All posts filed under: Personal

Farewell adidts.sys BSOD

Published by Matthias Gall

I promise, if this isn’t my very last posting on hardware and hardware driver issues (todays topic), I will add an own category. But since I finally found a solution for my last PC problem, namely BSODs caused by adidts.sys, I feel the urge to blog about that. adidts.sys is the SoundMAX high definition audio driver for the onboard audio which came with my ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. The driver version available on the ASUS homepage, where I went frequently to check for an update, is still V5.10.1.4530 dated 2006/07/10, but now I learned that there are actually two newer versions available on the ASUS FTP site. I tried 1988b_32bit_510014560.zip and it worked like a charm. I just updated the driver from the hardware control panel instead of using the setup.exe, and finally, my last woe was gone. Update: Although this fixed my BSOD troubles, I recognized that I did not have a stereo mixer available to record the output of my sound card. I tweaked around a bit to handle this, too. Let me …

Hardware, again

Published by Matthias Gall

After years on a 60Hz CRT at 1600×1200, I decided to get a 20″ TFT. It’s a Samsung SyncMaster 204B which is one of the cheaper models on the market, but it turned out to be a real bargain and I am really satisfied with it. I like the pivot function. Although it is unfamiliar for me, I always wanted to have a better overview over the code above and below the cursor, and I know that this is the only solution left if you use a relatively high resolution and relatively small fonts. So I’ll try to get used to that. When I tried out the pivot function, I recognized the only drawback of the hardware so far: I found it quite hard to rotate it 90 degrees, and I missed snap points. This is our game, DVW, at 800×600. Another view of my hacker cabinett with flash. To the left you can see my old tube which I now use for chat and debug windows. Although the CRT takes a lot of room …

All Good Things Must Come To An End

Published by Matthias Gall

Today, I brought myself to a decision which was overdue. I spent the last five years or so hanging around in a neat gamedev IRC channel, and the last four or so with founder access level (which is the highest privilege one can have in such a chatroom). The channel was a place of relaxation, chitchat, and sometimes even interesting ontopic gamedev discussion, and these guys really meant alot to me – all of them. I liked even those ones who sometimes were a real pain in the neck, and sometimes I really had to laugh in front of my tube when I had to admonish them at the same time. I always joined this chat if my PC was running, regardless whether I was coding, playing, writing, learning, or, of course, chatting. I spent some 10000 hours online with my latest mIRC installation, always with these guys, in this one chatroom. Actually, these guys even “survived” several ex-girlfriends! Although there were some differences from time to time, all the 40 or so regulars stayed, …

Friday the 13th

Published by Matthias Gall

One might think this must be a unlucky day. It wasn’t for me, at least until I came home today 😉 Work is very satisfying right now. I have to dig into several technologies that were new to me, because I’m going to impose JMX on our application. This is a rather challenging task, because the application consists of several distributed components, and unfortunately it’s an “identity management and security administration” application, so I have to be really careful not to break our own security. So, although I knew some of the technologies/APIs already, I learned a lot of new things about PKI, SSL, JAAS, JNDI, JINI, RMI, J2EE, SOAP, JPSs, Struts, Servlets, Application Servers like JBoss or Websphere, and finally JMX itself. After about two weeks of reading, playing around, testing, and comparing JMX implementations, a somewhat concrete picture of the implementation evolved, and I’m quite happy with it so far. I don’t have a 100 percent clear picture yet, but the most issues that troubled me are solved. One thing I’m still thinking …

sechsta sinn weekend

Published by Matthias Gall

Tomorrow another sechsta sinn weekend is going to start, and right now I feel sick. This sucks. But not just physically, but mentally as well … mattin told me that he has to leave early on Sunday noon, Julius is thinking about attending a birthday party on Saturday, I have to work tomorrow before I can take off, and Christopher, Jochen, Jan and Sebastian won’t join us at all due to several reasons. Melancholic I remember the days when we managed to get the whole team AND visitors into our little cellar for the whole weekend. Anyway, I’m looking forward to being as productive as possible this weekend. I’ll take my webcam with me again, so don’t forget to catch a glimpse.

Weekend Gamedev

Published by Matthias Gall

I’ve done a huge refactoring of our game project, DVW, over the weekend. One reason was that I could not see the GUI code anymore. It was a mess! Most of the stuff was about four years old, and it looked like 40 years old or so. So I was spending the whole Friday night to rearrange things, move attributes and methods up to the parent class, remove some redundant stuff, and I even killed about 1000 lines of code by simply removing some GUI controls which were not used any longer and which were buggy as hell. The main reason was that I am currently writing the main menu code which is completely controlled from a Lua script. I didn’t want it to be hardcoded, because I don’t want to be the one who needs to do all the fine tuning with all the visual effects we’re going to have. We have people who are much more talented with this detail work. I wrote a state machine which supports multiple states at once, so …

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 …

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, …

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 …