Everything you never wanted to know about Jon Watte

While I'm thinking about lighting, I'm dropping in a camera, and a player model based on kW Animation and kW X-port. This is mainly for proportion, and to get a feeling for what a unified scene will look like.

So, I'm generating a dungeon-like structure procedurally (in Rogue-like tradition).

Initially, I just lit it using a "sunlight" type directional light. However, that looks approximately like ass. Mainly because that's not how dungeons are actually lit, I guess :-)

Last week-end, I lost the boot disk for my Linux server. Mostly, that server just serves as a file server for MP3 files, photos and ripped DVDs these days, but not being able to listen to music or watch movies does cramp your style a little bit.

If you combine software outsourcing (seldom a good idea) with bulk form email (also not a good idea), what do you get? Can two wrongs make an unny-fay?

Really gives you a good feeling for the quality of work these people do, right?

One of the Google Adsense advertisers that showed up on this site have a sign-up page with the following beautiful ad copy on it. You'd think that if you had the money to develop a computer game, and host servers, and pay for advertising, you could find someone to proof-read your Engrish for another $50...

Microsoft has the Connect site, which works as a public feature request and bug report database for most of Microsofts products. At times, I do file bug reports on that site. The bugs have a "vote" feature, where the Microsoft groups apparently may pay more attention to a bug with higher votes.

It used to be, a microprocessor was simple. It had instructions like "Load the accumulator from the address stored in the X register (LDA(X))." Or "Add register B to register A (ADD B, A)." And that was pretty much it. Time marched on, and we got more esoteric instructions, like "load effective address of scaled register indirect with offset" (LEA eax, [ebx*8+ecx]).

I'm using WPF 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and developing for Windows XP SP3.

No matter what I do, the menu bar and menu items of my application are ugly, blurry, anti-aliased. WinForms, MFC and Win32 applications however have nice, crisp, clear menu items.

I've tried checking the "align to device pixels" box, but it only gives a marginal improvement.

I've been working on a GPU accelerated light map generator for XNA for a little while. I'm using the light map only to tell shadow/light for each surface for each light, and then solving the basic light equation (ambient + diffuse + specular + emissive) per pixel, multiplied by shadow.