Minimal Online Roleplaying Game) in Java. I had no time to test it in the Internet and found out that it’s nearly unplayable online, later, but it’s quite nice for LAN playing. The goal is to collect all gems on a map in a limited time, and to beat all collected gems out of your opponents with your sword. The entry and the other contributions, all with full source code, are available for download on the #gamedev.ger contest page.
Sidenote: I recognized that there seems to be a difference in the behaviour of the KeyboardActionListener under Windows and Linux, but I won’t investigate this issue further. If you have strange effects while trying to walk around with your character, you most likely just experience this bug.

Why spending money on hardware sucks

Published by Matthias Gall

Some days ago I needed a case for my girlfriends PC. I decided to leave her my old one and to order a new one for myself. My PC is running in the living room and three harddiscs, an overclocked CPU (1.6 to 2.4 GHz P4) with adequate fan, and a graphic card with fan made quite some noise. I hoped that a SilentMaxx case would reduce the noise audible. The case arrived, I put my hardware from one box into the other, but soon my graphic card decided to solve the noise problem in its own way. While I was away from keyboard, the fan silently stopped and allowed my GPU to make eggs roast. When I came back, I saw the same screen that I saw when I left, but I wondered why the Windows clock did not show the correct time. Nothing moved – the machine was totally frozen. Although I was able to see something before I restarted, the graphics adaptor never recovered – instead, the BIOS welcomes me with an unhappy “1x long, 3x short” beep. So I had to order a new graphic card too and had to decide whether to get some state of the art stuff or go for some mid-price hardware. I decided the latter, because I’m quite sure something else will break … soon …

Download of the day

Published by Matthias Gall

Microsoft is always good for a laugh. If you ever wondered why your Snow White & the Seven Dwarves DVD won’t work when watching it under Windows XP, it might be because you missed to install this patch. A friend of mine recently pointed me to this one and I had a good laugh. Don’t bother about IE security issues, download a Snow White & the Seven Dwarves DVD patch instead!

And the beat goes on …

Published by Matthias Gall

I had to recognize that the amount of entries in my personal worklog at sechsta sinn dramatically decreased since we returned from Dusmania 6.0, June 19th/20th. But it’s not only me who became slower, as it seems. We made plans to speed up the development of our game, decided what to do the next twelve weeks or so, and were full of beans. Today, about ten weeks later, virtually nothing happened. Yes, we did do some planning, all of us coders did do some code, and the graphic artists did work on some gfx stuff. But it was nothing compared to the amount of time and the potentials we had. Although the discussion we had that Sunday outside of the Dusmania halls was quite lively, it seems like it revitalised our motivation only for that one day. After we went home after this weekend everyone seems to have fallen back into his personal lack of motivation. One point indeed is that our project lead Jochen is currently busy with relocating to Finnland for some time, and one of our coders, Julius, is relocating as well to start his CS studies the upcoming semester; mattin was busy with a contest contribution (I guess he’ll win, won’t he?), Christopher and I are busy with our girlfriends, Gereon has his own little game project and works hard for the universty, and so on, and so on.
And this is the other point: everyone has become more and more busy with other stuff besides sechsta sinn. It’s hard to tell whether this trend is just a short term phenomenon … but I better don’t think about what it means if not.

Welcome

Published by Matthias Gall

Welcome, stranger. I felt like writing some blog stuff again after I saw WordPress and thus decided to start another attempt. I don’t feel like attracting lots of people or assert claims on posting some intellectual stuff here, but maybe someone likes to read the opinions I share with the WWW. For now, I have set up two categories for topics I like to write about: Game Development and Personal — I guess they are self-explanatory.
Anyway, just some words on my motivation to write about Game Development at all: as most people, I love to dive into fantastic worlds, fantasy or scifi, past, present or future. But since I can remember I did not only like to play, read, participate; I preferred to create my own worlds, stories, rules. I started to draw a lot of comics as a child, later I wrote short stories. Finally, I learned programming on a C64 at the age of 10 – that was in 1989. (In fact, I even started at the age of 6, but at that time, I had to ask my dad to use his computer, and he mostly decided to deny and to send me to play outside instead.)
I guess I made a very typical way then: from BASIC over Assembler to Pascal to C/C++. As before with one goal in my mind: to create my very own worlds. So that’s how I came to Game Development.
After 15 years of programming it’s still a passion of mine. I’ve been working for Electronic Arts in the meantime and had opportunities to join several other well known German developers. I also sneaked a peek into medical computer graphics when I wrote my CS thesis last year – quite an interesting field. But I decided to join some more conservative branch of the industry for now. While I’m working as a software engineer in the security management area, I still work on my game projects in my spare time: sechsta sinns Die verbotene Welt (The forbidden World), an award winning real time strategy game project, and Pre Mortal, a bizarre medieval adventure game which is yet to be announced.
So, that’s about Game Development so far. Feel free to take a look at the projects and enjoy your stay. Let me know how you feel about the entertainment industry, the weather, your mother in law, or whatever – I’d be happy to hear from you.

Welcome

Published by Matthias Gall

Hey, I am Matt!

I’ve built dozens of spare time projects, started a couple of companies and even made decent money from it. And I’ve always thought about writing about it.

Somehow, it never really worked out.

I still haven’t given up on the idea to write about the journey, so I hope to share a couple of more stories with you some day on my blog.

While you’re here, please check out my ever incomplete portfolio.