I got wild, staring eyes

An' I got a strong urge to fly

(But I'm an ox and that would look really stupid).

3/1/2002

Out On My Arse

Flossie says: Baaaa-llocks :-(.

Okay, now I can finally talk about it. The main reason that this page hasn't been updated for bloody ages is because things have been dodgy at VM Labs for some time now, and although I have known about it, I haven't been able to say anything publically. Also, doing updates requires a certain degree of ehthusiasm, and it's been bloody hard to get enthusiastic about anything when you don't know if any of the stuff you're working on is ever going to see the light of day.

Nothing to conceal now though; it's public knowledge that VML is doing the bloody chapter 11 thing and are being taken over by a company called Paradise IV; and when I got baack from my Christmas holidays I found I had email to the effect that, basically, although the aforementioned Paradise IV are keeping some of the people from VML on, I'm evidently not worth it, so I'm out on my arse. I had hoped that if I had to leave VML there might be something at the end of it, some kind of recognition for all the passion and enthusiasm I'd invested in the whole Project X/Nuon project over the years; but the way it's worked out there's nothing; no severance pay, just out on my arse with nothing. Less than nothing, really; towards the end at VML there were missed payrolls, and Paradise IV have stated that they don't give a smeg about honouring those, so basically I am out on my arse with a nice headstart into a state of financial freefall.

Baah. So much for the last six years then.

Bugger it. Sometimes I think that I should have been more "commercial" over the years, chosen the prospects that were more safely fiinancially rewarding, rather than those which I found most interesting, as I have always done. It gets really frustrating when you put your heart and soul into something and then it all just comes to nothing. Look at the Atari Jaguar: I was one of the loudest evangelists for that system, I liked the hardware and the people inside Atari, I produced what some considered to be the two finest apps for that system, T2K and the VLM; and then Atari went away. Then along came Nuon: again, the enthusiasm, good people, an exciting project, and eventually T3K and VLM-2 amongst the best apps for it... and then, bloody hell, it all goes away, again.

Ach, it's all too bloody depressing.

So here I am, out on my own again, in the somewhat scary situation of having a mortgage to pay, eight mouths to feed (nine, if I count myself), and a fairly punishing curry habit, and no income whatsoever. Heh... so I have to do something. I suppose I could try and get a job with some other software house, work on whatever systems are upcoming; but there is one last thing I would like to try, before I completely relinquish my idealism.

One of the last projects I was working on at VML was an idea I called the "Llamasoft Virtual Machine". What this did was basically set the Nuon up so that from a C programmer's point of view, it resembled a really tidy 2D machine, capable of doing all the usual things with scrolling surfaces and sprites, and also having the capability to do some neat special effects. The idea was that on the LVM, I could produce, fairly quickly, a stream of updated versions of my Llamasoft games, thereby usefully bolstering the somewhat sparse library of available Nuon titles, with some nice games that VML wouldn't have had to pay copyright for (because I would be kind and not ask for any).

When it was apparent that things were starting to get a bit wonky donkey at VML, I was basically warned that I should start looking into having some kind of "plan B" in place, should everything indeed go tits-up. And the thing about the LVM was, being a virtual machine, it pretty much completely hides the actual physical nature of the hardware that it is run on; and since it grows from a fairly simple set of machine-specific routines, it ought to be fairly easy to get it running on different platforms. Platforms with a significant number of users. Platforms which weren't likely to vanish out from underneath me at a moment's notice.

So I ported LVM to the PC, and to the PocketPC.

And now that I am out on my arse, with bugger all, I figure I am going to have one last shot at being idealistic.

Y'see, all I really want to do, all I really give a wet slap about, is writing games. My games, in my style, with my sense of humour and lots of silly beasties; games which are enjoyable and playable and fun, written by an individual rather than a herd, which you can play immediately without having to spend bloody hours reading some arcane manual. Games that don't take megabytes of RAM or HD space; decent, enjoyable, unpretentious games.

If I were rich, that's all I'd do; in fact just about the only reason I would want to be rich would be so that I could be free to just write my games and lightsynths the way I want to, and have a laugh doing it without having to worry about being "commercial".

So... without going into a load of detail yet, because I am still working out the final details of how I'm actually going to go about it: what I am going to do is restart Llamasoft. I'm going to sit down and do exactly what I would do if I were rich - just have a lot of fun making some nice games for the PC and the PocketPC (and possibly the Mac; I may well port LVM to that, too). I'll put the games up on my website, and people can come and take them, and if they like what I'm doing, and want me to be able to carry on doing it, then they can make a contribution to keeping Llamasoft going. It's basically going to be a variant of the shareware ethos. More details will emerge as and when Llamasoft goes live, which will be when I have at least two or three games ready for people to take.

I figure I can afford to try this out for about a year. If at the end of that time I'm making enough for it to become self sustaining, then I'll carry on, and be very happy. If it isn't, well, then I'll have to think about doing something else; probably something much more constrained and "commercial" and probably done for Somebody Else. I'd rather not work that way, but in the absence of alternatives if Llamasoft doesn't work out, then I might have to.

I've already made a start: anyone remember the game Deflex? This was a simple but fun dexterity game, which has had various incarnations over the years (on the Vic-20, as the "Made In France" subgame out of Iridis Alpha on the C64, on the Atari 8-bit and the ZX81 and as Super Deflex on the early Spectrum... it's a very simple game, controlled only by two buttons, and therefore I thought it might be a nice game to implement on the PocketPC, just to allow me to get used to that platform. 'Course, it's a bit more advanced than those old versions, with more involved screen layouts and moving targets and puzzle elements and such; it's coming along rather nicely; there are a load of screenshots here if you want to have a look. And a lot of the code for Deflex could be shared with Hover Bovver, so that is likely to be next on the PPC, and that will probably be followed by Gridrunner++.

On the PC front, first up most definitely has to be Llamatron II. Followed by Sheep In Space II: Ungulate Squadron. And, of course, there is always the VLM :-)...

So I may be out on my arse, and I may be bitterly disappointed, but I am at least having fun in the games that I am writing at the moment, and I figure I have about a year to see if the Llamasoft experiment is going to work out, to have one last shot at being idealistic rather than relentlessly commercial. Goat knows if it will work out. I really hope it does.

The Llamasoft website will be at http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/; if you go there now it just forwards you to some of my Enormouscamel webspace, but when Llamasoft goes live there will be a site there, carrying the games for download and (I hope) a bunch of interesting content besides. Certainly I shall maintain a "Llamasoft experiment blog" thingie there, so you'll be able to keep up on how it is all progressing (and my resultant state of mind ;-]).

Well, that's it for this time. End of an era, I suppose. End of an error, I sometimes think, if I am being unduly cynical and down on myself... but although I have come out of it with bugger all, I have nonetheless had some good times at VML, known some good people, done some good work. Just a damn shame it had to end this way, iz all.

Time to try something new, something based on established OSes, and something that allows me to do what bI do best: make games. Will it work? I don't know... but it can't hurt to try...

Wish me luck.

- Yak (solo)

13/8/2001

A Yak And A Goat In The City

Trevor the goat keeping an eye on me from the top of my monitor. 5,000 bonus points and two extra Smart Bombs to anyone who can correctly identify the goat on the screen.

A couple of weeks ago my goaty friend Ian asked me if I fancied going to a concert in London - a chap called Johnny Clegg was playing at the Hammersmith Apollo (still looks like the Hammersmith Odeon to me). Briefly, Johnny Clegg is a musician who was born in the UK but grew up in South Africa, where he learned a lot about African music and formed a band with a Zulu musician, something that was very much frowned upon during those times of apartheid. Despite the disapproval of the authorities, their band Juluka became very popular in South Africa; their music draws from both South African and European roots, and the lyrics are both in English and Zulu... oh, hell, if you're interested follow the link, where it's all explained far more coherently than I could possibly explain it here, by people with real brains and such ;-].

I'd heard a couple of Juluka tracks on one of the many compilation CDRs that Ian has sent me over the last couple of years (and if you're a completely uncultured and ignorant baastard like me through having had your face in a machine for most of your life, it's a Goatsend for me to have a few culturally well-rounded mates such as Ian who are willing to bring to my attention much cultural goodness to which I would otherwise be completely oblivious). This was to be Johnny Clegg's first concert in the UK for ten years; Ian asked me if I would like to go and I agreed with alacrity, not only on the basis of what I had heard already and the fact that I trust Ian's good judgement in music and am therefore certain that he would not drag me along to a duff concert, but also simply because I hadn't seen Ian for a few weeks, and even if I ended up totally hating the concert it would still be worth the trip just to spend some time with my friend :-). He lives almost 200 miles away, so we don't get to see one another anywhere near often enough :-].

The concert was on the Friday evening, so we decided it might be a good idea if I went down to Ian's place on the Thursday evening, and then we went up to London during the day on the Friday, taking the extra time to avail ourselves of the proximity of many excellent record and book shops afforded by a trip to the capital. So on Thursday afternoon I drove down through the thickening drizzle to Ian's place, there to be greeted with a cup of goaty tea and the gift of a most wonderfully eccentric-looking and utterly charming plush goatie called Trevor, which has instantly become my absolute favourite and which is shown in the picture at the start of this update :-).

After a period of unconsciousness some way above and slightly to the left of the A4, I awoke to find that the Friday was actually looking like quite a decent day, not 'orrible and drizzly as the Thursday had been. I was filled with goaty tea and a pastie, and obliged to play ballie for a while by Ian's mad Border Collie, Zig. It seems wherever I go I am unable to avoid mad Border Collies. Zig, however, is nowhere near as mad as Vindy, and is certainly a lot more polite than she is :-).

Eventually, fortified by aforementioned tea and pasties, we set off. I was relieved to find that Hammersmith was pretty much where I expected it to be, just off the end of the M4, where it had been last time I was there, a good few years previously. I drove around in a mild state of anxiety and swearing looking for somewhere to park (my natural state when called upon to drive in cities - I am definitely a country bumpkin). Eventually we found a place that wasn't going to close before the concert was over, where I duly stashed the Blue Ship, parting with a sum of money which would have enabled me to park for a week in Carmarthen :-]. We ascertained the relative locations of both Tube and venue (both pleasingly proximate), and then caught the chthonic choo-choo up West.

Our first task was to collect the tickets which had been pre-ordered, a task which proved to be not as simple as anticipated. The office had an address on Regent Street, which you would expect to be simple enough to find - except that it was on that bit where Regent Street sort of breaks in half around Piccadilly Circus, and it wasn't at all obvious which bit the office was in. Eventually, in desperation, we asked in a bank, and discovered that the office was in the same building up on the third floor somewhere. We finally found the office, only to be given tickets for the wrong night :-]. We were assured that the tickets could be changed for proper ones actually at the venue, and somewhat appeased, went off to do a little shopping.

It's true that there probably isn't much more efficient in terms of shopping for books and records than the likes of Amazon.com and their ilk. After all, you can search easily for exactly what you're looking for, and have it delivered to one's rural abode with the merest pressure of the left mouse button. However, what's missing from the online shopping experience is the element of temptation. There is something excellent about just wandering around a really well-stocked music or book shop, just keeping an open mind and looking around, waiting for those "Oooh! I'd like one of those!" experiences to occur :-). Foyle's bookshop, on Shaftesbury Avenue, is just one of those places where I am absolutely certain I could spend my entire life never doing anything except read books and never become bored :-).

Predictably enough I ended up buying way too many CDs and books, and after a small interlude that included some green tea that I really don't think I was supposed to put milk and sugar in, and a bit of cake-style thingie, it was time to head back to Hammersmith to get ready for the concert. By this time the Friday rush hour was in full flow, and the journey back on the tube was very crowded, very hot, and very, very sweaty. The commuting Londoners probably thought I smelled as baad as the mountain goat depicted on my t-shirt ;-].

Thus it was with some relief that we emerged from the tube into the cooler air of Hammersmith. We returned to the car to stash away the goodies, and then made our way to the Apollo, where the tickets were successfully exchanged for Friday night ones. Finally, after a certain amount of waiting around and thinking impure thoughts about goats, we were admitted to the venue and took our seats upstairs in the circle. We sat for awhile chatting and watching the venue fill up with a crowd which seemed to be composed largely of South African ex-pats. Ian mentioned to me that he'd seen something dubious in the Virgin Megastore - a sticker attached to a Syd Barrett album, the gist of which was something like "For more Quaalude-chomping madness, visit the Pink Floyd section!". Given the unfortunate nature of Syd's problems, we thought this was in pretty poor taste, and speculated as to what other such stickers could be devised to trivialise and exploit the mental illness of other musicians. We stopped when we got to Nirvana, thinking the subject by then too sick even for our somewhat scurrilous sense of humour. Ian then proceeded to alter my perception of the South African flag irrevocably by drawing my attention to the similarity between the design of the flag and John Major's underpants as depicted in Steve Bell cartoons.

The support band came on and played four numbers, which were OK - I mean, nice enough music, but I do admit to having been doing a fair bit of designing bits of my next game in my head whilst they were playing. They made a pleasant-enough sound, but somehow it failed to engage me that much. No disrespect intended; it must be a thankless job sometimes being the support band, and at least I didn't shout "GO HOME!" at them in the middle of their performance, as one less charitable soul in the audience felt compelled to do.

After an intermission to emit liquid, the main event started, and Mr. Clegg and his band came on to the considerable approbation of the crowd. Ian had been a bit concerned that, since I didn't know the music as well as he did, I might somehow find the concert boring. He really needn't have worried. The band played a jam-packed set full of songs that were at times exuberant and at times poignantly mooving, and I was swept up in the energy and enthusiasm of the crowd, who were rapturously dancing like extremely mad bastards during a lot of the performance. Had I been somewhat chemically disinhibited I would probably have joined them :-).

According to the nature of all good times, it was over all too soon; and we emerged into the cool 11 o'clock Hammersmith evening air each wearing a large grin, and I with a debt of gratitude to Ian for having caused me to be exposed to such excellent aural stimulation. We made our way back to the Blue Ship which was, thankfully, still where we had left it, and still contained the goodies we'd each bought earlier in the day. I bumbled around until I found the way onto the Hammersmith flyover going westbound, and began to put distance between ourselves and the city. The concert had been great, and the day of shopping rewarding, but nonetheless London is just complete sensory overload to rural types like us. It was therefore with some relief that we started getting further away from the city and closer to sheep.

On the way baack we stopped at a motorway services for some expensive and crap but nevertheless much-needed nosh, and a nice cup of tea each; then it was back to Ian's place and out with the beer, and we sat around talking, as we often do, until 5:30 in the morning.

The following morning had a final treat in store - Ian had mentioned seeing a shop in Chippenham which appeared to sell camels of a variety of different sizes, and on the Saturday morning he took me into Chippenham, bought me a very fine Cornish pastie and a nice cup of tea, and then took me to the camel shop. Sure enough, there were indeed a variety of plastic dromedary camels there in a range of sizes; there was some amusement behind the counter when I marched in and requested their largest camel. Once again, as somehow often seems to happen when Ian and I get together, he was witness to the bizarre sight of a mad hairy Yak walking through town with an unlikely animal on his shoulder, attracting curious glances and occasional comments from passers-by :-).

An enormous camel from the enormous camel shop in Chippenham, alongside the rocking-sheep, to give some sense of scale. And Vindy, because she just has to get in everything.

The camel has the strangest eyes, all black, with no detail; one visitor mentioned it looked like a cross between a camel and a Grey. Which, I suppose, must appropriately enough make it a Mutant Camel :-).

I left Ian's place in the early afternoon; I would have liked to stay longer, but I was supposed to be getting back to Wales by around 5pm, for the village baa-becue and to pick up my small mad Border Collie, who had been staying with friends whilst I was away. As it turned out there was fat chance of there being any baa-becue; the sky was uniformly covered in woolly grey clouds, from which much moisture descended, watering Wales thoroughly, dampening many sheepies, and deterring any kind of outdoor meat-searing activities. After getting stuck in a traffic jam near Carmarthen for nearly an hour I eventually arrived at the pub, where I stopped to retrieve my dog and become external to a pint or two of liquid; finally making my way home to my gaff where, amazingly enough, Alice hadn't once got her silly little goaty head stuck in the fence during my absence :-).

An excellent few days, productive and rewarding and it's always good to see my friend Ian :-).

Just to finish off, and apropos of nothing, here's a question: if you could have me update any of the Llamasoft games on a modern system, which one would it be?

Answers on a rampant goat to me...

7/8/2001

Quickie: What's Your Sheepiness Quotient?

Go to your Find Files and Folders option, wherever it may be, dependent on your OS of choice, and search your entire hard drive for any instances of file or folder names that contain the string "sheep". If you're a sad, obsessive baastard like me, then every now and again when you need to choose a filename for something, you'll include a woolly quadruped somewhere in the name; and in the course of browsing the web, should you come across a picture of a nice fluffy little sheepie, you'll go "Awwww!" and invoke "Save Picture As".

Trawling my drive C yielded a total of 143 instances of file or folder names containing the string "sheep", and my HD is approximately 16 gigs, of which 11.8 gigs are currently in use. So my Total Sheep Index is 143, and my Sheepiness Quotient is 143/11.8 = approximately 12.12 sheepies per gigabyte.

Repeating the same test with the string "goat" yielded a Total Goat Index of 123, which corresponds to a Goatiness Quotient of approximately 10.42 goaties per gigabyte.

Anybody out there sheepier or goatier than I am?

4/8/2001

Bloody hell, it's August already

A Very Silly Goat Indeed.

Sitting around on a Saturday evening; you know how it is on Saturday evenings - telly is absolutely shite, and as it turns out I've nothing stashed away on the TiVo that I particularly want to watch, so I thought I'd make myself useful and empty my digital camera and look for any pictures that weren't completely crap. A few examples are hereby included, although now I am getting a bit worried about the amount of web space I have on Magicnet - I maxed it out a while back, and had to moove all the games over to the Enormouscamel site, and I fear that soon I shall max it out again. One Of These Days I'm just going to have to get a lot more webspace and put up a proper Llamasoft site. My mum was up visiting the other day and brought up some material from the old Llamasoft HQ which is just fascinating... definitely needs scanning and making available in some kind of Llamasoft archive... but that's a future project, and I shouldn't even be mentioning it at the moment. All in good time :-).

I've been continuing to work on my nice little set of core graphics routines. It's really rather fun - the next game I'm doing is basically 2D (but don't worry, it's still going to look very pretty indeed; the game style has been tried in 3D and I simply don't think it works as well like that, so I'm going to implement it in the style which I think best suits the gameplay) - but basically, what I'm able to do with Nuon is implement in assembler what my C code will see as my dream 2D hardware system - it'll handle sprites in exactly the way I want it to, implement scrolling tile surfaces exactly the way that Goat intended, and contain all kinds of neat extra stuff which certainly wasn't ever implemented on any real 2D hardware - and you know me, you just know that's going to involve lots of read-modify-write malarkey and particles. There are always particles.

The thing is, once I get this nice little core up and running, and it's nearly finished now - I should be able to produce the game for which it is intended fairly quickly, because most of the game logic will be implemented in C (yes, you read that correctly - Yak willingly using C for more than trivial functions - but given that I will have the stuff that needs to be quick running in parallel, in assembler, why the hell not make the implementation easier on myself? That kind of stuff doesn't need to be in assembler any more, and it means that the game will get finished a hell of a lot quicker than if I was doing it all in assembler, believe me).

I must admit, with my nice little virtual-2D machine nearing completion, there is a part of me which is thinking: now I could do some absolutely lovely updates of some Llamasoft classics on that...

But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. No promises about anything like that until I have conferred with The Powers That Be.

Wouldn't half be fun though ;-)...

Alice, with her silly little goaty head stuck in the fence.

As you can see from the picture above, Alice is clearly a goat of very little brain. As I explained in my last update, she just can't keep her silly little goaty head the right side of the fence. I once spoke to another pygmy goat owner about this problem, and she said that occasionally one of her goats would get stuck (she has about 20 of the little goatlets) but that hers soon learned not to do it. No such luck with Alice :-]. I think her heuristic capabilities are somewhat impaired ;-).

Oh, and don't worry, it doesn't hurt her when she gets stuck (perhaps if it did she might learn not to do it!). All I have to do to release her is go and bend the sides of the mesh outwards slightly; she can then extract herself without too much trouble. Silly goatie :-].

Good goat, I just looked at the cover of the latest Edge magazine (number 100) and it actually looks like Luigi is sucking Mario ;-). And no, that's not implying that the latest Edge magazine features incestuous gay action on the cover. You'll have to look at the magazine cover yourself to see what I mean :-). But I digress (and I shudder to think what kinds of weird search requests are going to show up in my referrer logs now that I have used the words "gay" and "incestuous" (and "sucking", for that matter). I deliberately didn't mention by name the subject of that Brass Eye Special in my last update because there are certain things I just don't want to see in my referrer logs. And I shall probably avoid mentioning male chickens, too, especially glistening ones).

Speaking of referrer logs, I had another couple of sad-bastard search strings show up in my log today - "girls wearing penty + photo", and I don't think it's anyone looking for pictures of some of the research they've got going on at MIT Media Lab into wearable computers; most likely some sad adolescent no-life with a box of tissues and a swollen glans momentarily getting his vowels mixed up.

Then there's "free images of lads pissed up naked out on the town". This one is bizarre. For one thing, the subject matter is basically abhorrent to me - not nakedness, just the whole mindset of those kind of people whose idea of having a great time involves getting extremely drunk, vomiting, fighting and getting arrested... my idea of a good time can certainly include getting quite drunk, but usually involves sitting around with a good mate talking about life, the Universe and everything, which I think happens to be a tad more civilised than reverse peristalsis and mindless violence - but anyway, I'm digressing and creating one hell of a massive run-on sentence here, and it's about time I got to the point, which is that such a searcher is hugely unlikely to find references to behaviour of that kind on my site, and yet that search string returns my site in the number one position.

The inclusion of "naked" in the search string implies a fairly strange fetish on behalf of the searcher, who obviously gets off on the sight of blokes in the buff thumping one another, behaving in a violent and uncoordinated manner, and generally acting as if they have no higher thought processes. Oh well, whatever floats your goat, I suppose. You can certainly learn a lot from referrer logs. Makes my prediliction for fluffy sheepies and goat aroma seem relatively tame ;-).

And speaking of sheepies... Shaggy and Shy go head-to-head.

Bloody hell, as I mentioned at the start of this update; it's August already. This year seems to have gone by impossibly quickly - it seems only like yesterday that it was February and I was freezing my knackers off standing outside a church and actually wearing a suit - a supremely unlikely spectacle, and one which I will gladly scan in and put up here for everyone to have a good cackle at, as and when I actually get a copy of the photograph that was taken as evidence of how daft I looked :-]. Now it's August and getting on for the end of summer, dammit.

I have a stupid, deluded theory that our perception of the rate of passage of time is proportional to how much time in total we have experienced. The reason that when you were in infants' school the summer holidays used to seem like they went on forever is because six weeks is actually quite a significant chunk of a five-year-old life. The more of an old fart you get, the faster time seems to pass; six weeks out of 39 years is almost bugger-all, and so it seems to pass very quickly indeed. Bloody hell, the Queen Mother's life must be a total blur by now. Mind you, that's probably just all the gin.

Anyway, it being summer, there are various summer-type things going on around here, and I don't just mean the denuding of sheepies. It was supposed to be the Village Barbecue yesterday, but sod's law being what it is, it pissed it down like a bastard, and so that was cancelled. Last weekend it was the Village Carnival, which is rather a grand term really - there were a few strings of bunting tied out across the road, and in a field there were three floats (one of which carried the Carnival Queen who, doubtless due to the movement of livestock restrictions in force on account of FMD, was disappointingly human), a car boot sale (five boots), a candy floss stand (the only Floss I eat is at home ;-), a bottle stall (where I had a go and won a bag of crisps, a tin of tomatoes, some dried mushrooms, and a tin of evaporated milk, for a quid) and, most importantly, a beer tent, to which our party duly retired, for the purpose of consuming cooling draughts of llager, it being a swelteringly hot day.

One feature of the event was lots of people done up in fancy dress (including a few people clad almost entirely in bright orange fur - I have no idea what they were supposed to be, but they must have been hotter than a very large unsheared sheep in the noonday sun). We were just leaving - from the beer tent to the pub over the road, to consume more unexpected mid-day lager - when I spotted this little boy wearing a costume which made me laugh out loud - I hope he won :-).

Fancy dress costume marking the incarceration of the slimy lying old Tory.

The day of Archer's incarceration was one of those days when just about everybody in the country was cheered up and happy about what they heard on the news, a rare enough event, let's face it. Even the most dyed-in-the-fleece Tories must have been glad to see him get what was coming to him, given the disrepute he has put their party in over the years. I think on the day he got banged up, if you'd put your head out of the window at the time that the news was flashed up on the telly screen, you'd have heard the sound of everybody in the UK uttering a little cheer.

The Newsnight special on the old crook was excellent viewing, and it was evident that the journalist, Michael Crick, was enjoying every moment of finally being able to tell it how it really is with regard to Archer. There were some truly priceless, laugh-out-loud moments, such as Archer losing his rag and snarling at the Newsnight journalists some threat about "wait till I'm mayor", and of course John Major standing on his hind legs with his face hanging out going on about Archer's "integrity and probity"... one couldn't help but cackle :-).

Mind you, he'll probably get an easy ride of it inside the clink, since according to another Tory ex-con the prisoners love a con-man; "the bigger the con the bigger the heart", I think the quote was.

I've never really got the whole lovable-rogue thing. I mean, I suppose I can understand it in the context of convicted criminals having admiration for one another's devious work, but I know that the attitude persists outside of the realm of the convicted, and I've never understood why. To me, if someone's a devious, mendacious git, then there's nothing admirable about that; I wouldn't want to know them and I certainly wouldn't want them to know where I lived. End of story.

I had a mate once who completely shocked me one summer afternoon some years ago, back when I lived in Cwmcych. Me and a couple of mates were sitting on the step outside my cottage, enjoying the sunshine, drinking some wine, if I remember correctly, and talking about all kinds of things, and the subject of ethics arose. One of the blokes then proceeded to opine about how he admired con-men, and he was evidently quite enthusiastic about it, and I was most taken aback. In my opinion, confidence tricksters are a particularly low type of pond-life, on account of the way they operate - falsely gaining the trust of an individual, and then using that trust to take advantage of them. I find that particularly upsetting, because it takes a certain amount of intelligence and empathy to gain someone's trust in the first place, and I consider trust to be an extremely valuable and important thing. The idea of falsely obtaining anybody's trust and then betraying it for simple gain is quite abhorrent, and I can't imagine any state of mind where I could possibly find it admirable. The fact that someone I called a friend was telling me that he did find such behaviour to be admirable, with a smile on his face and no sense of shame about it whatsoever, was absolutely shocking to me.

At the time, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, and allow that perhaps it was just the booze talking and he wasn't really like that, and so I remained his friend. I found out some years later that I was wrong to do so, and that he had in fact betrayed my own trust of him quite terribly some years earlier. I spent a few weeks absolutely consumed with anger, mostly harmful self-directed anger at what I thought of as my stupidity in ever having trusted him in the first place. It's a harsh thing indeed when someone you've counted as a friend for years turns out to be a git. It somehow invalidates your memories of all those years of friendship, spoils them, forces you to modify in a negative way years worth of memories. Painful.

After a while though I realised that to continue to feel anger at his betrayal was only to damage myself, and to allow him to blight my life even more; so I did what I should have done sooner, and just forgot about the bloke, put him out of my life. That was some years ago now, and the other day I actually saw the bloke in question, and I felt - exactly what he deserved - nothing.

Oops - bit of a rant there; to get back to the point, I think I've met enough gits and bastards in my life to think that there's nothing remotely romantic or admirable about being a rogue. Goat, back in the early days of my involvement with the games biz I encountered a succession of slimy smeggers who were only out to take advantage of me, and I got so fed up with it that I vowed to myself that no matter what I ended up doing, with Llamasoft or indeed in anything, I wasn't going to bloody well tread on anybody else's head in order to achieve it.

Okay, rant over. I really need to calm down a bit. I think I'll finish this for now, and go out and hug a sheep or something :-).

29/7/2001

Pictures of Fluffy Lambs

That thingie at the top of the page, by the way, is a free tracker. Basically what it does is keep track of all kinds of details about people who visit your web page, and how they got there - interesting, in a spoddish kind of a way, if you're a spod like me; and it can in fact be the source of a bit of fun, too.

You may have seen pages which feature "Disturbing Search Requests" - if you haven't, follow the link and have a goosie at some of them; they can be quite amusing (and, indeed, disturbing). Basically, using a tracker, you can find out who has arrived at your site through the use of a search engine, and what search string they used. It's this last part which can be interesting.

I think there ought to be a term for a single-word search which, if typed into Google, returns one's own web page in first place in the search results. For example, since I installed that tracker thingie, I have discovered that should you type the word "grunting" into a Google search, then out of all the web pages in all the world which might have made mention of grunting, it is this one which is the number one choice.

You also get the chance to see what kind of strange search requests people with way too much time on their hands end up typing into Google. This page is the first search result for the phrase "the ox is slow but the ground is firm", which is obviously some proverb that I never heard of, but which is actually quite relevant in the way in which I identify myself with the image of oxen - that is, that I am definitely not the sharpest tool in the box, as it were, but I will decide what I want to do and just be stubborn and patient and eventually get the job done. Hell, you have to have that kind of approach if you're doing something like writing T3K, which took me over two years, mostly in assembler. At first a task such as that seems incredibly daunting, because there are so many tiny steps which all need to be accomplished in order to achieve the desired objective. Considered as a whole, such a task seems impossibly daunting. You need to cultivate that kind of plodding, ox-like patience in order not to just be freaked out and put off by the sheer magnitude of the task ahead.

But I digress: I was talking about search requests. I've had the sad and mundane, such as "girls naked collection jpeg zip" - and whichever spotty youth came to my site with that particular search string was so barking up the wrong tree that the entire dog and forest might as well have been on Mars ;-). Then there are the requests which are simply bizarre. One I had recently - well, I can imagine how someone might search for "mpeg2"; I can understand how the search string "mpeg2 PC" might arise. PCs and mpeg2 files might conceivably go together in some way.

But "mpeg2 biscuit PC"? Biscuit? How on earth do PCs doing MPEG2 decode go together with biscuits? Unless you're going to be watching DVDs on your PC whilst having a nice cup of tea and one of Flossie's Digestive biscuits, I suppose... but still, the strangest search string to find this site yet. And it does, and in first place, too. Try it :-).

Referrer logs provide the opportunity for much sad Net geekery, for those so inclined. For example, it can be amusing to try and hack oneself into a friend's referrer logs in such a way that they will recognise that it's you and be amused by it. For example, I found that the search string "Charlie Dimmock drinking John Prescott love liquid - Biohazard indeed!" would not only bring up my mate Ian's goaty website as the only search result in Google, but also make it bleeding obvious, should it appear in his referrer logs, that there was a hairy person with a scurrilous and deviant sense of humour sitting out here in west Wales attempting to hack stupid phrases into his log to make him smile :-).

Hey, it's stupid but it's fun. Go on, try it, on mine or his or anyone else you know with a tracker. All it takes is Google and way too much time on your hands :-).

And get your own tracker, by clicking on that thingie on the top of my page. Not only can you have hours of pointless fun with your own web site, you can also snoop around inside my own referrer logs if you want to. And it's free, so the price is right.

If you came here by the front page, you may noticed I have put a counter on there. I've never really been that interested in the whole thing of counting the number of people who come by my page, but I came across a free counter called the "Ox Counter", and thought hey, if I were ever to have a counter on my page, then it really couldn't be more appropriate than if it were an Ox Counter :-). So there it is, for what it's worth. If you want to enumerate oxen for yourself, clicking on it will enable you to get one of your own. Counter, not ox, that is.

Oh, and one thing I noticed from my referrer logs is that I should avoid using words like "hack" and mentioning software that I like, because I just get hordes of people coming to my site looking for hacked versions, which they certainly aren't going to find. 'Course, having just used the h-word, I'll probably get even more now that I mention it. But maybe if I state here that "this is not a warez site", that phrase might get brought up in a Google search for such stuff, and people realise not to come here.

Speaking of sad, spoddish fun... you know how, when you've had your PC a while, it gets full of all kinds of stuff, millions of files in millions of directories, and it gets to the point where you have no idea of the totality of what you've got on there... one thing I tried doing, just for a laugh, was to use Windows Media Player, select "All Audio" in Media Library mode, and then set it to play on Shuffle.

What this does is randomly play every single bit of audio data on your entire hard disk. CD rips, MP3, samples, MIDI files, everything, in random order. Now my machine is mostly dominated by a whole load of Pink Floyd bootleg MP3s, a few CD images of disks that I might have burned for my mates, if I had such a cavalier attitude to the sanctity of copyright, and a whole load of silly samples, sound effects from games, and suchlike. Plus a load of stuff like MIDI files of naff versions of various songs that doubtless were demo files in some music package or other, and an extensive and painstakingly spoken idiot's guide to using Windows 98, which I had no idea were lurking inside my 15 odd gigs of space.

So you let Media Player/Media Library do its indexing thing on your HD, then select All Audio and play in Shuffle mode. The result is... well, some quite weird listening, which some might appreciate more whilst in neurally modified states of mind. A typical session on my machine goes like this:

[Pink Floyd - Cymbeline live back in the early 70s]

[Voice: "The slider bar is the dingus at the edge of the window. You pressed the part of the keyboard with the bits that look like typewriter keys. Try again".]

[Robot voice: "Elbow. Nosebag".]

[sound of large explosion]

[Pink Floyd - "Run Like Hell" from the 1980 Wall tour]

[Voice: "Congratulations! You pointed at the blue semicircle with the mouse pointer. Eventually. I can't believe it took you so long, you uncoordinated moron. Try again".]

[Robot voice: "Happy. Machine."]

[sound of Vindy barking madly (wakes up the real Vindy who starts barking madly)]

[sound of Flossie bleating]

[awful cheezy MIDI thing which makes you think of lounge-lizard pianists in American bars wearing bad wigs]

[track off that Banco de Gaia CD you might have ripped a while ago if you weren't such an honest and upstanding bloke, which you still haven't been arsed to burn to CD yet]

[Robot voice: "Nine. Elephant. Handbag".]

[track 3 out of T3K]

[Voice: "That big thing that looks like a telly that you can see in front of you is attached to the computer and it's called a monitor. A MON-ITT-ER. You use it to look at things".]

[Kryten out of Red Dwarf: "Ahhh. Smug Mode".]

[some DTMF tone]

[Voice: "That big square thing with all the little icons in is called a window. The grey bit you pointed to with your mouse pointer is an inactive area of the Task Bar, you dolt. Try again".]

[the Sinistar out of "Sinistar": "RUN, COWARD! RRRRUUUUARRRRRRGGGHHHH!"]

[Pink Floyd getting half way through Astronomy Domine and then stopping to moan about power cables]

You get the idea ;-). If I were a pretentious bastard I'd probably go on about how imposing arbitrary fragmentation upon the audio-space of one's hard drive forces us to perceive it in an entirely new way which at once makes us more aware of the nature of the totality of the audio-space, and also serves somewhat surreally to amuse; but I'm not, so I'll just state that it's fun in an idle, stupid, sad kind of a way.

Ooh - I got a bit carried away there, and forgot to keep putting in the lambs. I'll sort that now.

There we go. Sometimes people think it's odd that I like sheep so much, but hey, look at the Christian religion. If I were the religious type, maybe the Christian religion would be one for me. No other religion, at least none that I have heard about, is so big into sheep as Christianity. One of their most fundamental messages is that God Himself is into sheep, hence items like the Christian plush opposite. And if the Supreme Being Himself likes fluffy little lambies, well, then I am proud to say that so do I ;-).

I remember being out of it one night back when I used to live in the US, one of the bleak nights back around the end of '95, when my father was dying and I was stuck 6000 miles away, more distressed than I knew it was possible to be, and alone; nights where the only way to get to sleep was to have one gin and tonic too many and forcibly kill one's thought processes in front of the televisual wasteland that is late-night digital satellite programming in the US... some of the things you could find at that time of night were truly bizarre, and I gravitated towards the stranger stuff, in a kind of grimly fascinated, I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-seeing-this-on-telly kind of a way. I developed a habit of recording fragments of this stream of bizarre televisual jetsam, this constant stream of sell, sell, sell; whether or not they were selling you exercise equipment, a con, religion or the promise of easy riches; it was relentless, the grating tone of it all, and there was always the insistance that all you had to do was to buy the product (Jesus, pyramid selling scheme, George Foreman waffle iron, Psychic Friends, freedom from the fear of eternal damnation, Scientology, new miracle golf-ball, incitement to anorexia, encouragement of paranoia about body image, learn how to use Windows without actually needing a brain) - and your life would somehow become better. Regardless of what was being sold, religion or commodity, the underlying subtext - surely so glaringly obvious that nobody could fall for it? - was always:

GIVE US YOUR MONEY. YOU ARE UGLY, UNPOPULAR AND YOUR LIFE SUCKS. GIVE US YOUR MONEY AND WE WILL MAKE IT ALL RIGHT. ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS GIVE US YOUR MONEY, NOW. PICK UP THE PHONE. WE CAN MAKE YOU ATTRACTIVE AND POPULAR. GIVE US YOUR MONEY NOW, AND YOU WILL NO LONGER BE A FAILURE. DON'T MOVE. DON'T THINK. PICK UP THE PHONE, NOW, AND GIVE US YOUR MONEY. IF YOU GIVE US ALL YOUR MONEY, YOU WILL BE SUPERIOR TO EVERYONE ELSE, AND BE ABLE TO LOOK DOWN ON THEM. BUT ONLY IF YOU GIVE US ALL YOUR MONEY. NOW, YOU PATHETIC DELUDED SCUM.

Call NOW. Easy payment plan available.

The religious ones were the worst. You'd get some demented old granny done up like Barbra Cartland on some seriously bad acid who somehow, incredibly, was allowed access to the broadcast media and who would then use that power shamelessly to extort money from the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. Sick people were told not to bother with doctors or psychiatrists; simply give the Cartland-creature all their money and God would cure them. Poor people were told that, regardless of how little money they had, they should nonetheless give it all to the Cartland-creature because God would repay them a thousand times over. And should God not come through on the deal, then it must be because you're too much of a sinner, or because you haven't got enough faith. Even in my dire state, I still found it amazing that anybody at all could be taken in by it, that the only certain thing in the whole scam was that the Barbra-Cartland-on-acid woman and her coterie of creepy preacher types were going to end up with lots of money taken from people who could ill afford it... and yet people did call in, they made millions of dollars in just a few hours.

Goat, I know I've ranted about this before, but I still find it remarkable that although in the US you can't say "bollocks" on telly and they cut the farting scene out of Blazing Saddles, it is still perfectly acceptable to use religion to extort money from the gullible and the weak.

Oh, but I'm not going off on that rant again; like I said, I've done that one before. I was merely mentioning the sheepiness of the Christian religion, before I got sidetracked; there's one bit on that mad tape of US telly I made where there's this old Texan buffer with extraordinarily large ears outlining his own True Version of Christianity with the accompaniment of some intricate but ultimately meaningless diagrams of the New Order of the Ages, or some such bollocks.

Oh, the lambs, I'm forgetting about the lambs again. Here you go.

So anyway, I'm channel-surfing for oddness the way I used to back then, and I come across this old Texan geezer drawling on about God and Damnation and the Second Death and pointing it all out on these mad little diagrams, and I thought it would be worth adding to the Mad US Telly Tape, so I hit Record and let it run awhile. And the bloke just keeps going on about sheep. He talks of the "little flock of sheep" and the "other sheep", and rather delightfully, whenever he utters the word "sheep", a picture of some sheep appears on the screen. So there's this wizened Texan droning on earnestly to the accompaniment of strange little diagrams and occasional pictures of sheep. Very odd.

Of course, what he was actually saying was completely hatstand - apparently the "Little Flock Of Sheep" were the only humans who would be deemed acceptable by God and granted access to Heaven, and only numbered a hundred thousand odd, which is pretty crap going for a divine being, given the number of humans that have populated the planet since biblical times. It seems an odd feature of loony variations on existing religions, or entirely new cults, that the madder they are, the fewer people are actually going to get into Heaven/fly off with the aliens on their mothership/whatever. Oh well, I suppose that's a good thing, makes them self-limiting, I s'pose.

Apart from Scientology, that is, which is obviously barking mad but which seems to manage to garner quite a few dupes^H^H^H^H^Hadherents, of course.

Anyway, enough ranting on pointlessly about sheep and religion. If anyone knows of a religion that's actually sheepier than Christianity, be sure and let me know.

Hehe... once I was at a mate's wedding, in a small old church near Newbury; sat there bored and looking ridiculous in the church, I amused myself by looking around at the old church's architecture which, even for someone non-religious, can still be quite fascinating. There was a rather beautiful mural at the back of the church behind the altar, a great pyramid of saints and suchlike, rising up towards the roof of the church; and at the apex of it all, surrounded by flares of numinous light and glory, was... (and I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing when I saw it) - a big SHEEP! Hehe... gotta love those wacky Christians... although I think in that religion the sheep is used as a metaphor for unquestioning acceptance and obedience rather than simply gentle fluffy cuddly things that smell nice.

Okay, enough about sheep and religion. Enough about religion, anyway. Can't promise that I won't be mentioning sheep again though ;-).

Work-wize, I've been working on a selection of utility routines that I believe I would like to use to make my next game (and probably a few others. I would like to produce a few games fairly quickly, which I should be able to do when this lib is finished). One of the routines is the Daddy of All Pixel-Shatter Explosion Routines, and I have been having fun testing that out, blowing up a large picture of Amber the goat in a variety of cool and interesting ways. Ever since I first stood in awe in front of a Defender machine for the first time and saw what His Holy Exaltedness Eugene Jarvis did with the explosions in that game, I have been aware of the need for things to blow up interestingly in videogames. My nice new explosion routine allows you to specify how things break apart - strictly geometrically, strictly randomly, or a combination of the two; you can choose the size and shape of the chunks that the object breaks into, and specify an overall vector along which they can be made to fly away; you can choose to have them go translucent as the explosion progresses, or sparkle as they fly away... it's a nice, versatile routine, and Robotron explosions are a subset of its capabilities; and if you consider what I might need to be using Robotron explosions for, then you might get some idea of what the first game I'd like to do with the new modules is ;-).

The beasties are all fine; the llamas seem happily settled in to their new surroundings, and now both have acquired the requisite taste for Digestive biscuits that all beasties living in the Yakly abode are accustomed to. Given that I often give out biccies twice a day, packets of McVities judt don't last long around these parts any more. I'm going to have to start buying them in bulk.

Maya is definitely the friendlier of the two llamas, and is the first to come running up when I go out into their paddock. The sheepies are all still a bit wary of the llamas, and have a tendency to wait nervously in a little clump in a corner when the llamas are about, and should they get too near, they all scuttle off round the corner and into the next field :-). Shy has a habit, when she thinks she's got to run away from something, of leaping up in the air as she runs, sometimes to quite surprising heights. Not that I like seeing her scared, or anything, but one time I must take my camera out there and wait for the sheep to scuttle past the llamas - I would really love to have a picture of Shy in "mid-flight", as it were ;-).

Floss is just as lovely and cuddly as ever, although she is an old lady now and spends quite a bit of time just sitting around in a regal (and slightly bulging) manner :-). She seems the least perturbed by the llamas out of all of them, and is bold enough to put her head in the same feed bucket as Maya when I go to feed the llamas.

The goaties are also doing well, although what with it being Summer, Alice is currently needing to have her silly little goaty head extracted from the fence approximately twice daily. Goat knows why she does it - she is kept in a field with plenty of thick, lush grass in it, and feels compelled to poke her gead through the fence to get at a much thinner, scraggly patch of grass on the other side. Just recently she started escaping from her own field into the llamas' field (through a little gap under the fence it took me a while to find - these little goaties are terrible, so tiny they can get out of all manner of little gaps!) - anyway, she escaped from her own field (which is full of lovely lush grass) into the llamas' field (which is even more full of more lush grass), only to get her silly little goaty head stuck in the llamas' fencing, trying to get at a scraggy bit of grass on the edge of my driveway. Silly goatie :-).

Oh, and speaking of escapology, I had a surprise the other day - I went to the garage to get some feed out for everybody, and as usual when they see me heading in there with feed buckets, they know what's about to happen, and I get massively bleated-at by everyone. Anyway, I gathered up the feed buckets and exited towards the garage through the gate by the stables, which I closed behind me. Opened up the garage and started filling the buckets, laughing at the chorus of baa-ing that I could hear outside. I heard one familiar bleat which sounded unusually close... and turned around to see Shaggy, bold as brass but much more cuddly, standing right behind me, looking not at all sheepish :-).

It turned out that since she's had her wool off, she has become thin enough to actually squeeze underneath the gap at the bottom of the gate by the stables, and seeing me head off to get munchies, decided that she'd just follow me right out :-). I've put an old concrete post along the bottom of the gate now. and she can't get out that way any more (although I spotted her going straight to have a try as soon as I left the field the next time).

Hehe... for all they do get up to mischief now and again, I do love my sheepies and my goaties and my llamas :-). I can't think of many pleasures greater than sitting out in the goats' field trying to read a book before they both eat it, or lying around with both my arms around sheep, one on each side, scratching their fluffy backs; or getting absolutely filthy due to stroking llamas that have just been rolling in the ash pile :-). Beasties really are the best therapy :-).

I'm just about to finish now, and go off and watch Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends - and speaking of telly, did anyone catch that Brass Eye Special the other night? I did, and I thought it was rather good - laugh out loud funny in places, a bit disturbing in others, much what we have come to expect from Chris Morris. I thought the program was a valid bit of satire, pointing out things like the willingness of celebrities to talk any amount of obviously bogus shite as if they were being sincere and actually knew what they were talking about, just to be seen to be associated with a Good Cause; and how the media help to sustain the hysteria surrounding the subject matter through the use of aggressive and sensational methods of reporting. And as if to prove Morris's point, reaction from certain sectors such as the tabloids has been frenzied and outraged - I was in the shops the other day and noticed that the front page of the Daily Mail was shrieking outrage *again* simply because the programme had been repeated the previous night on Channel 4. Even the Government have seen fit to stick their oar in, and so you have the frankly ludicrous situation of a minister who can't possibly have actually seen the program (because he's blind) getting up on his hind legs to castigate it. Very silly indeed. Highly recommended, if you haven't seen it yet.

Right then, that's it, I'm off for now. One more lamb before I go :-). It's been bloody hot here today, and I've spent quite a reasonable proportion of my time out in the goats' field being licked (since they tend to enjoy doing that when I'm hot; I guess I'm like a human salt lick for them). I was wearing a t-shirt with "Goatsucker" written on it in large letters, and this afternoon, the goats sucked it. Which seems kind of appropriate.

Take care all, and may you have the sort of dreams a mate of mine told me he'd been having recently ;-).

9/7/2001

Camelid Acquisition Mode Initiated

Real, honest-to-Goat llamas. In my middle field :-). That's Maya on the left, and Iki on the right.

The llama obsession... Goat, it goes back a long way... I was somewhat notorious for being into camels when I was at school, from the age of about twelve onwards; and one day, reading a book about South America, I came across illustrations of the South American camelids, and something odd happened in my brain, I s'pose. I became besotted with the beasties. At the time I had absolutely no idea that it would lead to Llamasoft, Llamatron, Mama Llama, Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time, and all the other llama-oriented craziness that I have emitted over the last 20 years.

Of course, back then I thought it would be cool to be close to llamas, but I had no idea how I would ever go about it. Llamas, if you saw them at all, were exotic beasts you only saw in zoos, and had a reputation for spitting (but wouldn't you spit if you were in a zoo?)... I was a kid, I lived in town, it was hardly practical to think about keeping llamas as pets in that environment, even if my parents could have afforded to get me any (which they very definitely could not).

Nonetheless I nurtured my llama obsession. I went to University, got thrown out, went to polytechnic, got ill, almost snuffed it - many of you know that story... and I wrote a game. And one day, alone in the house while my parents were out, I sat tinkering with a little program I'd made on the Vic-20 that allowed you to make little objects by re-defining a chunk of character images in RAM, and I drew a little llama with it. And, on a whim, in the space underneath the llama, I wrote, in tiny characters, "LLAMASOFT!!".

Yes, naff double exclamation marks and all. I know, I had no taste. But that was how it started.

Those old enough to remember those times will know what happened next; Llamasoft began publishing games, and after a while I started occasionally to be interviewed by game magazines and suchlike; and frequently I would be asked if I actually owned any llamas. And although at that time I might well have been financially able to buy a llama, I still lived in town with my parents, and there wasn't an appropriate environment to keep any animals llarger than your usual domestic carnivores. The closest I got to actual ownership of a camelid at that time was Llamasoft sponsoring a llama at Marwell Zoological Park, near Southampton (home of the best football team on the South Coast, and infinitely superior to Portsmouth).

Llater I mooved to Wales, where, in the country at llast, I was finally able to keep my first ungulates. However, I started by getting a couple of sheep, because... well, I love sheep. I am passionate about sheepies and goaties, and, it being Wales, there were plenty of sheepies around, so I cut my large-animal-keeping teeth on sheep. One of those sheep was Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World, and she's still with me now, for which I am very glad indeed. But the house I used to live in, in Cwmcych, only had sufficient lland to keep a couple of sheep, so while I was there I had the sheep - frequently - but nothing more.

Then I made the Biggest Mistake Of My Life, and left Wales to live in America, where I endured basically three years of anguish and depression, before finally coming home to the country I never should have left. This time the house had a lot more lland, and I thought that llamas could be an eventual possibility. But first there was much else to be done - prepare for Flossie's homecoming, bring her back, then when Alistair passed get her some companions (the microgoaties)... llast year acquiring Shaggy and Shy... the herd was growing, but still no llamas...

Towards the end of llast year I decided it was time to take the goat firmly by the horn and prepare for the possible actual acquisition of camelids. To this end I needed some proper fencing for my paddock, and this was duly completed by the end of llast year. I decided I would wait until Spring arrived, and then look out for some llamas.

'Course, then FMD came along, delaying all plans and scaring the crap out of everyone...

Finally, llast month, I figured things had quietened down enough FMD-wise to actively start seeking llamas. I visited the llama website which provides a useful list of dealers, located one in my area, and arranged to go and visit. As it turned out my friend Paula was visiting from the US, so she came along too. We met a lot of llamas, and a very nice lady called Liz, whose llama-originating business it was. We spent quite a long time talking about how lovely sheep are (she also has a herd of Herdwicks), Paula got to feed a very loud lamb who waggled his tail vigorously and amusingly when he sucked from the bottle, and the possibility of my llama-acquisition was discussed.

A couple of weeks llater I began a process of faffing around which eventually yielded a moovement license from that-which-used-to-be-called-the-MAFF, and eventually, two weeks ago, this happened :-).

Now the llamas have been here a week, and they are starting to settle in. The sheep have been put back in the field with them, which is fine for most of the time, although the sheep do tend to panic a bit and run, if the llamas come too close. At first the llamas were a bit shy of me, until I learned that the best way to overcome shyness in a camelid is to be sure and carry a feed bucket ;-).

Maya and Iki demonstrating that they don't mind eating goat mixture.

I'm trying to get everyone used to the llamas by spending some time out there each day with some goat mix in the bucket; everyone likes goat mix, so I dole out handfuls to everyone, llamas included. Hopefully this should get the llamas used to me, and everyone else used to the llamas; and besides, I quite enjoy being lightly nibbled and licked by two goats, three sheep and two llamas.

Oh, and if you look at these pictures of the llamas, you may think that they are a different colour than they were when they arrived - and you'd be right. Llamas, it seems, love nothing more than a good old dust bath, and there happens to be a big circle of ash left over in my paddock, from where the fencing guys burned up a load of stuff after they were finished with the fencing. And my lovely white llamas just love to roll about in it, which explains the grey look that their fur has now :-].

Iki, in his favourite place, the ash circle. He doesn't half look ridiculous when he rolls about in it.

It's been immensely pleasurable and amusing just watching the llamas :-). Firstly, I was quite impressed by the sheer size of them - yes, I know I've met llamas before, but even so I wasn't quite prepared for just how tall they are up close. Big animals can be quite intimidating - I'm never quite at ease around horses, for example, because they are big, solid things that you know can bite and deliver a killer kick, should they feel so inclined. Llamas, on the other hand, for all their size, are not intimidating at all. Their motions are delicate and graceful. And they really only usually spit at other llamas - you'd have to seriously piss one off to get it to spit at you. The basic mein of the llama is one of gentle curiosity.

Maya, looking like an architypical figure of a llama. She's just so... llama-y :-].

My two llamas are Maya (female, just over a year old) and Iki, who is a gelded male of three and a half. The trouble is, he certainly doesn't behave like one would expect a gelded male to behave, and I have had a few demonstrations of orgling (the noise that a randy llama makes), followed by - well, let's just say that I am now well up on my llama sex education :-]. And no, I am not going to put any pictures of that up here; it's not that kind of website :-].

Another picture of Maya, looking lovely. You can see the "bean pile" behind and to the left of her.

I have a gelded male for now, because there weren't two females ready to be sold at the place I got them from, and it's not right to keep a single llama alone; but eventually, once these guys have settled in, I'd like to get a bit more fencing done and maybe even start up a bit of a side-line, more for fun than profit, generating new llamas. Heh - it would have to be called Llamasoft Llamas, naturally.

Branching out into hardware, as it were ;-).

Maya again, against a backdrop of the Blue Ship.

Hey, come to think of it (and sometimes I do), now, at my place I have llamas, sheep and goats; all I need is a camel or two and I'll have real-life Llamatron :-).

And now, for no apparent reason, here is a picture of a goat up a tree:

Alice, one of my pygmy goats, up a tree.

Shaggy and Shy continue to grow more accustomed to human company (even if they were rather worried about the enormous long-necked hairy things when they were first introduced to the llamas). Shy still lives up to her name - it's not that she runs away or anything (in fact she is probably the most curious of the sheepies, and always comes up to see what's going on whenever visitors are about) - it's just that she has a constant nervous twitchiness, she's always a bit on edge and ready to startle. But she is getting better - even a couple of months ago when she had her morning biscuit she'd have to snatch it out of my hand and run off a little way to eat it, whereas now she will happily eat it from my hand like the rest. She is still shy of actually being touched, though, unlike Shaggy, who now positively importunes me for skritchies every time she sees me :-).

My excellent friend Ian (he of the Sheep Shop and Floyd expeditions and keeper of those two lovely Golden Guernsey goaties) came to visit at the weekend, to be formally introduced to the llamas; Maya seemed most definitely to take a shine to him immediately, and upon first meeting him gave him a kiss on the back of the neck :-). All the animals get on well with him, actually, particularly Flossie and the little goatlets - only natural, really, I suppose, since he *is* a thoroughly goaty baastard :-).

The visit commenced in the usual way, involving a large curry, quantities of Grolsch, and an extended period of nocturnal verbal communication (which actually went on until 6AM this time, something of a new record, and quite impressive given that nothing more chemically stimulating than alcohol was involved, and Ian, being something of an early riser, was well out of his normal TZ ;-).

After a few hours' kip I thought we'd go out for the traditional Saturday afternoon trip, during which we usually try and do something involving sheepies or goaties, and frequently end up purchasing many fluffy items. The trip started out not too unpleasantly, with a journey to Newcastle Emlyn and a visit to the fish-and-chip shop thereof, and the purchase of two fluffy sheepies, a little model Jacob sheep, a little white sheepie and a greeting card covered in sheep. Despite the fact that the weather was looking rather dull and uninspiring, I thought that after chips we might mosey up the coast road, visiting the Farm Park just near Cardigan where I knew there were a couple of llamas and some particularly lovely sheepies and goaties, including one particularly handsome goat who was just enormous (we like big goaties). Afterwards I thought we might go a bit further north, up to Aberystwyth, perhaps, maybe going to Devil's Bridge, or somewhere nice and Welsh-picturesque.

Wales, however, was not co-operating in the slightest, going all shy and retreating behind a mist that thickened dramatically as the day wore on. By the time we got to the farm park it was grey and murky enough that we were denied even the pleasurable sight of the sheepies in the fields by the road as we drove by. Upon entering the park we were told that the sheepies, goaties and llamas were no longer accessible, being sequestered away from visitors as a result of FMD (I should have thought of that before, I s'pose). We trudged down a track in the cold, grey gloom, fed a small amount of food to a very depressed-looking donkey, who reminded me of Roger Waters and who brayed mournfully as we left him; and eventually decided to cut our losses and bugger off back home. Even the rabbits in the hutch near the car park looked depressed.

Driving back was more of an ordeal than a pleasure; the fog had thickened to the extent that it looked like we were driving in some video game where the CPU couldn't sustain a lot of draw-depth and therefore the programmers resorted to fogging-in the scenery; sorta like a Nintendo 64 version of Wales. Eventually we arrived back home after what must be one of the crappest days out I have ever inflicted on anyone, both quite cream crackered after all that driving through the fog, and after the previous night's extreme lateness. Not even an enormous cup of tea apiece and a little gaming action was sufficient to prevent a double instance of unconsciousness in front of "Mr. Driller" on the Dreamcast.

After an indeterminate period of nappage Ian was roused in a particularly revolting manner by Vindy's tongue, a horrible but effective means of waking up, and his splutters of disgust roused me also from my slumber on the floor. Upon rebooting we were sufficiently recovered to drag ourselves off down the pub, where we ingested a modicum of cow and consumed a few restorative cylinders of llager. Tinnies were procured and we returned home for another evening of sitting around, drinking beer and talking; terminating of unavoidable physiological necessity somewhat earlier than the night before, but nonetheless just as enjoyable as it always is :-).

Sunday morning consisted of a gentle boot-up involving more massive cups of tea and a certain amount of "Bust-a-Move 4" on the Dreamcast, and a degree of "Silpheed" on the Praystation 2. This was followed by a trip to the pub for a lovely cholesterol-packed Full English Breakfast apiece, after which we returned home, watched the British Moto GP on telly, and talked a lot about sheep and goats, until it was time for me to make the inevitably regretful trip into Carmarthen to drop Ian off at his train.

Despite the weather and a spectacularly crap day out on Saturday, a good weekend; although I hope next time he visits there is some actual decent weather. Wales, when it's sunny and not being all shy, is particularly beautiful in Summer.

And I shall never think of Silpheed quite the same way ever again ;-).

14/6/2001

It was shearing day on Tuesday!

28/5/2001

Quick llinkage fix and driving fast in circles

Summer 2001

Just a quick update to rearrange things a bit. I'm moo-ving all the zip files with my old games in onto my Enormouscamel site, to free up a bit of space on this one. I've updated my Llinks page accordingly. I've also added a collection of my old Commodore 16 games, for use on emulators - thanks to Llando for collecting these together (yes, that bloke who now has my llama jacket ;-). The collection contains Hellgate, Laser Zone, Matrix, Psychedelia and Void Runner, and a version of Gridrunner that somebody hacked from the c=64 version! To run the games you'll need an emulator such as YAPE, and you could do worse than to head over to Llando's site to get that (and any other c=16/plus4 stuff you might be interested in).

Currently taking up CPU time on my Praystation 2: Silpheed (you may remember this from an old incarnation on the Sega CD). Old-skool shoot-em-up with lovely lovely graphics and big meaty llasers and lots of things to blow to big particley bits ;-). Great to play in a dark room on the projector... and Formula One 2001, easily the most fun F1 game I have played so far, llargely down to the smooth framerate and the throttle/brake control being on the right-hand analog stick, a setup which takes a little getting used to but is worth the effort, as it allows a lot more control of the throttle than you usually get with just a button. At the moment I've only just got the game so I'm still just playing it at the level of a glorified Virtua Racer, but as and when you get serious about it you can make it as realistic as you can take :-]. Even in "arcadey" mode it's great fun, though, to play as a known driver on circuits that all F1 fans know so well :-). I'm currently Heinz-Harald Frentzen... and okay, I know I'd never get away with the collisions that I have when I play at the moment, but nonetheless there is a certain satisfaction in nerfing Schui off into the gravel trap on the llast lap at Spa to win the race for virtual-Jordan (heh... better than real-Jordan have been doing this season, anyway ;-]. And yesterday at Monaco... poor old DC... Ghu, I would not like to be a software engineer working on systems control at McLaren...).

Right, I'm off. Curry night tonight! *slurp*

22/5/2001

Pretty Sheep

Just a quick update, really - to mention a couple of things that happened recently - the DNA event, where the VLM got deployed in an old Commodorean environment and there were rotatey neon llamas about in Club DNA in Birmingham; and the Sheep Floyd weekend, during which me and my mate Ian finally got it together ti visit the Sheep Shop and get to see the Australian Pink Floyd :-).

Apart from that, not too much else to relate, apart from the fact that the weather is getting rather llovely here; oh, yes, and that Shaggy, one of my two Jacobs ewes, has very definitely crossed the threshold into full-on tameness. She had always been a bit shy of actual physical contact, but just in the llast couple of weeks I have been making a point of giving her skritchies whilst she takes her biccy in the morning, and she went overnight from shying away from such contact to suddenly realising that it was actually rather good ;-). Now she is totally up for two-handed deep-fleece all-over skritchies whenever I go out there, and Floss is even getting a bit jealous; llast time I was skritching Shaggy, Floss very deliberately interposed herself between Shaggy and me :-).

Ahh, there's something very right in the world when I've got sheepies fighting for my physical attentions ;-).

3/5/2001

Strange Days

2:34 PM on a FebruaryThursday: Llama Thang, Yak Elbow and Three Distant Sheep

Okay, there are two blokes. One of them keeps a few sheep and goats on a smallholding completely surrounded by sheep farming in a part of the country renowned for being extraordinarily high in sheep-density. The other keeps a couple of goats in his back garden in the middle of a small town. Which one of these two do you think was most directly affected by the recent (and ongoing, although thankfully attenuating) foot-and-mouth outbreak?

The answer, to quote a lyric from that rapper blokie who named himself after one of my sheep and whose irritating song about nasty hairless creatures doing stuff that I'd really rather not think about has been in the charts and therefore on the radio for far too long: it wasn't me :-/. Although I live smack in the middle of farming territory, the bit of south-west Wales I'm in has remained completely free of any outbreak of FMD for the duration. The bulk of the infections in Wales occurred in Powys to the north-east of me, on the border to England, and up on that island off the northern prong of Wales, Anglesey.

However, my goat-owning friend Ian (who some of you probably know as T(NT)) lives in Wiltshire, and, sod's law being what it is, despite living in town, one of the first few FMD outbreaks occurred only a few miles from where he lives, placing him smack in the middle of a restricted area right from the word go. I'm sure you're all aware of how much I care about Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World, and exactly how gutted I'd be if anything were to happen to her; and Ian cares for his goats no less, and as a result has been through some horribly stressful times over the llast few months. At one point it looked like he was going to be within a couple of miles of a blanket-cull zone, and, well, if I'd been in that position here I'm not sure I could have handled it at all.

Even now, on the trailing edge of the outbreak, events have conspired to deliver him one final kick in the nuts. Llast week, as the outbreak died down, Wiltshire was declared to be no longer an infected area, and we both were starting to feel a bit of relief that the nightmare was at llast coming to an end. At the weekend I was due to go to the football, and, as is my habit on such occasions, doss the night at my mum's (enabling me to enjoy a bit of a piss-up in the Wellington Arms, a small country pub about a mile and a half from my mum's place where, for some inexplicable reason, they seem to like me) and pop in and visit Ian on my way back to Wales the following Sunday afternoon. Llast weekend it was Grand Prix Sunday, too, and, me and Ian both being fans, we'd agreed that I'd arrive at his place in time for the start of the race and we'd watch it there.

Saturday afternoon I went to The Dell, where I got intermittently rained-upon and saw the Saints go down 1-0 to Sunderland (oh, and by the way, I really should just mention here that Glen Hoddle is a complete and total smeghead and a gimboid of the highest order) despite having a Beattie goal disallowed (which was never offside, oi ref where's yer white stick, somebody hand that man a pair of glasses, etc. etc) in the sixth minute. Upon returning to my mum's house after the match, I was shocked to find her suffering from a severe curry deficiency, due to not having been out for a curry for some months - she hadn't had curry since my llast visit, in fact. I cannot stand idly by and see any of my family members suffer in this way, so I rushed her down the curry house and got some pappadoms down her immediately to stabilise the situation; she then followed up with an emergency chicken Korma and shortly afterwards appeared to be recovering well. I admonished her to take more care about her curry-levels, and at the very least take a take-away or two once or twice a month just to be on the safe side. Of course I do understand that she doesn't need the amount of curry that I do (at the very least Vindaloo twice a week, and during times of stress additional emergency curries in between) but nonetheless, there's no need to tempt fate, and no curry at all is just asking for trouble; great Ghu, start doing that and you'll be eating pasta and disliking Lal Toofan before long.

Anyway, sitting in the curry house secure in the knowledge that my mum's curry deficiency was being taken care of, I remembered that I ought to call Ian and confirm an ETA for the visit the following day, and when I did, I was dismayed to find him quite upset - there had been an unexpected suspected case of FMD less than a couple of miles from where he lives, and the MAFF were insisting on sending someone round to inspect his goats. *Waaay* too close for comfort. Very scary, and a great big stinking monster of a pisser, given that his area had effectively been given the all-clear only a few days earlier.

When I arrived there on the Sunday he was waiting for the MAFF entity to show, and in the end they didn't show up and the visit was re-scheduled for the following Tuesday. It was pretty much an unspeakably horrible and stressful situation to be in. Bloody hell, if it was me, I don't know if I could have coped at all; I'd've been a gibbering wreck if I thought that anyone was seriously considering the possibility of having to kill my Floss and the rest of the herd.

Not to curse-of-Murray the situation, but now things do look a bit more hopeful - it looks like the suspected case near Ian which precipitated the MAFF visit may turn out not to be FMD at all. I certainly hope that proves to be the case, and that we can all get back to living our lives without the constant fear and worry which has dominated them for the last few months. I'm starting to realise just how depressed and tired it's been making me, and I'm not even directly proximate to an infected area. Goat only knows how much worse it has been for people in the thick of it, farmers losing entire bloodlines, people like Ian whose beloved pets are threatened and in some cases killed... it's been a very rough few months here in the UK :-/.

Oh, and speaking of the curse of Murray - anyone watching the ITV coverage of Sunday's Grand Prix will have been witness to the Curse in full effect ;-]. Only a few llaps to go, and Schui was having some problems and it looked like Hakkers was set for his first win for quite a few races; Murray starts getting all enthusiastic and effectively dishing the World Championship points out before anyone has crossed the line. And no sooner are the words out of his mouth than, on the very final lap, Hakkers' car starts to slow down, emit ominous smoke and eventually trundle to a stop with a blown engine, and Michael, doubtless unable to believe his luck, nips by to take the race. I definitely think that any software house that's making a Formula 1 game and using Murray for the commentary should figure in a Curse of Murray algorithm ;-].

I suppose there have been other things going on over the llast few months apart from FMD, but somehow they all seem lower-priority and don't really mean much compared to that... work-wise I have been working on the VLM Editor, a tool which allows one to more effectively build and tweak VLM effects for the Nuon VLM. The editor is probably 90 percent functional now - it does pretty much everything it should do, there are a couple of interface glitches and a bit of tweaking yet to do, but it is actually useful. I used it to create some custom VLM effects for a little outing to a club in Cardiff, where my mate Robin was doing some video projections and invited me along to get in the mix. I didn't have any audio direct into the VLM, so I made a bunch of effects that could be "performed" in realtime using a couple of Nuon controllers. This proved most effective, and when the bank of video projectors in the club covered one entire wall with VLM, it was indeed a wicked buzz ;-).

I'm going to be deploying the VLM again on the 16th of May, at the DNA event - I should have even more effects this time out, because the editor is closer to being finished than it was when I did the Cardiff thang. Come along if you're in that part of the world at that time - who knows, maybe I'll let you waggle my joysticks ;-).

Flossie and the others are doing fine - Shaggy the Jacobs' ewe is becoming very tame now, and almost knocks me over bumbling around me when she thinks I've got food or a biscuit for her; she'll eat the food right out of my hand, and doesn't mind if I dig around in her lovely thick fleece while she's eating. Her sister Shy, though, continues to live up to her name and, although she will approach quite closely, still startles at the slightest moo-vement or touch. In fact the pair of them are quite similar in character to the original pair of sheep I had, Molly and Flossie. Floss was always the friendly one (and still is!), whereas Molly was always just that bit skittish and shy.

The weather is getting somewhat better here now, and indeed that and the continuing decline of the FMD outbreak is starting to raise my spirits somewhat, and make me realise just how "down" I've been at times over the llast few months. It sometimes feels like he best therapy in the Universe is simply to sit for an hour or two in the bright sunshine, out in the sheep field, with one arm around a relaxed and happy Flossie :-). It probably didn't help that in the middle of all that FMD bollocks, at the very peak of the crisis and at a time of maximal stress, I also decided to give up smoking. I know, I've tried it before, but this time I haven't tried, I've just gone right ahead and done it. It's a Yoda-esque thing: "There is no try" ;-). This time I knew it was a certainty that I was going to quit; I finally had a good enough reason to do so, and if I have a good reason to do something, then I bloody well will. In that context, the question of stress didn't really arise; smoking in response to stress is just an excuse that I've always made to myself before to explain caving in after having quit, or for continuing to smoke - after all, there's always going to be *something* stressful going on in one's life, so that excuse is always there, and I've used it way too often. So I just went ahead and quit, stress notwithstanding. I used high-strength patches for two weeks in order to break the habitual part of the addiction, and then just cut out the patches and went straight to nothing. I actually wouldn't recommend that course of action - one is supposed to step down the dosage by using smaller patches over a few weeks, and it would probably be a lot more comfortable to do that. As it was, I had a period of about a week where the physical craving became quite baa-d, and I was a complete wanker and an irritable smeghead to everyone who had the misfortune to encounter me, but now that's over and although I still get an occasional fag-urge, they are increasingly easy to override, and although I have since been in not a few stressful situations with smokers around me, I haven't even thought about caving in. A mate of mine visiting me the other weekend saw me in such a situation and remarked that he *knew* I was quit if I had survived that evening without lighting up ;-).

No cheating, either. Always before when I tried to give up I would still allow myself the occasional fag or sip of nicotine - blagging a rolly down the pub, puff of the occasional recreational cigarette, whatever - but in the end that inevitably leads to relapse. This time I'm right off the nicotine in any form, and buggered if I'm going to go back on it again, not after all the fucking states I've been in coming off the damn stuff ;-].

I am starting to notice some positive effects now, in particular not having lungs that creak and bubble alarmingly when you take a deep breath in the morning, and not having to cough my way twice round the top field when I go out there in the morning to empty the dog. There are other effects that I'm sure I'm seeing, although if they are real or psychosomatic I'm not sure - doesn't matter anyway, I s'pose, given that I perceive them as beneficial. My senses of taste and smell seem to be becoming slightly more acute. My Vindaloos taste more delightful than ever. My goats smell more goaty, and Flossie's fleece smells yummier than ever when I bury my face in it :-). And my desk isn't covered in ash from overflowing ashtrays, and my keyboard will probably llast a lot longer now since there is no longer a steady drizzle of fag-ash down through the cracks between the keys :-].

'Course, now that I no longer have to spend a fiver a day on killing myself slowly, I shall have a bit more of a disposable income than I did before; and anyone who knows me well knows that when I am feeling a bit down I usually end up buying myself some kind of tech toy or other (and, given the level of tech in my media room, would [perhaps not unjustifiably] come to the conclusion that I'm a miserable baa-stard a lot of the time ;-]). It's not that I'm materialistic in the conventional sense (I don't like to have tech because I think anyone else would think highly of me because of it; "status symbols" don't mean a lot to me. I like tech because... well, I'm a geek, for Goat's sake, that's all ;-). Anyway, what with FMD and giving up smoking and all, I've acquired a few nice goodies recently. For starters, a rather nice 17-inch flat-panel LCD monitor. In a way I suppose that isn't really a *toy*, since it actually is a lot clearer and easier on the eye for someone who spends a lot of every day staring at the screen, as I do; it's a genuinely useful part of my work environment. But I have to admit that I also like it simply because it's aesthetically much more satisfying than a CRT monitor, which I have long felt is an outdated technology - the llast valve in systems which are increasingly becoming solid-state. And a 17-inch CRT monitor is a bloody great heavy thing. This LCD monitor is just much more elegant ;-).

The only downside is that a rather large herd of fluffy animals which used to reside on top of my CRT monitor have suddenly become homeless! They have been re-deployed along the back of the couch, for now. I still need to do quite a bit more re-arranging of this room as it evolves towards my Ideal Media Environment, so they probably won't remain there for ever :-).

Speaking of the Ideal Media Environment, another one of my recent tech toys (very recent, in fact; I only got it yesterday!) is a thing called a TiVo. It's basically a Linux system running on a 54MHz PowerPC processor with a bunch of memory, a whopping HD, and a hardware MPEG2 codec. (I was thinking of rolling-my-own version of the same kind of thing using a stock PC and appropriate graphics cards and such, but the software I was considering using doesn't appear to be sufficiently well evolved and stable enough yet to guarantee the kind of seamless operation that is required for such an application, and anyway, by the time I'd put it all together it would have ended up costing a fair bit more than the TiVo, anyway). Basically, it's a video recorder that uses HD instead of tape. The first and most obviously different thing about it is that, if you're just sitting watching telly, you can pause live telly if you get interrupted for any reason, re-wind at any time up to half an hour of recent history or, if behind realtime, you can fast-forward to any point (obviously only up until realtime, of course!). This enables you to do all kinds of cool things. For one, if you ever have one of those moments where you see something amazing on telly - some mistake, or someone making a fool of themselves, or any one of those moments when you think "*damn* I wish I'd been taping!" - you can just re-wind to the appropriate part, shove a tape in the VCR, and archive it. Excellent :-). You can also start watching a program on a commercial channel deliberately ten minutes behind realtime, and then - ahh, blessed relief! - when the adverts come up, just fast-forward through the baastards ;-).

'Course, it's a video recorder, too, and it comes with a comprehensive EPG which it keeps updated for the upcoming two weeks; it's easy to nav through that and mark items for recording. It uses a little IR emitter to change channels on your Digibox, so when that weird little documentary comes on at 4.30 in the morning it'll change the channel as appropriate and shove it on your HD. It's cool because most of the time that's the kind of thing you use a VCR for, re-scheduling stuff that you're not around to see when it's broadcast, and this saves all that fossicking around with tapes. You just accumulate stuff on your HD, and save the VCR for stuff that you really want to archive.

The interesting bit is that you can tell the box what kind of telly you like. There are "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons which, judiciously deployed, should allow the system to get an idea of what kind of telly you enjoy. So, every time you see Jim Davidson, you press the "Thumbs Down" button, and after a while, the box gets the idea you'd rather have bubonic plague than see his grinning face. And when something you enjoy comes up, you press Thumbs Up, and the box gets the idea that you like Royston Vasey and Bob Mills. The more you do this the beter it is supposed to get to know your viewing characteristics (I don't know how well it does this yet, only having set it up yesterday).

Then, what it will do is speculatively record stuff which it thinks you might like. If that really works, it could in fact be quite cool. Given the sheer volume of programming available on Sky Digital, it's always possible that some gem that you'd have really enjoyed seeing is likrely to pass by unseen at some goatforsaken time of the morning on some channel you'd have never thought to look at. And wouldn't it be cool if, confronted with the bleak, dark wasteland of the televisual soul that is Saturday evening programming, you could have a look on your HD and find that your machine has accumulated some stuff for you to watch which is actually interesting, informative, and doesn't involve Cilla Black?

Nice idea :-). I shall begin educating my machine, and we'll see how it goes :-).

Another recent tech toy isn't anything expensive, although I have a Japanese import version and therefore can enjoy a couple of months of Smug Mode until the UK launch in June - the Game Boy Advance :-). It's very cool indeed - has a slightly higher-rez colour screen than the GBC, in a "wide-screen" stylee orientation; the batteries llast ages (I am still using the set which came with the GBA) and the system power seems to be approximate to that of the SNES. And indeed, one of the first games out for the system is a version of one of the best SNES games of all time - F-Zero. The GBA version is every bit as wicked as the original version was, and indeed looks even better in places (there seem to be more textures on the tracks than in the original). Best of all, up to 4 players can play multi-player, and each with their own screen, and none of that split-screen bollocks :-). Great fun, and a must-have when you buy a GBA in June :-).

I have two other games - Super Mario Brothers Advance, which is basically SMB2 from the NES, except obviously with nicer graphics; and Mr. Driller 2, which \I didn't really like, but which has rather crept up on me, a bit like a nasty cold does, to the extent that I find myself taking the GBA with me whenever I go anywhere and whipping it out at the most inappropriate moments in order to get busy thrusting with my drill ;-).

GBA is kewl ;-).

I think one of my favourite tech toys isn't hardware but software :-). I was looking around for something for Ian to use, and came across a softsynth/sequencing tool that is just the mutt's nuts. It's called FruityLoops 3, and is pretty much exemplary of what good software should do - namely, provide access to modes of creativity which would hitherto have been unavailable to the user. Fruity3 makes it easy for any old git - including the evil-smelling, llama-obsessed hairy git sitting at this keyboard - to have a lot of fun and in the process end up with an actual techno tune ;-). 'Course, the results will always be better if used by someone who actually knows what they're doing, but it's excellent just to be able to much about and end up with something that's actually not hideously awful. I'm certain that Ian will make infinitely better use of the tool than I ever will; but if you want a good laugh, check out my tune. I know, I know, I'm never going to be any Chemical Brother, and the only way I'll ever set the dance floor alight involves petrol and matches. But also consider that at the time I did that tune, I'd had the software two days, and I'd never attempted anything of the sort before.

That's damn good software :-).

Other news - my Dreamcast died the other day, dammit. A friend of mine was visiting, and I happened to mention the goodness of making some Crazy Money, and when I went to fire up the system the CD drive refused to spin up. Arse.

Oh, and "Edge" magazine were quite enthusiastic about Tempest 3000. In the May issue they have an "Edge Awards" feature, and they awarded Winner, Second and Third Runners-Up in each of several categories, as well as mentioning other worthies not in the top three. And T3K garnered Seconds in the categories of "Graphical Achievement" and "Audio Achievement" (cheers to Ian and the rest who contributed to the soundtrack), and "honourable mentions" in the categories of "Technical Achievement" and "Game of the Year".

I'm quite chuffed about that :-).

Well, I shall smeg off now and cease to bore everyone with my worthless drivel. Ll8r...

3/1/2001

Happy Gnu Year, and Fleece to All Men!

29/12/2000: Ugly baaa-stard; pretty beach though ;-).
The Grunting Ox considers it his duty to spread the joyous message of sheepiness even unto the most exotic and remote parts of the planet. As you can see that's a really odious job sometimes ;-).

I've been away over Xmas; every year I like to take my mum to Baa-bados, 'coz all my other brothers have families and therefore have their own "family" Xmas celebrations, and therefore me and my mum would otherwise each spend Xmas on our own, which would be a bit sad and boring. So I decided it might be better for both of us if we buggered off to somewhere hot and forgot about Xmas altogether. We first did it three years ago, and it's proved so effective that we've continued every year since :-).

I got back a couple of days ago, and now I'm settling back into the mode; got a couple of tweaks to do to the extra 52 VLM effects I've made for the Euro release of VLM, and then start thinking about maybe making some kind of VLM editing tool.

Tempest 3000 is now actually available and Out There in the US. If you want to see the first user reviews of the game, check these from Nuon-Dome, Tempest X000 and Iongames. I think they like it ;-).

Hehe... it was cool to have a break, but I almost didn't come home! It is quite an amusing tale to tell:

How I Almost Got Killed in the Most Ridiculous Manner Possible

There's always a degree of risk when you travel, it's true. Many holiday leisure activities carry with them a small but nonetheless acknowledged amount of risk; you accept that when you go away, and of course usually nothing untoward occurs.

On our trip I got up to a variety of things that one could imagine might involve such minor risks. I flew in a light aircraft to the Grenadines, went on a variety of sailing and snorkelling trips, got mildly drunk on board a floating piss-up of a boat called the "Jolly Roger" and walked the plank and swung off ropes and basically inserted myself into the warm Caribbean waters in a variety of silly but amusing ways, and yet in none of those things did I sustain any injury or come to any harm at all.

On the penultimate day of the holiday, me and my mum went on a tour which promised to be a very chilled-out, restful and - one would have thought - safe trip. It was a visit to a tropical flower forest, and it was really rather nice - tranquil, restful, and very beautiful. My mum was enthralled, and we both enjoyed a very relaxed stroll through the forest, feeling utterly chilled-out and at peace.

So there we are, strolling along, nicely chilled out, and suddenly I hear a loud crack! noise. It sounded like a gunshot, or maybe a firework going off. And at about the same time, a shout from the people behind us. I looked around, wondering what the smeg was going on, and then noticed two things: a few inches from my right hoof, an indentation in the ground, and a very large coconut...

The forest, you see, contained many beautiful and very tall palm trees, and I just happened to have been walking underneath a fine example, probably about 150 feet high. Which just happened to shed a coconut at that time... the people behind had seen it falling, but too late to call out a warning before it hit the ground. Bloody thing missed my head by about six inches ;-]. I almost ended up having my brains smashed out by a coconut ;-].

Which, if you think about it, would have been an absolutely ridiculous way to go :-).

I kept the near-missile, and I have it on display in my living room. Hehe :-).

I got back from holiday on the 1st (having passed New Year at 39,000 feet, a first for me). It's cold, and there is a burst pipe outside, and Vindy has kennel-cough; back to reality :-]. Still, there are good things about being home - cuddling Flossie, working on the VLM, being able to crank out my stereo loudly, and play on the PS-2 :-). And my llama enclosure is complete :-). This is good for a couple of reasons - I can alternate the pasturing of my existing herd, which is good for them and for the land; and of course I can think about getting a couple of llamas in the Spring :-).

I must away - VLM is calling, and my hay man has just been :-).

3/12/2000

Yak and T(NT)'s Big Day Out; VLM (Iteration); some sad news; general wibble...

Yeah, I know it's a bit early to put the decorations up. Not that I can ever actually be arsed with decorations, anyway. But I found this somewhere and it seems appropriate - apparently the original coin-op Tempest team made it for a greetings card back in the days.

I've always had a major thing about sheep and Pink Floyd. Sure, there are camels, goats and llamas involved too, but sheep and Pink Floyd have been defining themes for me since waaay back. Sheep in Space, Flossie, all the sheep and Floyd references in my games over the years... and anyone who went to one of those London computer shows back in the early 80s and looking for the Llamasoft stand will surely remember that the first mode of location was aural - listen for the Floyd amongst all the zapping and exploding noises coming from everyotherbastard's stands; and the secondary mode was visual (it wasn't too hard to spot the stand when you get close, because there were two life-size sheep displayed on the countertop, one at each end of the stand, bracketing the tellies and joysticks laid out for people to play the newest games).

Now over the years I have met many people who like Pink Floyd (and quite rightly so), but never anybody with quite the same enthusiasm about the sheep thing. It seemed to me that I was safe to assume that the sheep/Pink Floyd thing was a pretty rare combination. I've met plenty of people who like "Sheep" by Pink Floyd, from the "Animals" album, but, well, that's not quite the same thing :-). I figured that the only reason anyone was likely to think about sheep and Pink Floyd in the same neural breath, as it were, would be because they were former Llamasofties, probably remembering how they used to locate the Llamasoft stand at computer shows. I certainly believed that I was alone in thinking that the correct spelling for "Hey You" from "The Wall" should be "Hay Ewe".

So you can imagine my surprise when some while ago I fortuitously bumped into an individual who also, amazingly enough, is just as enthusiastic about both Pink Floyd and sheep as I am :-). (If he had only had a Commodore 64 instead of a Beeb back in the days, then we would surely have encountered one another *much* earlier ;-) But I digress).

Perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, we actually got on pretty well, and fortuitously enough, he happened to be a musician, so I got him involved with T3K. From which you will probably deduce that I am talking about none other than T(NT), whose goats and general goodness I mentioned llast time. He's done a couple of Floyd covers which are very good; he's even done "Sheep" on his synthesiser (although I think that would be a bit uncomfortable for the sheep, actually ;-).

We like to visit one another now and again, and last weekend was originally planned to be a mutual indulgence of our twin enthusiasms, sheep and Pink Floyd. The plan was that we would go and see the Australian Pink Floyd on the Friday night, and then follow up with a pilgrimage to a place called the Sheep Shop on the following Saturday, thereby enjoying a thoroughly sheep-and-Floydian weekend.

The Aussie Pink Floyd are a "tribute" band - they play live Floyd in such a way as to sound as much as possible like the *actual* Pink Floyd, and from what I hear, they are pretty damn good at it. Somebody emailed me and told me that if you closed your eyes and listened to them you would be almost convinced it was the Real Thing. They even played at Dave Gilmour's birthday party. And they were on tour in the UK and coming to play at Narberth, a small town only about 30 miles from here. Apparently last time they came to Narberth someone spilt a pint of beer in the mixing desk and the show had an enforced hour-and-a-half interlude, but those who went said it was nonetheless an excellent show, and well worth the wait to extract all traces of misplaced libation from the desk.

So the plan was that he would arrive Friday afternoon; we would possibly have curry first (the man even likes a nice fiery chicken Vindaloo; truly an individual with excellent tastes ;-) and then bugger off up to Narberth for the promised two-hour set of Floydian goodness. A fine start to a good weekend.

Unfortunately, on the Thursday before, I got a phone call from a bloke at the Narberth venue, explaining that the band had cancelled at almost no notice (it seems one of the singers was having voice problems and they decided to take a week out of the tour to let him recover), and there were no plans for a rescheduling on the current tour; basically we were scuppered.

"Bugger!", I said, "arse!", "pants!" and other words of that nature. No Floydian Friday for us. It was, as they say, a bit of a pisser. Still, we could still have a good weekend, and we ended up still having that curry on the Friday night, and then had an enjoyable time nonetheless, sitting about yakking for ages and having a good old laff at the League of Gentlemen DVD I'd just bought, drinking a few beers and, well, you know how it is when your mates come 'round :-).

However, Saturday's treat was very much still on :-).

The Sheep Shop is one of the major epicentres of all things fluffy, woolly and making bleating noises in this area. The Sheep Shop is a place so suffused with sheepiness that when you stand inside you can hear people passing in the street outside spontaneously bleating as they walk past. The Sheep Shop is, of course, a very dangerous place for the likes of us to be in, because we're likely to end up spending far too much dosh on sheepy Precious Things :-). Logically, therefore, we really shouldn't go there. However, how the hell could we *not* go there? It was inevitable...

Therefore on Saturday afternoon we set off to find the Sheep Shop. I'd never been there before and had ascertained that it was in Haverfordwest, a town probably about 15 miles further away from here than Narberth (we actually drove within about a mile of Narberth on the way, which prompted comments as to how at least we'd been to Narberth even if we didn't get to see the bloody band :-]). Easy enough to get to, and the drive was quite pleasant - it was even sunny for awhile, and the scenery was nice; gentle rolling hills, with many gentle white fluffy bleating things upon them :-).

We arrived in Haverfordwest, which I didn't know at all, so I immediately got sucked into a vicious one-way system and ended up being vomited up somewhat to the west of town, far too far out from the centre to even think about just parking up and walking in. I duly turned around and re-entered the system with some trepidation, eventually happening upon a car park which I thought wasn't likely to be too far away from the shops. We parked up and eventually found our way to what looked like the right kind of area (although I am certain not by the quickest route; I didn't know Haverfordwest at all). I knew from what I'd read on the Web looking for the place that the Sheep Shop was near to a pedestrianised shopping area, so we found one of those and made our way through the human herds that thronged the place, doubtless engaged in the hideous throes of Christmas shopping; and began to look for the Sheep Shop.

"Holy Goat", I prayed, "please send us a sign, that we might find the epicentre of ovinity!"... and lo, there was a sign, this sign, in fact, which T(NT) spotted (and photographed) next to an alleyway:

The sign that showed us which direction to flock off in. All pics are courtesy of T(NT) by the way. I was an arse and forgot to charge up my digital camera.

We duly followed the indication and, excited and with heads full of woolly thoughts, set off determinedly down the alley in search of our goal, unusually for those bent on retail activities actively hoping that we would end up getting thoroughly fleeced. Finally, there it was: the Sheep Shop, with baskets of sheepy items temptingly arrayed outside, windows crammed with items of ovine significance; all it needed to enhance its allure would have been to smell like Newcastle Emlyn on a Friday afternoon. We both went into raptures of sheepy joyfulness and spontaneous bleating, and T(NT) fetched out his camera to record the auspicious occasion:

"This is my church. This is where I heal my hurts..."

T(NT) who, shortly afterwards, was giving that sheep head
next to him the once-over.

Then we disappeared inside, to be immersed in one of the sheepiest environments I have ever encountered. Everything everywhere was ovine (well, there were a few anomalies, like a teddy bear section that somehow managed to sneak in there, and which we eschewed for the horrible tweeness that it represented). Sheep mugs, sheep plates, sheep jumpers, sheep socks, fluffy sheep of a bewildering variety of dimensions and shapes, sheep biros, sheep keyrings, sheep fleeces, sheep jigsaws, sheep pictures in wide array; prepend "sheep" to just about any object you can think of, and there was probably one of those there :-).

We wandered around in a sheepy daze, "grazing", I suppose; each accreting a mound of ovine articles at the check-out desk (there were far too many for us to actually carry around all the time). Eventually common-sense prevailed, and we ceased browsing for fear of actually ending up owning the place. Upon presenting ourselves at the checkout, the staff seemed quite in awe of our evident overwhelming sheepy enthusiasm, and asked with a degree of amazement as to what might actually cause someone to *be* so sheepy. To which there really is no answer, I suppose. Some of us just have sheep in our genes (making sure to undo the zipper first, of course ;-).

Finally we emerged, thoroughly fleeced and happy, and actually a bit hungry, come to think of it, as we'd had no breakfast that morning. Once again T(NT) whipped out his equipment to record the scene, as I struggled with the burden of sheepiness that I had acquired:

Mad flocker with a sheep head on a stick. Note the muddy jeans due to being repeatedly molested by pygmy goats. We are in serious Scruffy Baa-stard territory here.

It was looking like moisture might imminently start descending from the sky, as it often does in Wales, and there was that little matter of no breakfast and a good while since that curry, so we set off again, this time in search of a bit of nosh. I was carrying my sheep head on a stick in one hand, and collected quite a few amused glances from passers-by, who I like to think were momentarily happily diverted from Christmas-shopping-hell by the incongruous sight of a grinning scruffy hairy idiot with a sheep head on a stick.

Eventually we found the Restaurant That Has No Door (well actually it does, but it's quite well-camouflaged, and we ended up walking all the way around the building before we found it) and disappeared inside and each ordered a large plate of chips with hods of baked beans on top, and a nice cup of tea. Mmmm, epicurean stuff, and by then eagerly anticipated; my stomach was starting to think my throat'd been cut. As we waited for the aforementioned nosh, I began to idly twiddle with my sheep head, eliciting giggles and further amused glances from the Saturday shoppers who had also stopped to eat there. A small child a couple of tables away was quite enthralled by it, and stared at it with a rapt gaze the whole time she was there. Maybe she, too, will one day grow up to be sheepy :-).

After a while the beans and chips arrived, curiously enough accompanied by an unsolicited sliver of salad at the edge of it, which both of us pointedly ignored, as we both have in common no great enthusiasm for the old rabbit-food. We sat refuelling for awhile, munching and slurping, occasionally glancing outside and up through the rain at a darkening sky which was indeed emitting quite a lot of liquid. Finally, sated, we left and made our somewhat moist way back to the car park and thence set off home, deviating our journey briefly both physically and thematically on the way back, to ascertain whether a farm shop we'd spotted on the way up sold nice fresh goats' milk (alas, it did not). Driving back the increasingly blackening sky behind us began to emit flashes of lightning, and the storm pursued us all the way back, eventually catching up with us a few minutes after we arrived, when a large zap struck the ground not far from here, interrupting the power momentarily and, although I did not know it at the time, destroying the modems of two of my neighbours.

Fortunately for us the power stayed on (although I had suspected it might not, and had rushed to boil the kettle before the storm arrived; we had to have tea) and so we sat around to gloat for awhile over our sheepy haul. Here is just *some* of mine:

Just some of the things I obtained at the Sheep Shop, including my sheep head on a stick. If you are stuck for gift ideas this Christmas, why not give a sheep head? It doesn't cost much, and it's as much a pleasure to give as it is to receive.

In that photo you can see large, medium and small fluffy sheepies; the sheep head on a stick; and an unfeasibly large sheep keyring (which is actually more practical than it sounds; it's hard to properly lose one's keys when there is a large sheep attached to them. It does mean that you can't get the entire keyring into your pocket, and you end up with a sheep dangling out of the top of your trousers, but hey, for the likes of me, that's appropriate and understandable personal adornment). You can't see the sheep jumper or the sheep socks, because I'm wearing 'em :-). Nor can you see the sheep biro, because I forgot to put it in the pile and left it on my desk, but rest assured, I've got it here (brandishes sheep biro).

The enormous sheep upon which they are arrayed, BTW, is one of the very life-sized sheep that used to grace the Llamasoft stand, all those years ago :-). And that gormless-looking one second from top is a dead ringer for that sheep on the cover of that Orb album :-).

Lest anyone actually doubt the sheepiness of the Yakly gaff, bear in mind that the whole weekend I was able to provide T(NT) with a steady flow of necessary liquid without *once* doing the washing up and without ever having to provide it in an inappropriately-themed container. Witness the extent of my sheep-mug collection:

The Yakly sheep-mug facilities. The one on the front right actually contains an active cup of tea.

I eventually regretfully saw T(NT) off onto the train (an actual train! One that was working and everything!) on Sunday afternoon, full of tea and clutching his bag of sheep-oriented goodies; although not before we'd had a damn good fry-up at the Mason's :-). A splendid weekend and a most excellent pilgrimage :-). T(NT) has written his own account of it, probably considerably better than my own; you can read it on his webpage here.

Work-wise, well, I haven't been idle. T3K is, as I write this, about to hit the streets in the US in the next few days. It was released to manufacture awhile ago now, and although there have been a couple of delays since then getting it actually out there, I can only assume they were due to packaging or duplication hassles. I'm watching the Nuon boards to see when it finally gets through to those who have been waiting for it for so long.

After Tempest, I've had an opportunity to go back to the VLM for a while. This is good news for future European Nuon-owners, who will get the benefit of some improvements to the VLM itself, as well as a bunch of nice new effects. User-interactivity has thankfully been restored; if you have a controller with an analog stick on it, you can twiddle the effects with your thumb in an intuitive and gratifying manner, as I had always intended. I've also made it so that VLM can run in a slightly different configuration that allows for VLM to be concurrent with other, more computationally-intensive audio playback modes than just straight CD playback; the same mode also allows you to effectively increase the frame-rate of VLM when you *are* just doing straight CD playback. Andreas from VM Labs, my collaborator on VLM and the guy responsible for all the actual difficult bits of the audio analysis, has also improved the beat-extraction code so that it's much more effective. A bit of a result for us Euros, it seems :-).

Outside of work, I'm sorry to say that I have sad news to relate: I lost one of my kids a few weeks ago :-(. It happened very suddenly, without any warning, without there being any indication that something was amiss so I could at least call the vet in. I saw them all on a Thursday night when I checked up on them, all in the shed and bleating at me as vigorously as ever; on Friday I got up and went to give them hay and biscuits, and noticed that Dave with the white socks wasn't around. At first I thought he must still just be in the shed, but as I walked towards it I made out a still shape on the ground, and my heart sank into my boots when I found that it was Dave's lifeless form. I still don't know what took him so swiftly, although my goaty friend tells me it could be enterotoxaemia, to which they can be prone during very wet weather (and we've had a bunch of that) and which can take down a goat in a few hours. I only wish whatever it was had happened in the daytime, for then at least I might have seen *something* and at least had a chance to get him some attention...

Ach... I was gutted, as you can imagine. I was grateful that my friend Paula was staying at the time, because she did provide me with a much-needed shoulder to blub on for awhile there. I was very upset... it's particularly harsh when you've known a creature since he was just a few hours old, seen him bounding about like a mad thing and enjoying his new life so much, only then to see that life arbitrarily truncated...

So now I've only three goats... thankfully they all seem to be healthy enough, although I'm understandably a bit paranoid about them now and go and check up on them a lot more than is probably strictly necessary. Life in the herd goes on, I suppose... the new sheep are now well-integrated enough into the herd that they go indoors with the others into the shed, rather than keeping themselves separate and sleeping outside, as they used to. Good thing too, with the cold nights coming up - I like the thought of a large pile of beasties out there all sleeping together and keeping one another warm.

Oh, and work has begun on the fencing of my paddock - 5-foot-high mesh, suitable for containing llamas :-). All I will then need to do when that is complete is clear out a couple of the stables, and then I will finally be ready to accommodate the South American ruminants that people are sometimes surprised to find that I don't have already. It is only good and fitting that the bloke who called his company Llamasoft should finally actually have some llamas :-).

Well, that's it for now - time to upload, and drink tea with goats' milk :-).

23/10/2000

Just a quick update to add the Unofficial Guide to Tempest 3000 :-).

20/10/2000

Change returns success, going and coming without error...

(Is it just me being a geek, or does it sound in that song as if Syd took a particularly heavy trip one day and flashed forward into the mind of a coder? That lyric seems to describe the successful execution of a procedure called "Change()". And there's all that business of "darkness++" in the same song, too. Heh. Okay, I'm too much of a geek for my own good sometimes).

Er. I'm digressing before I've even started. What was I going to say? Oh yeah, just a small thing, really.

T3K is finished.

And, you know, it feels rather strange... today is the first day I've woken up and not had anything to do to Tempest today. And after... what's it been? Couple of years, at least... that feels really odd. There's a void in a certain part of my head (well, you knew that anyway, right?) - I mean the bit which used to be full of T3K-workmode. I'm sitting around here listening to Underworld and feeling faintly bemused :-).

'Course, I may yet have to do another compile or two. What I uploaded to work at one in the morning last night was "RC1" - that stands for "Release Candidate 1", which basically means that as far as I can tell, the game is complete in every way, it doesn't crash, everything works properly, it plays correctly - basically it's *done*. RC1 will be scrutinised by a few more people before it goes "golden" - that is, cleared for release. It's possible that someone may request a few small changes - to the wording of menu pages, or minor stuff like that; but such mods should be trivial, if required. Basically, it's finished :-).

I don't know what to say about it, really, except that I hope that those who has been waiting for the game aren't disappointed... it's kinda hard when you work really close to something, especially for so long, to form an objective opinion about it. Subjectively, I'm pleased with it. It looks nice, plays well and sounds great. I had a few mates round the other day and they thought it was very cool. So I hope it really is OK :-).

'Course, there was that time I was playing the game in a dark room, sound cranked, my nerdly pallor illuminated only by the flickering stroboscopics of Superzapper discharges and Pulsar blasts, tranced out, deep in the Zone, and convinced that this was the best game known to Man... but that probably had everything to do with the fact that someone had encouraged me to burn a quantity of herbal matter in a small pipe and inhale the resultant smoke just a few minutes prior ;-).

I think it's OK. I hope you do too :-).

(Mother do you think they'll like this song?)

Now that Nuon players are actually available (both the Samsung Extiva N-2000 and the Toshiba SD-2300 are on sale now in the US) some of you will have already seen the four-level "demo version" of T3K that's distributed with the players. There's now an updated version of the demo around that is somewhat closer to what the Real Thing is like, but for those of you who have the original version of the demo, well, when you see T3K "for real", you're going to notice quite a few differences :-).

Firstly and most importantly, the final game is faster, both in frame rate and pace of gameplay. The speed of everything is faster now - in particular your projectiles, and the speed with which the Flippers make their way up to the Rim. There are more simultaneous enemies on the Web at one time, and they come at you faster. This makes the gameplay considerably more intense than in the demo version :-).

Also, the somewhat sloppy control of the Claw has been tightened right up. There was waay too much inertia on that original version of the demo. I played it the other day, when I was at a party with my Extiva, and found that the control was as sloppy as a bucket of custard :-]. If you've been playing the demo, you're in for a nice surprise when you get yer hooves on the real thing.

Fans of T(NT), the composer of the track "Intimidation" that accompanied the demo, will be pleased to hear that he has provided another three excellent tunes for the game. There are nineteen tracks in all - four from T(NT), two from Andre Meyer, one from VML's own James Grunke, and all twelve tracks from the CD remix of the original tunes from Tempest 2000 :-). Plenty there to keep you aurally satisfied as you blast your way to Level 128 and beyond :-).

I should take a moment to introduce T(NT) here, because he's been instrumental in more ways than one in assisting the completion of both T3K and VLM. He's also a good mate of mine, and has been supportive beyond the call of duty at times during the making of all this bollocks when I have got a little... er... stressed-out :-]. Coincidentally enough, he's even a fellow goat-keeper (although his are rather larger than my little goatlets :-). In fact, one of his two goats features quite prominently in T3K:

Spindlwyke Copper, one of T(NT)s two Golden Guernsey goats, whose voice talent features in Tempest 3000, apparently proving that she's nutty enough to appear in a Yak game :-).

You'll hear Copper's bleating during the Bonus Round, as well as during things like menu selection :-). Flossie gets a look-in, too - remember the Yes! Yes! Yes! powerup trick out of T2K? Well, if you do that in T3K, then you'll get to hear the Prettiest Sheep in the World going a bit bonkers as you zoom off into hyperspace :-).

I certainly hope that there will be further collaborations between me and T(NT) on future occasions. Anyway, you should pay a visit to his website and meet both his goats :-). They are really very cute (although Copper's 'ard as nails, she'll 'ave ya, she will! ;-).

I'll be uploading an "Unofficial Strategy Guide" to T3K in the next day or two, so you can start preparing yourselves for the full version of the game :-). Although "strategy" is altogether too grand a word to use with regard to T3K - "Agh! There's one of those! Shoot it! There's another one! Shoot it too!"... heh ;-). Nevertheless, there are a few tricks and tips that I can pass on, from the ox's mouth so to speak, which will help you rack up higher scores on your way to Level 128 and beyond (although how far beyond it is possible to go I don't really know yet. Should anybody actually make it to level 256, something really evil happens).

So that's it, really - T3K is done. Bloody hell, it doesn't half feel weird :-].

You may now be asking yourselves, "so what's the smelly old ox up to next"? And basically I have a few small projects to undertake for VML before I start on a new game, stuff like making some of the techniques I used in T3K more accessible to other Nuon programmers, and designing a tool that can be used to create new VLM effects. This will occupy me for a few months, and I'll probably be starting on a new game proper sometime early next year. I already have a design in mind, something original this time, not an updated arcade game - and again in a unique style, using a custom renderer assembly-coded for Nuon. I'm very much into having my games look different from those produced on standard polygon-based libraries, and I work on the perfect machine for being able to roll-yer-own renderers, so why not ;-).

A word about VLM and the available Nuon players - if VLM is a major consideration when you're thinking about buying Nuon hardware, then you should opt for the Samsung rather than the Toshiba. Not that the Tosh is a baa-d machine; just that on the Tosh there are only 8 built-in VLM effects, whereas on the Sammy there are 100. Both of 'em will run T3K, of course :-).

Outside of work, what's been going on? Well, I found out the other weekend that taking the VLM and a video projector with you goes down very well at parties :-). Not only did I have an excellent night and rave my box off, I could probably also have sold a stack of Extivas there and then, if I'd had any to hand :-). The power of very loud techno music and a wall-sized VLM display running the "Overdriven" bank is not to be underestimated :-). I think the funniest moment of the night was early on in the evening - the host of the party had diplomatically invited his neighbour round to have a look around, and in the course of being given the guided tour, was shown into the "VLM room". Now this neighbour, I must add, is a very "straight" Welsh lady in her 50s, so I was amazed when she went totally bananas about the VLM :-). She was well into it :-).

I have two new arrivals in the back field, too :-). A couple from this area were leaving to move up North, and disposing of their small flock prior to leaving, and I ended up relieving them of a pair of absolutely, inordinately gorgeous Jacob's ewes :-). Check out these pictures of the pair of them, on the fisrt day they arrived. They were well shy at first, and would go to the opposite side of the field whenever I went out there. But they'd been used to being fed from a bucket in their previous home, and after awhile started to take a lot of interest when I went out with the food bucket. In due course they'd come close when I put the food down, and then it got so I could actually sit with them and skritch them whilst they were feeding. And just in the last couple of days, they have started coming up to me when I go out there, even nibbling my hand sometimes :-). Soon they'll be as tame as everyotherbeastie there, and I'll be mobbed by even more bleating entities whenever I go out there (and that's quite a few now - four goaties and three sheep ;-).

Thus far I have only named one of them - the one with more white in her back, who is usually the most forthcoming of the pair of them, is called Shaggy (because she is). I'm just waiting for an appropriate name to come to mind for the other one now. They are developing the traditional taste for Digestive biscuits that all my beasties share, which means my morning walk now costs me *eight* Digestives per go, including Vindy. It took them a few days to fit in with the rest of the herd - Flossie didn't take long to get used to them, but for some reason Alice, the little mother goatie who is usually as gentle as anything (and daft as a brush - regularly gets her silly little head stuck in the fence!) was a bit of a bully to them, for some reason, running over and giving them a proper butting if they got too close. She still gets jealous if they show too much of an interest in me, and runs over and chases them off, the little bugger :-]. But she's calming down now, and the new girls are settling in with the rest nicely.

Roger and Dave have had their bollocks off, poor little guys; although they seem to be completely unaffected by it and are their usual mad selves :-). All four of the goaties are massive attention-hogs, and crowd around me for skritchies whenever I go out there (and jump up on me like dogs, which means I continually have muddy hoof-prints all over my jeans). Skritching them all thoroughly takes a bit of time, as there are four goats and I only have two hands. And sometimes others get jealous - this afternoon I was crouching down, skritching the goaties, when I received a gentle but firm nudge from behind, and turned to see Flossie looking accusingly at me :-).

I bought a new digital camera this summer, the Fuji MX-2700, which is a successor to the MX-700 I got a couple of years ago. It's a pretty neat little thing, about the same size as the original but with a zoom lens, something I missed on the old one. It also takes pics at ridiculously high rez, and you can even shoot small 80-second long web-movies with it. I got a 64M memory card for it last time I was out in the States, and between that and the cards I already have from my old camera, there's enough to go for a reasonably long holiday without having to dump the contents of Flash to the laptop. I took some really lovely pics of Floss lying out in the meadow during the summer, and I was going to put one of them up here, but I just realised they are over on my Powerbook, and I'd have to reset my PC to get the unregistered version of PC-MacLan to work again, and I can't be arsed right now. (One of these days I'll give in and register it). Instead, here is a picture taken by my mate Ian (the Good Doctor), during a visit in the summer. He deliberately and maliciously composed it to make me look as stupid as possible, like I have a palm tree growing out of my head, the bastard. As if I'm not enough of a scruffbag already ;-].

Yak, looking stupid. And yes, despite evidence to the contrary (palm tree, blue sky, people actually in the water) that *is* Wales. The coast a few miles from where I live, actually. So it doesn't always piss down here. Just usually :-).

In June I took a trip to Silicon Valley, different from the many I've made this year in that it wasn't for anything to do with work. A certain Mr. Roger Waters happened to be playing at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, which is little more than a camelid-expectoration away from the office. I stayed with my mate Paula while I was out there, and we hooked up with a couple of old mates from the area to go and worship at the shrine of the Lord thy Rog. The gig was bloody excellent, and I completely enjoyed it, from the moment we arrived (and parked next to a woman who, upon spotting the Welsh flag I was waving, told me that she was originally from Fishguard!) until the post-gig chill-out in the bar, drinking Amber Bock beer ("Bock" means "goat", by the way ;-). Roger's set was excellent, comprising plenty of the expected Floyd songs taken from The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals (seeing "Dogs" performed live was a particular treat, because I thought I'd never get to see that!), as well as material from his solo albums and a new song to finish on. Definitely worth the trip :-).

Speaking of matters Floydian, I'm off to see the Australian Pink Floyd with my mate T(NT) later next month - apparently they are supposed to be pretty good; they even played at Dave Gilmour's birthday party :-). It's billed as "two hours of classic Floyd", and if they are as good as their reputation implies, it should be a great night out. We're looking forward to it :-).

I finally got around to replacing the speakers I blew up playing the Floyd's live Wall album, "Is There Anybody Out There?"; now I have a pair that can kick out a bit more bass than their predecessors :-). Late at night with the lights off, the projector running VLM, and the stereo blasting (thank Ghu for no near neighbours ;-) this place is more like the Smallest Nightclub In Wales than someone's living room :-). Hehe :-) I llove it :-). A Yak's gotta have his toys ;-).

Well, that's about it for this update. I know it's been a while coming, but I didn't want to do it until I could state that T3K was in the bag. And yeah, that *did* take rather a while, but it's done now :-).

Oh yeah, before I go - take a lookie here. If you like what you see, and want to create images like that yourself, then I suggest you avail yourself of the program that made them - it's called UltraFractal2 and it's the bollocks for making fractal imagery. There are tons of different fractal types to use, and loads of colouring algorithms to render them in all kinds of groovy ways. You can combine fractals into multi-layered images using a variety of different transparency modes. If you're a clever bastard you can even write your own fractal and colouring algorithms. Far too much complexity for me to go into here; suffice to say that if you like your fractals, you need this program :-). Take a trip to the UltraFractal resource page - there you'll find links to UF itself, as well as libraries of formulae, galleries of images that people have made, and tutorials on using UF. Be warned, though - it's terrifyingly addictive when you get into it :-).

Oh yeah ][ - I don't know if any of you remember the Atari VCS "Space Invaders" hack I did a long time ago, and called "Beast Invaders"? I somehow managed to lose my own copy of that hack, having left it on some PC about three upgrades past, and just recently I managed to track down a copy of it again, thanks to Keita Iida at VML. I thought I'd put it on my site for safe keeping :-). So if anyone runs a VCS emulator and fancies a copy of the hack, you can download it from here :-). It's only 4K, so it won't take long :-).

I'll be up with that "strategy" guide in the next day or so, but for now I'm off to fondle my Superzapper and think of goats ;-).

22/05/2000

E3 and Spawning

Baah! Yes I am alive, and occasionally I might even update this page. What can I say, except that I haven't been arsed to do it for awhile. Too much T3K and VLM going on... speaking of which, VLM is now all done, bugs fixed and integrated into the Samsung firmware; in fact mass production is now underway and the Extiva N-2000 should be hitting the streets in the US sometime in the next few weeks. It will come with one Nuon game, a puzzle game called Ballistix that is actually quite addictive in a Puzzle Bobble stylee; and also a demo disk that will contain demo versions of, I think, Iron Soldier, Merlin Karting and T3K.

The demo of T3K isn't some pansy-arsed over-in-an-instant stylee demo, either. It allows you to play levels 1 ("Welcome to the Machine"), 9 ("Hay Ewe"), 15 ("Dark Side of the Moo"), and, uhh, I think it's around level 24 ("Interstellar Overdraft"). The last level in particular is no pushover, featuring as it does those beastly Pulsars, and Rotors (a new enemy type that causes the entire web to spin around whilst it's on it - quite disorienting, especially when you're pussyfooting it around the Pulsars. Don't try it if you're pissed and full of lager and curry!).

Most of the powerups are available ("Hover" is disabled in the demo), and if you're really good, and collect *all* the powerups on the last three demo levels, then you can get in to one round of the Bonus Round before the demo ends. The whole demo also has one of the new music tracks from the game - the finished game will have all the old faves from T2K, plus some great new music. The track on the demo, called "Intimidation", was written by a mate of mine, and it rawks ;-).

In the full version of the game you can expect to see more variation in the dynamic textures that fill the web, more backdrops, prolly a slightly higher framerate (I'm not using up all the chip yet) and of course a shedload more levels and effects - there will be 128 unique levels, and then if you reach the end of that, webs will be generated by algo, so your torment will know no end ;-).

I just got back from E3 llast week, and it was quite an enjoyable trip. There was plenty of interest in Nuon, and quite a few people stopped by to play Tempest, so I had my first real feedback from actual gamers, and it seemed to be pretty good. Nobody said they hated it, and some of them even said they would get a Nuon to play it on, so can't be bad ;-). It was good to see actual Nuon players out and being used, as opposed to tucked away behind perspex like they were at CES. I had my video camera with me but not my digital still camera, and I took a few pics from the video - the quality isn't great as stills, but you can see what's going on...

VLM running on a Toshiba DVD player. And somebody's arse.

I know it's a fairly pants quality pic, but it was just ripped from vid, not as nice as from a proper digital still camera. Still, always nice to see VLM doing its thang ;-).

A detail of a screen from the Merlin Racing kart game. You can be a little goatie!

Hehe... silly pic I know, but I just have to love any game where you can be a little goatie :-). Guess which character I always play in that game ;-).

Anyway, I'm not out to do a whole E3 report here; I am sure there are millions of those floating around, anyway. I didn't get out into the main bit of the show much during the time I was there, spending most of my time on the Nuon stand, playing Tempest :-). I did have a quick look around on a couple of occasions - went to gawp at the PS2 games (which looked nice, but which didn't use edge-antialiasing, from what I could see, which surprised me), and passed through the Sega stand (which somewhat surprisingly seemed to be full of a lot of nice games on the Dreamcast that didn't look that far removed graphically from the PS2 ones).

Between finishing off VLM, CES and E3, I've been out to the States rather a lot recently. The day before the trip of around five weeks ago I went outside to check on the little goaties and have my usual morning Flossie-cuddling session, and I noticed that the little female goatie wasn't in the field with Floss and the other goat. I poked around a bit in the field looking for her, to no avail, and then went to have a look in the goat-shed... where I was somewhat surprised to find three little goaties :-). Now Alice (the female goatie) had been looking a bit plump recently, but I hadn't thought she was actually preggers, because all my ungulates are the same shape :-). Robin (the male goatie) is a little barrel on legs, and Floss, well, she's a big girl, and she's not preggers (though Lord knows I've tried ;-). Besides, I had thought that Robin wasn't old enough during the breeding season, so I really was not expecting any goaty hanky-panky to have occurred. Evidently I was wrong :-).

'Course, it was a bit of a shock having two tiny new arrivals show up less than 24 hours before I was due to bugger off to the US, but they seemed to be fine and healthy and Alice seemed completely unconcerned by it all; so before I went away I solicited some help from the villagers, and left knowing that the little ones would be checked upon several times daily and the vet called, if necessary, should anything even look like it might be going wrong.

They were fine though, and they continue to be so. In fact people from the village were so enamoured of them that they ended up getting visited even more frequently than I could have hoped for :-).

If you want to see some pics of them as newborns, you can check out some pics I took on the first day they were born on my Freeserve webspace. At the time those pics were taken, the little ones were a few hours old, and hadn't even set foot outside their shed yet. Now they are quite a bit bigger, and run around, frequently bouncing improbably, all over my top field. Here is a more recent pic of them, taken a couple of weeks ago:

Alice, the mother, and the two new microgoaties. The one with the white socks is Dave, and the almost all dark one is Roger. I expect when they get older they'll have a terrible clash of egos, fall out horribly, and each go off and pursue separate careers whilst claiming that they are each the true soul of Pink Floyd.

Just in the last few days their little horns have started to come through; they look sooo cute with their little tiny hornlets :-). They can't half bleat, mind - yesterday some friends came up to look at the goaties, and I picked up Dave, who happened to be close by, and boy did he bleat about it! Hehe... amazing that such a loud sound could come from such a tiny goatie :-). Mind you, he'll have something else to bleat about today - the vet is due over llater, for general knacker-removing duties, for all the males in the herd, Robin included. I don't really like to do it, bit it's either that or I am going to end up with an incestuous herd here :-]. So it's knackers off all round, lads, and at least tea's sorted ;-).

Flossie seems quite unfazed by the new arrivals (although on the first day she did have a sort of "oh no, not more of the buggers" air about her ;-). She gets on well with all the goaties, with the possible exception of Robin, who can be a bit of a bully sometimes, butting poor Flossie up the arse! Hopefully he'll calm down somewhat when his knackers come off :-]. It'll be time to have Floss's wool off soon, but for now she is lovely and woolly and wonderfully cuddly ;-). If you've never been out in the top field on a warm Spring day cuddling a big sheep with a thick fleece, you don't know what you're missing. Mmmmm :-).

I collected together a bunch of pictures of Floss in various cute aspects the other day, and shoved them all together to make a nice stimulating desktop background for meself. If you want to check it out, I put it onto a webpage here. If only it were scratch and sniff!

I'm due another trip to the US next month, but this time for once I shall be going for pleasure rather than to work. The Lord thy Rog is touring over there, and I'm off to see him! I shall stand once more in His Holy Presence and hear His Holy Words! I'm going to the gig at the Shoreline Amphitheatre on the 25 June, and it should be excellent - a mate of mine out there lives right near the venue, and as a resident of Santa Clara County was entitled to buy four tickets the day before they went on sale to the general public. As it turned out, when she went to get the tickets on the day in question, she ended up being the fourth person to actually be able to get tickets for the gig. The result being that we are going to be sat right behind the VIP section, smack in the middle :-).

I haven't had a lot of time for non-Nuon gaming recently, but when I have had the offchance it's usually been on the Dreamcast; particular faves on that system include Crazy Taxi (of course [and is it just me or does the arcade mode town seem to be full of cloned vicars? I must have picked up five or six of them during one game, and they all wanted to go to the church - are they having a Cloned Vicar Convention in there or something? And they must have really boring lives, because they never ask to go to Tower Records or the beach; always the church. Heh. They should do a Crazy Taxi UK update of the game. I can see it now: "Take me down the pub!" "I need to go to the curry house!" "I have to get to the chip shop!" "Take me to the offy!"]); Speed Devils (which I just got the other day; sure, just another stock racing game, but it looks quite nice and is reasonable fun to play); Toy Commander (which is kinda cute, and also pretty hard on the higher levels - you get to "pilot" all kinds of different kids' toys on various "missions" set in a big house. It sounds twee, but actually it is a lot of fun, and quite challenging on some missions, where you have to work out which vehicles to use and how in order to complete your mission objective. And you can do all manner of stupid stuff for the hell of it, such as divebombing the cat and setting fire to the toast). House of the Dead 2 is a fun game to put on when yer mates come around - blaze away with the Dreamcast gun, shootiing the crap out of the undead and trying not to plug the hostages. Shame it doesn't work on the video projector - the lightgun needs to see a "real" TV screen to work, unfortunately.

Oh, and speaking of the projector, I have been enjoying The Wall on DVD, which is, of course, excellent; and on the audio front, Is There Anybody Out There, which is the new Floyd release of the live performance of the Wall, sourced from the concerts that took place at Earl's Court (hey, I was there for one of those). ITAOT is so good that I actually blew up my left speaker through playing it so loudly :-]. If you're Floydian and you haven't picked it up yet, I suggest you hie thee to your local disc emporium forthwith and do the Right Thing. If you are not Floydian, I suggest you go down the record shop, find the section labelled "Pink Floyd", take one of each of everything you see there, then go home and enlighten yourself. You will not regret it :-).

Well, that's it for now. I must get back to finishing off T3K. I'm on the home stretch with that now, and probably the next time I update will be to report its completion :-).

30/01/2000

Completion, Availability, Good Goat Almighty

It's been a... dense couple of months :-). A lot of stuff happened in a very short space of time. It's been pretty intense... and finally I'm through the other side of it, sitting here doing the PC equivalent of moving house, getting all my favourite bits off my old PC and moving them over onto my new one, which, when it first came online at VM Labs I gave the network name of "GoatAlmighty" to, and which has kinda stuck :-). GA is a 733MHz Penty III completely tricked out for speed (256MB SDRAM, ultra/fast/wide SCSI HD), and I have it for a very specific reason... which I shall explain about, in due course.

In the last two months I have been absolutely hacking my tiny brains out all the hours that Ghu sends, and quite a few that Ghu wanted to keep for himself but which I nicked anyway. I have consumed sufficient Red Bull to float a medium-sized battleship, and for me the Millennium was something that more or less occurred between compiles. I hope it was worth it...

Some of you have been coming to this page for awhile now, and have read endless waffling about that stuff that started out as Project X, and which lately I've been working on; and by now it's been going on long enough that you're probably convinced it's all vapourware, because the two things I have never mentioned, with regard to either the 'wares I'm working on or the hardware itself, have been completion and availability.

I have a tale to tell :-).

Last November, I was happily hacking away on Tempest, when I had contact from work to the effect that we needed to be demonstrating a functional VLM-2 at CES in Las Vegas, on the 5th of January. At first I was not unduly alarmed, for, as you will know if you've read last year's updates, I had a reasonably well-functioning VLM-2, with ten or eleven effects on it, working since last Summer.

However... since back then, the environment in which VLM-2 has to "live" (VLM-2 is just a small part of a complex app, written by many coders, that performs all the functions of the DVD player - MPEG2 decode, audio decode, special modes, game loading and execution, CD-Audio and of course VLM-2) - the environment had changed quite substantially since last Summer. So much so, in fact, that my existing VLM-2 was completely, irretrievably broken. And that did give me cause for concern, because by then it was the middle of November, and in December I had one weekend away and over a week away on holiday with my Mum at Xmas, and I was faced with the prospect of having to design and implement a completely new VLM-2, and not an awful lot of time to do it in. Still, I thought, with a few late nights and nonobservance of weekends, I could probably get something VLM-like happening before the 5th of January.

However II...as December came around it became plain that what was needed was going to be more than just something in its early stages exhibiting VLM-type behaviour. In fact, I would need to deliver a complete, finished VLM-2 by the 28th of January. A VLM-2, I might add, with 100 effects. And, since as it turned out I was going to be spending almost 2 weeks away in the US at the beginning of January, it was evident that the only way I would get that done would be by shutting down all functions nonessential to immediate survival, reducing my non-work bandwidth to almost zero, seriously disrespecting conventional circadian rhythms, and basically working like a complete and utter bastard.

We did make it to CES, and I had something VLM-oid, with around 24 effects in it; trouble was, everything had come together so fast that I had spent most of my time just on implementation, getting the component parts of VLM actually into existence and working together, and the effects I had I'd had almost no time to consider the aesthetics of, and so basically most of them were quite pants. There were one or two that were OK, and those are the ones I usually demonstrated the most :-).

The Grunting Ox in Las Vegas, demonstrating one of the couple of VLM effects that weren't completely pants.

Once the show in Vegas was over, everyone buggered off back to California and I managed to get my vector generator back online, which was a great relief to me because once I got home from the US, I had to produce 100 non-pants VLM effects in about two weeks... but I realised that, in that time, I was going to be doing an awful lot of edit/compile/test cycles, and my old machine was just bloody slow grinding through all that, and so I mentioned to the powers that be that it would seriously improve my chances of making deadline if I could have a system that was a bit faster. And so, a couple of days later, I was presented with GoatAlmighty :-).

GA does indeed blaze through the compile cycle, and I've been very grateful for that, because over the last two weeks I have worked almost to the limits of my capacity and endurance; but on Friday night I did indeed manage to squirt down the wires to VM a fully-functional VLM-2, with 100 effects that I don't think have any aspect of gentlemen's bottom-half apparel... but fuck, it's been an intense time...

The bottom line is: VLM-2 v1.0 is finished :-).

You may well be thinking that's all well and groovy, but it doesn't do you any good because you can't get your sweaty hooves on it anyway, and whilst that may be true at this instant, I would ask you to have a gawp at this:

Hardware. Not vapourware.

That, my friends, is a Samsung Extiva N-2000 DVD player, and it will be available in Spring of this year. You will note the little Nuon logo on the bottom-left of the machine. You will also note that one of the listed key features is "Virtual Light Machine" :-). And that is the reason that I have had so many late nights and had to drink so many cans of Red Bull the last couple of months - because it's going into production imminently. So I have been working like a bastard so that you lot can get yer mitts on VLM-2 very shortly :-).

'Course, you;ll also be able to play T3K on it too :-). As well as enjoy the coolest DVD tech and special modes around :-).

Aftermath: the Yakly workstation after VLM-2 completion. Note the ceremonial Red Bull pyramid, which accreted during late-night sessions, and which testifies to the amount of caffeine consumed during the project.

I must say that I have found Red Bull to be the most excellently effective coder-fluid I've found; a much nicer experience than the traditional wirejuice, Jolt cola (which is, anyway, unavailable in the UK, at least 'round these parts). When it gets to that point at about two in the morning, your neurons are starting to unravel but you need another couple of hours runtime yet, just reach for the old purple-and-silver can and suck that Bull... when I first got in to the US I was a bit alarmed because at first it looked like there was no Bull to be had out in the Valley, but it is being introduced over there, and in due course supplies were located. In fact I became known as a bit of a Red Bull evangelist when I was working in the office, and random individuals would sometimes drop by my workstation and hand me a can of the precious liquid :-).

I'm glad I can give it up for awhile, though - there is still a little bit of work to do, some minor debug of an occasional screen glitch, but nothing that can't be done in normal work hours; nothing that will require prodigious feats of continuous consciousness and irrational amounts of caffeine :-).

Although the work has been hard, especially in the latter days, the consolation has been that the view from my workstation has really been getting rather nice of late...

A giant, glowing, rotating disk flies over a rolling alien cloudscape, emitting streamers of gently-coloured plasma. In time to Pink Floyd.

On Friday night, after the deed was done, I sat down and for the first time actually played with VLM-2 (rather than hack dementedly on it in an attempt to ram more stuff into it) and... well, I don't think it's too bad a toy :-). Certainly I look forward to when I can get an actual Samsung DVD-player in my hi-fi stack and have VLM-2, always there, hardwired, ready to play with :-).

Plasma flows outwards from the centre of the screen; suspended within, a formation of glowing disks pulsate and emit pale green smoke.

Those of you who remember the Jaguar VLM will, I hope, be pleasantly surprised when you see VLM-2... there are more effects, and some of them are things that could not even be attempted using the Jag's old hardwired graphics manipulation hardware. VLM-2's main aesthetic is based on things that are not normally comsidered to be the domain of (at least low-end) graphics systems - mist, smoke, even fluid surfaces that appear to flow together and break apart in a natural manner...

A vortex of blue liquid that oozes, flows together and breaks apart like mercury on a flat surface, according to the pulsation of the spiral generator-function that is visible in the centre of the image.

Of course there are some more "trad" kaleidoscope-y effects in there too, because some people like those as well as the more exotic ones; but even they are rendered in the Nuon style, heavy on the translucency and neon-effects; with one or two of them, the influence which inspired 'em will be obvious, if you happen to be a Pink Floyd fan...

A throbbing yellow neon vector llama rotates in the middle of an effect which, if you have ever been to a Pink Floyd concert and noticed what they do with the lights all around the edge of their big circular screen, may look familiar :-).

As I mentioned, VLM-2 has 100 effects (by the way, only two of the effects I had in Las Vegas actually made it into the final cut of VLM-2) and, if you're feeling in the mood, if you use the analog joystick, you can "jam" along quite effectively. Although the interactivity is quite simple - often just colour/feedback intensity/scale changes - it's surprisingly satisfying. You can just sit there and kinda "air-guitar" with your thumb (if that makes any sense) and it looks great on the screen :-). A fun toy :-).

I'll prolly add some more to this in a few days - more to tell, about the trip and suchlike; not a lot of nonwork-stuff to talk about (there is some, just not as much as usual) because there hasn't been a lot of nonwork-stuff in my life recently :-]... There was, of course, my holiday with my mum, which was excellent and a lovely bit of calm in the middle of all the mayhem that came before and after... but I'll tell all about that on another update, soon. For now, I just wanted to let ya know that VLM-2 is in full existence, and that soon Nuon will be unleashed at last :-).

More (and very definitely more about Nuon - Samsung is not the only manufacturer releasing Nuon tech this year) on a later update... right now I am going back to trying to get a nice comfortable environment sorted here on GA. Like I mentioned, moving PCs is a bit like moving home - you don't feel fully settled in your new environment until all your old familiar clutter is unpacked and deployed, and for the last two weeks all GA has had on it has been my work stuff - a bit like moving into a new house that only has a desk and chair in it :-). So I'm bringing over all my goodies like my emu collection and my Web stuff and my fave sample editors and such... and it's starting to feel a bit more like home now :-). I need to sort out my FTP program before I can upload this though - for some reason the thing thinks it's unregistered, which is a rotten lie :-). Must be some config file lying around somewhere I forgot to copy over. Doesn't help that one of the machines is without a network card, so I am having to schlepp everything over by hand. Thank Ghu for CD-RW, iz all :-).

And... extra thankmodes are due to those very excellent mates of mine who have been watching out for me and keeping me from getting so far into the workmode that I forget to run basic self-maintenence (or intervening when that happens)... to those people who noticed when I forgot to feed myself and rammed me full of sausages and chips, or who noticed I was overstressed and forced me to get off the bloody machine for awhile, or who stayed in touch and kept a part of me human when it felt like the machine was taking over... much thanks, guys. This one's for you :-).

Thanks are, of course, also due to that bloke on Barbados who sold me some wicked ganja. But that's for another update :-).

03/10/99

Naked Sheep, Horny Goats, Fast Cars and Videogames

Well, I'm in the middle of a debugging cycle so I think I'll do some web update stuff. I am nailing down a crash bug that has haunted me for awhile; I've narrowed it down to the setup for the vector generator and to find out where it is involves a cycle of enabling certain bits of code then just letting it run for awhile... so while I'm letting it run I can type some text, can't I? So here I am.

So the other Saturday I was lounging about in the Cow Barn (actually Elaine from down the pub was here, she had come over to examine the new microgoaties, and I subverted her into being a naive user for T3K (which is now well into the realm of really being a proper videogame and worthy of being unleashed on naive users)... but I get ahead of myself, as I usually do, on this occasion in multiple threads too, so I will pop the stack a coupla times)...

Anyway. So I am sitting there, watching Elaine get to level 15 and score 45,000 on her first go, with the help of the droid, and therefore attain the realisation that she can in fact actually enjoy playing a shooting/scifi/abstract videogame. And the phone goes and it is my mate Robin (who it turns out is the King of All Tickets [as you will come to understand]. He was the one who got the Star Wars tickets alluded to in previous rantings). On this occasion, the phone goes, and it is Robin who is driving to the airport to go to Scotland (to do a gig in a club: Robin is a VJ, does realtime video projections in clubs and at gigs, he is exactly the kind of guy for whom I have been making all that Trip-a-Tron, Colourspace and VLM-type stuff over the years, had I but known it; so we get on fairly well as you would imagine. And he works for the coolest clubs both in and out of the country, so he gets to have a lot of contacts for good tickets for loadsa thangs :-). I digress, again, and massively.

Well, the phone goes, Elaine on around 40,000 points and just got her second extra man (claw, shooty thingie, whatever you call it in something as abstract as Tempest) and it is Robin, and he sez to me: how would I fancy going to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone the next day?

I mean, is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Is there frequently wool caught in my flies? Hell yes, I would like to go, and the tickets have been sold out for ages. Thank you very much indeed Robin, I would most certainly like to go to the Grand Prix :-).

Because we only found out about the tickets fairly shortly before the event, there was a certain amount of running about to be done: Robin had to get a different flight back from Scotland the next day (to Luton as it turned out, especially handy as Luton is not that far from Silverstone) and I had to get up at a completely stupid time of the morning and pick up the tickets from south London, then go north circular/M1 and get to Luton and pick up Robin and get to the race itself, but my Ghu it was worth it, to actually be there for the GP and see (and hear) the cars going around before your very nose... to see Dave C. and Eddie battling it out, lock up their brakes right in front of you, and see Damon finally get in a good race and the Jordans get decent placings between the pair of them (I am a bit of a Jordan fan, not sure which bit, but there ya go), now usually for me my Grand Prix weekends are just with Murray on the telly on a Sunday afternoon eating your usual M&S Grand Prix Sunday dinner, but to actually be there, in the middle of a bunch of Damon-Hill-flag-waving nutters on a perfect hot sunny afteroon at Silverstone... hehe... it was so top, it was unbelievable:-).

Of course it was not a perfect day, what with poor old Schui pranging it into the wall at Stowe corner and subsequently being flown off to hosp with a broken leg. I was disappointed because I had really been looking forward to seeing the Red Baron racing, and I didn't even get to see any of his first lap since we were stood at Club corner, the next one past Stowe where he actually ploughed in. Still, at least he is OK (well, relatively - mind you, drive anything other than an F1 car into a wall at that speed and you would be suffering from a case of severe deaditude), but he will be out for a few races, which is a shame; F1 isn't quite the same without Schui to spice it up a bit :-).

Still, it was a great day and the racing was entertaining - Irvine chasing Coulthard in for second place, the Jordans placing respectably in 4th and 5th, so that at least Damon got a bit of confidence back and decided to at least hang on till the end of the season; when everyone started pitting the second time around Damon was even out in front for a short time, much to the delight of the crowd, who cheered him enthusiastically each time he appeared.

(Whoops - it crashed again - so obviously the bug is happening before math table setup then)...

What else is new around here? Well, I now have a naked sheep :-). I was visiting my old local in Cwmcych with a mate of mine who was visiting, and we bumped into the old boy who used to shear Floss when I lived around there, and I managed to persuade him to come out here and give her a good seeing-to. He came over a couple of days later and, of course, Floss did not want to come out of her field to the shearing machine. And when Floss does not want to do something, she just sits down. This tactic is actually quite effective, because she weighs a bloody ton (she's a big girl :-) and so you just have this massive woolly blob on the ground that is about impossible to shift :-). In the end we had to bung her in a wheelbarrow (how undignified for poor Floss!) and trundle her out to the shearing area, where my man duly unzipped her from her fleece in about five minutes. He also cut her hooves as well, but I wish I had done that myself, because I do it all delicately and carefully, and he just went hack! hack! and there were great spurts of blood and poor Flossie flinched dreadfully.

(Crashed again... before even starting execution... so the problem is occurring when the overlay is paged in)...

Of course Floss is now much happier now she has recovered from the shearing ordeal, and is a lot more comfortable when the weather gets hot (as, contrary to popular belief, it does occasionally in summer in Wales). And she looks all funny and naked too, as you can see from the following pic :-).

Flossie, all naked :-).

(Hmmm... something to do with the overlay size then? Mmmm)....

[Some time later] - it was nothing to do with the overlay size. It was a buffering error in a completely different part of the code. I have since pulled its legs off and squashed the juices out of it and added loads more to Tempest :-).

Oh yeah... speaking of Flossie, after she got sheared she seemed a bit sad and put out for a few days (she really did not like the wheelbarrow thing) and so, to cheer her up, I thought I would get her some company :-). I didn't know of anyone with any tame sheep, and I still need to have extra fencing done before I can bring in any llamas (and my budget has been vectored to different things at present, as I shall in due course explain). But then someone down the pub happened to mention that there was a place not a half a mile across the fields from my gaff that was advertising pygmy goats for sale. I was taken into a back field, apparently at first just full of sheep, but as I walked across I heard a lot of bleating and all these tiny goats started running towards me :-)... they are so cute, and, I thought, small enough so that Flossie could still be the boss of them, even though she is an old lady now.

So, some notes changed hands, and two small caprine entities shoved in the back of my blue ship and transportedback to Flossie's field. Here they are, just after they arrived:

Flossie's new friends. That hand used to contain a Digestive biscuit.

You can't really see much in that picture to give an idea of scale, apart from my hand, but they really are little, tiny goats. They are a mother and son, and she is about as big as Vindy is, and at the time this was taken he was about as big as a large house cat :-). (Mind you, for such a small entity he does seem to have quite unfeasibly large testicles. I thought about calling him Buster Gonad. He won't have 'em for long though :-).

Although they were a bit shy at first, they have settled in well and indeed, now whenever I set foot in the top field there is the scampering of tiny hooves and as soon as they reach me they jump up on me like little dogs, eager for a scratch and a Digestive biscuit. In fact my Digestive biscuit budget is much bigger than it was with just Flossie eating them - now it's two for the goats straight away (because they always mob me for them), then stroll over to where Flossie is usually lying down at her ease and give her one (a biscuit, that is), and then I have to give a fourth to the dog who is by then usually going mental with jealousy. God knows what will happen when I get llamas and other beasties as well, I shall have to order crates of the things :-). McVities must love me :-).

Work on Tempest is going exceedingly well - in fact I expect soon to have all the enemies in there, the powerup chain is complete and everything works, there is nice trippy stuff in the level transitions, 96 levels are currently defined; I have done some major work on the explosions and they look lovely, all geometric and glowing; plays nicely, too - I have spent many a happy evening in a darkened room at my play-testing :-). Once all the baddies are in for the main game then it will just take a month or two of adding bonus rounds, extra groovy graphics FX and necessary peripheral stuff like hi-score tables and such and I'll be done :-). I think you'll like it :-).

I have done some major re-organization of the layout of the Cow Barn, and now I have almost got it the way I always envisioned it when I first saw the house two years ago. First off I got rid of the poky little desk I had been using for ages - it was too small, too cluttered, not enough room to stand a keyboard and monitor on it and still have any room to swing a mouse, and it faced the wall which was kinda depressing *and*, since the screen packed in on my little Sony deck, meant that to inspect my work running on the Nuon I had to keep on getting up out of my chair and turning around to see the game on the big Sony.

I have installed a large, spacious desk with hods of room for everything, a proper monitor shelf so my screen is at a more comfortable height, there's loads of room for my mouse, keyboard, printer, ox-boxen and a large stuffed camel wearing a very silly Welsh hat, and most importantly I now face looking down the room at the opposite wall. With good reason :-)...

The view from my workstation. You will notice the ancient stone wall at the far end of the Cow Barn. You will notice that it also apparently now has the ability to display Tempest 3000 :-).

Hoooo yeah :-). Got myself a comfortable desk to work at, one that is big and roomy and curves around me and has space to hold all the hardware that I need deployed, in a manner which leaves all the cables and ports on the back nicely accessible too; a chair that is actually the right height for me and not the stunted dwarfs who must have been at Atari, given the old ex-Atari chair I used to use; a sufficiently elevated and comfortable chair that is all leather (well, apart from the metal and plastic bits) and which really only needs the addition of a "Tyrell Corporation" logo on the backrest to fully give you the idea what kind of chair it is :-). Cool, iz all... And best of all, and what I always thought of when I first saw this room... I got a projector :-). And it rules, oh my, does it rule, it rules like all the Kings and Queens from England's long history all connected in parallel and ruling like they never ruled before; I deeply, truly and with great passion love my Seleco SLC600, oh yes, I most certainly do :-). It's wonderful.

Now I am not new to video projectors; I used to have one, years ago. It was a huge great bloody thing that some of you who might be reading this who used to go to computer shows in the 80s might remember, I'd be there with my projector doing Colourspace or Trip-a-Tron shows. And it was a big bastard. Took two blokes to carry (some of you may even have helped me set it up or take it down at a show, you know the score). Came in a flight case the size of a coffin. Weighed as much as 135.7 overweight cats. Took an hour to set up (you had to turn it on, let it warm up, and then set to with this amazing array of around 40 twiddlers; carefully converge, align, focus and generally wank about with each of the 3 guns... I once did that 30 feet up a ladder with my arm 2 inches from a 37KV powersupply at a gig, it is not the kind of thing you forget in a hurry).

That projector was big, fucking big. Weighed more than a couple of Flossies, and she's a big girl :-). Did the job, so long as you reduced the ambient photons enough to get a good picture. Had enough voltage running around inside to electrocute the entire population of Philadelphia, was a bit scary, and eventually was blown up by my cat taking a nap over the ventilation slots while I was watching East Enders one evening. It was obese, frightening, but I loved it because, despite all its user-unfriendliness, it was the only thing which did what I wanted: amplify graphics.

My, how things have changed...

Check the picture above; see that thing on the left side of my monitor, with a little green LED on it? That's it; my Seleco, the object of my adulation, the cause of an old stone wall being able to display Tempest 3000 in broad daylight :-). It's the size of a shoe box. It cost about one-third of the price of my big old monster that I used to use all those years ago. Set-up? You plug it in, you switch it on, you twiddle one thing until the picture is the right size, you twiddle another until it is in focus, and that's it. A Mac user could do it. [joke!]. The wimpiest geek could hold it easily with one hand. And it is about 5x as bright as my old beast (the pic above was taken in broad daylight, without the blinds closed or anything, onto an old stone wall, no special projection surface or anything). Until I get a proper screen, at the moment I am just projecting onto a white, dubiously-stained sheet that someone lent me, and believe me, turn off the lights at night and play Tempest on it and you just go into that mode of "I can't believe this is happening, that this technology is real, because what I am seeing is too unbelievably lovely to be true" :-). With a proper projection surface instead of a sheet this thing is going to be so amazingly lovely that I am not sure I have the neurons to handle it :-). The colours are bright, vibrant, and when the lights are out and the stereo is cranked so far you can feel the bass and you get to one of those levels with the feedback layer still left in during gameplay and you shoot a spiker and that green, spherical explosion gets caught in the feedback-flare and it's just the most beautiful thing you've ever seen... and this image is magnified up to 8 foot by 6 and you walk up to the screen and you still can't see the pixels... ahhh, how far we have come, in such a short time, this technology is so amazing... I love my Nuon, I love my Seleco, but the one through the other is just mind-altering stuff of the highest order. I mean class-A, no chemicals involved (except maybe the Brothers, on the stereo)...

Haven't felt technolove like this for a long while. Inspirational, it is. Wait'll you see how that manifests in T3K :-).

And, of course, the projector is the perfect companion to my new stereo and DVD player :-). And being so tiny, it'll be easy for me to take it off down the pub for some of the games from the rugby World Cup - for a small rural pub, we will have the best screen in the area for match-days :-).

I know I haven't updated for ages, which is partially due to being a lazy git who would rather play Tempest than write stuff late at night, and partially due to the fact that I have been making an effort to Get Out More (coding and tech is all well and good, but sometimes one needs a bit of real-world interaction, just to keep from completely drifting off into virtual space). So over many of the summer weekends I was actually out Doing Stuff rather than just sat at home in front of the PC surfing and fiddling, as I often do on weekends. This has led to some interesting trips: I went up with my mate Robin to the Scottish Homelands festival (his company were doing all the video projections there) and, in between lending a hand moving projectors and messing about with Fastfold screens (something I took to quite well, being as I have done a bit of that myself in the past) I was able to take advantage of an excellent, no-holds-barred, access-all-areas crew pass to enjoy an unrivalled view of all the bands and DJs there, including an unforgettable set by the Chemical Brothers. A top weekend, indeed :-).

I've also taken to going to the occasional Southampton home game, since I now own a quarter share in a season ticket. I've never been that much of a football fan, although I have always supported the Saints (as do all my family; my dad originated from the Southampton area and we all grew up supporting the local side. I was even at the FA Cup in 1976 when Saints beat the heavily-favoured Man United side by 1-0 to claim the silverware for the first and, so far, only time in the club's history). However I've always kept an eye out for the Saints and hoped for them to do well every season, and some of my brothers' support borders on fanaticism :-). The Saints' brush with the relegation zone last season perked up my interest and I started following their progress more closely and watching the occasional match on telly, and to my surprise I found that I actually enjoy watching football. And so, when the issue of shares of ownership of a precious season ticket arose, I became the co-owner of a seat at the Dell (along with my mum and my oldest brother Matthew). It's quite nice on the occasional weekend to go off to a match, because I get to see my mum and meet up with some of my brothers who I normally don't see very often, being as the Minter clan is now quite widely geographically dispersed. I went to see Saints play Arsenal a few weeks ago, and although the result was wrong (Arsenal winning 1-0) the game was actually very good, Southampton actually playing better than I have seen them for ages and unlucky to come away without a point at least, and they could easily have won had fortunes been slightly different. And just last week holding the old enemy Man U. to a 3-3 tie at Old Trafford was pretty cool too. I think we'll do alright this season. And I'm off again to see them play Liverpool later this month :-).

I had a great day out on Friday last, too - some of the lads from down in the village invited me to go along with them to go down to Cardiff on the day of the opening of the Rugby World Cup, to join in the partying and celebration and to watch the game in a suitable environment (namely a decent pub with a big screen). Now the Welsh are absolutely passionate about rugby, and the recent return to form of the home side and the prospect of hosting the World Cup at the impressive new Millennium Stadium in Cardiff have raised this passion to fever pitch. So, offered the chance for an excellent day out and to experience participation in the unofficial Welsh national religion, I took a day out from coding and set off with the boys on an early Carmarthen train (actually driven by Lew the train driver from down the pub) bound for Cardiff. Changing trains in Swansea, we poured onto an unsuspecting Inter-City and fortuitously took over the First Class carriage; pretty soon the train was jammed by a seething mass of crimson-clad, Welsh-flag-bearing rugby fans and the business types attempting to reach their allotted First Class seating were, well, shit out of luck, is all :-). Arriving at Cardiff, we found the place awash with a sea of red shirts and flags and, of course, silly hats :-). We duly purchased several of the silliest and set sail on a sea of lager to enjoy the town and the atmosphere, eventually arriving at a small club that, the lads assured me, was the absolute epicentre of Welshness and the perfect place to ensconce ourselves to watch the opening game, Wales v. Argentina. And so it proved to be - we arrived in time to get seats at a table with a fine view of the big screen, only a short distance from the bar - pole position, really :-). It was a really good place to be - the good-will, enthusiasm and euphoria of the occasion (the Welsh term is hwyl) was evident and copious, and everybody drank copiously and cheered and roared the Welsh side to a nervy but definitive victory over the Argentinian opposition. We even managed to meet up just before the game with Robin and some of his cohorts from PictureWorks, who came down from London (where they were working at the swank new Home club in Leicerster Square) and there was generally much cheering, drinking, singing, and thanking of various deities for the boot of Neil Jenkins (despite an uncharacteristic misfire early in the game). And then afterwards, a deal of good-natured beery queueing in the rain at the train station to get trains back to all points Welsh, and a final session down the pub to round things off and show off the silly hats to the regulars :-). A truly great day out. Must do that again :-).

Of course I've been playing games too... my absolute favourite at the moment I am afraid you cannot buy yet, because it's T3K on Nuon :-). The aesthetic and the gameplay are definitely starting to mesh now and it is definitely the most fun, especially with the lights out, appropriate choons and, of course, the projector (lovely, lovely projector :-). On lesser systems, I've had a deal of fun with Driver, the PlayStation car-chase game. I like that one because as well as the main, mission-based game (it plays kinda like a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Destruction Derby) there are lots of other little sub-games and diversions you can play. Sometimes it's just fun to set out in the free driving mode, drive dangerously and aggressively to piss off the cops, and then see how long you can keep going outrunning the law (and how many cop cars you can wreck along the way). Then, once you finally end up trashing your car, you can watch the action in the fun Replay Mode. You get to drive around various large cityscapes (including San Francisco, for those fully authentic 70s-stylee big-air chases) which are populated by more than their fair share of cops and Sunday drivers (whose innocent, bumbling, law-abiding cars you can smash up just for the fun of it). A great laugh.

Naturally I have Wipeout 3 - which is by default great, with the best soundtrack in all of videogames, thanks to the likes of the Chemicals and Orbital in the soundtrack lineup. WO3 is another game that looks lovely on the late-at-night projector :-). The graphics are now higher-rez than in the previous two games, and the tracks are darker and more industrialised-looking than in the other games. There isn't really much that is new in WO3 other than new tracks, the higher rez, and some split-screen options; and the user-interface is, well, sparse would be the right term I suppose, and even in places a bit buggy (after you finish a tournament, for some reason it skips the proper menu screen and defaults to the start of a vector league tournament, requiring you to press the "back" button to get to the proper select screen). But it's more Wipeout, so you know the tunes are going to be great and so is the gameplay; if you're a Wipeout fan and you want more, then here it is.

On the Ninty, it's been more racing games (looking at what I've just written it seems like it's been all driving or racing games of late, apart from T3K of course) - specifically Pod Racer, which is good but not great, I would say - quite pretty, nice and Star Wars-y, long tracks with nice graphics but a bit of framerate drop 'specially in hi-rez mode which is a shame because games that move so quickly need to be fluid, and the gameplay isn't quite as refined as WO. Still fun though, and very nice indeed thank you on the projector. That device has also caused me to start having more F-Zero X sessions - now there is one game that does remain fluid, has excellent playability and is just a hoot on the big screen :-). I have still to finally beat the X-Mode - I'll have to put in a few more hours on that methinks :-).

Over the summer I had my mate Paula from California come over for a few days on her way to Portugal, and we spent most of the time drinking beer and playing videogames until the wee small hours, as you do (or at least as my mates usually do :-). One of the most fun "beer and a few mates" games has long been Micro Machines by Codemasters, so I got the latest Ninty version of that (almost identical to the 'Station version but without the pain-in-the-@ss loading times) and we had plenty of fun with that, falling off snooker tables, going off the ruler and hitting the brain, failing to make the calculator jump, getting knocked off the bread, running into the curry and hitting the dog on the nose. Reading that last sentence, if you've never seen the game you're probably thinking that I'm clean off my lobes :-). If that's the case, get the game, get your mates around, drink up a few and you'll see what I mean :-).

This month, of course, is Dreamcast launch, and I'll be getting one and a few games, you can be certain of that. And the VGA lead... there are a couple of VGA ports on the side of the projector that definitely need filling :-). Should provide yet more lovely photons and thumb-candy for my upcoming Projector Warming Party that I am planning for the end of this month :-). Now that is gonna be a top blast :-).

Well I better upload this update before it reaches War and Peace stylee proportions (it has been a long time). Updates should be more frequent now that summer is over and the weather has returned to the more usual mode of overcastness with descending moisture; less going out on weekends, more sitting in here all snug in front of a nice, warm, cheerily-flickering projector screen :-). And with Tempest finally on the home stretch I'll be wanting to keep you informed of how it's all working out.

Oh, and I went to Romania to watch the eclipse... but this update is already way too long, and that's a whole nother story that'll have to wait till next time. Look out for my Travels around Romania with a Small Plush Goat update :-). And I changed the pic of me on the yak page, because some of you told me it was ugly and scary. Well I can't help genetics :-). But I've used my projector and my Nuon to make a new pic that places me more in the abstract. Where I belong :-).

Until next time - keep warm, hug something furry :-). And always carry a Superzapper :-).

23/05/99

The Force is with me!

I have been away for a few days, on a totally silly but really great fun trip. It came about due to a mate of mine from around here, who managed to get hold of some tickets for the new Star Wars film, for a showing the day after release, in a cinema in New York. He asked me down the pub the other night if I fancied just taking off for a few days and going over to see the film, thereby ensuring a good two months of Star Wars related Smug Mode before the film finally gets released in the UK. I thought, hell, why not? and in due course last Wednesday saw me buggering off down to Heathrow at a very un-Yakly early hour to catch a flight to New York.

The first cool thing was that the cheapest flight we managed to get was actually on Air India, which, of course, meant one excellent thing - in-flight curry, oh yes! Airline food has never smelt so good as when the glorious smell of curry started to fill the plane at meal time. Air India also scored well in a number of other ways - coming out very smartly with the drinks trolly as soon as the seatbelt signs went off, and then giving you two bottles of gin for your gin and tonic without having to be asked - very civilised. And the snack-ette with the drinks was also much better than the usual half a dozen peanuts you usually get - a nice, spicy Bombay Mix kind of a thing, and also at least a reasonable amount of it. And, more points for Air India in that they also managed, much to my pleasure, to serve the only decent cup of tea I have ever had on an airline. And I have had many cups of tea before and they have all been universally awful. The worst one ever was actually from British Airways some years ago - they had no real milk, only that accursed non-dairy creamer that has never been near a nice, big, firm, pretty cow ever in its life, and which produced a cup of "tea" that was bright orange, acrid-tasting, and almost completely unlike tea.

Although when we arrived the weather was pretty bloody awful, the following day (the actual day of our Star Wars showing) was really rather excellent - bright sunshine and temperatures so clement that even I felt the need to remove my Peruvian jumper. We went for a pint of Guinness on top of the World Trade Centre, which was kinda cool.

Me and my mate Robin (he who actually arranged the Star Wars tickets) enjoying a high-altitude pint of Guinness up the World Trade Centre

Next our little group trundled off on the subway to Central Park, where something extremely cool happened, which convinced me that on that day the Force was indeed strong with me :-). As you know, the traditional outer garment of the Yak is the llama thang, a knitted thing with a prominent llama design and capacious pockets. These are, unfortunately, lamentably hard to find, and my absolute favourite, which I have worn forever over the last few years, was in fact acquired in New York some years ago, when I happened to be on a bus and spotted a little South American woman selling them from a stall by the roadside. I immediately leapt off the bus, and sadly only had enough dosh on me to buy the one llama thang, and I have loved it, and worn it, ever since, even unto the point where it is now showing the signs of long service and has had to be repaired a few times. Since then, I have been unable to buy a llama thang anywhere near as good as that one.

Well, at Central Park Robin had to go off and make a phone call, and, looking around, I spotted a few market stall-y kinda things outside the subway station, and I noticed that the end of one of them had a few things on display that looked, from a distance, as if they might be South American in origin. On the offchance, I moseyed over to have a look, and around the other side I found... a little South American woman, grinning widely and standing alongside a rack of llama thangs! Excellent ones, too, with decent pockets and some of the biggest and boldest llamas I have seen on them - and this time, I had more cash with me (which I had carried with me in case of just this eventuality). In the end I bought three excellent new llama thangs, and I am a very happy Yak indeed :-). And I am appropriately clad, with absolutely massive llamas on my llama thang now :-). The Force is indeed with me :-).

Then, of course, it was off to the film (clad in a nice new llama thang) for the real objective of the trip, to see the new Star Wars, and it was great, as of course it was always going to be... amazing effects, CG that was so realistic that it didn't look like CG at all, plenty of action, some of the best lightsabre fighting I have seen, some old familiar characters seen in a new way and lots of new ones... some very nice beasties in there, too (I could quite fancy one or two of them hehe). Excellent.

On the last day, we went out to Central Park again and pissed about in the rowing boats, and managed not to actually kill or maim anyone else despite being cursed with a bollocksed rowlock :-). Then it was into a taxi, back to the airport, and home in time for tea (and another in-flight curry). In all, a top trip.

Pissing about in a boat in Central Park. It is kinda cool to be in the middle of so much greenery and yet still in the middle of New York.

Tell you what, though, some of the people in New York are well rude about bloody tipping whenever you have to pay for anything (except llama thangs, although I would gladly have tipped that South American woman). One morning we took a taxi, and after driving for a couple of minutes the guy managed to get completely blocked in down some street, unable to move, and after ten minutes of being stuck, he said we might as well get out and get another cab. Not only did he expect us to pay for, basically, going nowhere, he also wanted a tip! And when we got out, we were actually about 100 yards further away from when we had wanted to go before we even got the taxi! A tip, for taking us further from our destination? I think not...

Then there was the bartender up the World Trade Centre who, when I bought a round of drinks, went out of his way to emphatically tell me that "service was not included". Now, I am aware of American tipping etiquette, and would have done the usual thing, but since he was rude enough to ram the necessity of tipping down my throat in such a manner, I am afraid that he only managed to talk himself out of a tip.

Worst of all though was this Italian restaurant we went into to snarf a bite after the film was finished. Settling up at the end, we left what we thought was a perfectly adequate tip, but the waiter actually returned our little folder thingy they bring you the bill in, with our tip still inside, and said "service is not included"... as if to say, "your tip is not enough, give me more!".

The rude bastard!

Don't get me wrong, I understand why tipping occurs, that waiters and such do not get that well paid and need to earn more from tips. But they should also remember that tipping is voluntary, and is supposed to be a reward for good service, and not for unnecessary rudeness. I will always do it where appropriate, but if people are going to be rude about it, then they can smegging well whistle for a tip, I reckon. The only tip they will get from me is "never throw your granny off a bus".

I don't approve of cow-tipping, though. Or ox-tipping :-).

Well, I'm off - I have to take Vindy down the pub; she hasn't been for a few nights recently! And I have missed the excellent taste of a nice pint of Spitfire too...

The monkey in the corner, slowly drifting out of range.....

13/05/99

I haven't abandoned all my good intentions to update the site more frequently, never fear. I have just been an ox seriously in harness recently, in the run-up to E3. I have been in that kind of full-on work mode that usually occurs prior to shows, where you go all-out to get the projects looking as nice and funky as possible before they get subjected to the curious gaze of thousands of swarming pixel-junkies all desperate for a nice bit of psychedelic groovosity; it is the kind of work-mode where the real world simply goes away for awhile, and you allow your head to fill completely with thoughts of the mission in hand, and where you therefore forget such mundane stuff as eating, sleeping, shaving and bathing. Hehe...

Oh well, my code has now been transmitted to the Labs, and is probably even now on its way to LA, where in due course the eyeballs and thumbs of the assembled digerati will get to absorb and caress it. Hopefully it will not crash too much :-). And I can get back to my normal work mode, in which I appear to be merely "mad" as opposed to "completely insane".

I know I can get pretty antisocial when I am really on the case: my routine does not allow for much intrusion from the outside world. I usually get up around 10am, boot up in the usual manner (cup of tea (coffee if desperate), 2 bits of toast (no butter), fag, sit on the throne, walk round the fields to empty a full dog, second cup of tea, then on with the choons and fire up CodeWright) - then I am in until around 7, when if I remember I get something to eat, then back in again until 10:30, when it is time to take the dog down the pub; after the pub, usually I put on some more choons and have a play with the things I have made punter-stylee, joystick in hand, in user-mode rather than designer-mode, except that often when doing that I'll have ideas for little tweaks and mods, so occasional trips back to CodeWright tend to occur, and suddenly I'll notice the dawn coming up outside, and drag my bovine carcass up the little wooden hill to Bedfordshire (in my case, Bedfordshire covered in llama-fur) and crash heavily, still running graphics on the screen in my mind's eye...

Iterate on a daily basis, until the show deadline...

The thing is, though, I really enjoy it. Sure, it is hard work, but it also feels good to totally give yourself up to it. And you tend to get shedloads done, and work on all the little cosmetic things that maybe have been less important in your workaday coding than underlying core functions, and so your stuff ends up looking much cooler. At the end of it all, when you are sitting there on the eve of the show, reviewing what you've done, it's great when you look at all this cool, flashy stuff and know that people are going to love it (I hope, anyway :-)). It is true, I could not sustain such a pace indefinitely (I'd burn out, for sure - my normal workday is similar in structure to what I described, but not quite so intense, and I do occasionally acknowledge the existence of an outside world). But I find the weeks before a show or other such deadline are exhilarating, you get a load of stuff done, and I find it fires up my enthusiasm for the projects in hand as well. I have so many new ideas for T3K and VLM, it's unreal :-).

So, what of those projects? Well, T3K now has a much better frame rate than it did (optimised my screen-buffering), and an attract mode (which not only looks cool but is also very useful for testing a game - the demo plays random levels continuously, so if you have just built some new levels you can test the robustness of your code by just leaving the demo-mode to slave away, playing them all night, and hope that you do not come down the next morning to find a frozen screen). I have been further tweaking the gameplay, adding some extra particle stuff due to the better framerate, and generally doing the kind of spit-and-polish that a game needs before going to a show. The game is by no means complete - only the first 32 Webs are available and there are nowhere near the amount of enemies and powerups there will be when I am finished, and there are no bonus rounds or hi-score tables or anything) but you can, at least, play a proper game and get an actual score.

All the really major parts of coding T3K are done now; what remains is basically just carrying on adding cool things - adding enemies and behaviours, fiddling around making extra cool backdrops for levels, making up bonus rounds and powerups and suchlike; I know I have the speed and core routines in place to be able to do everything I want to. It is quite a nice stage to be at. You know you've done what's needed to make a cool game, and now you can spend time adding all the nice touches and doing the balancing of the gameplay that will make it a great game. (Again, I hope :-)).

More coding fun for Yak :-).

One of the things I have occasionally missed around here is my old Jaggi CD-ROM, and the accompanying VLM - I have no Jag kit at all here at the moment; I know there is some at my mum's place and some at VM out in the US, but surprisingly enough, I actually have none at home right now. Most of all I missed the VLM. And, although I have been working on the framework of the new VLM for Nuon, I have been unable, until very recently, to use a CD player to drive it, which made it, although very pretty, not quite the excellent toy that a VLM should be.

Well, in the run-up to the show, I got the necessary drivers an' thangs that I needed from VM to finally be able to formally introduce my VLM framework to the CD player (and therefore to my entire CD collection); I spent a few days hooking up my FX to the music, and suddenly, as if by magic... I am now the happy owner of a real, live, working VLM-2 :-). It is now definitely my favourite toy. If you liked JagVLM (or any of my old lightsynth stuff), you are gonna really like this... the effects are way more responsive than on the Jaggi, and everything is just so smoooth and llovely :-)... some of the effects that come out of the new VLM are so trippy and smooth and analogue-looking, that no-pixels aesthetic, that even I find it hard to believe. One of the settings looks a lot like those photos you sometimes see of the gas clouds surrounding a supernova - well, imagine that kind of thing, but the supernova in question happens to be repeatedly exploding conveniently right in time to the stomping bass from the Prodigy album you happen to be listening to... llovely :-).

The neat thing is that the coding for VLM is at about the same stage as that for T3K - that is, all the core stuff is in place and working, and I can now have fun refining the effects I already have, and dreaming up new ones. Cool. Yet more coding fun for Yak. I sometimes think I must have the coolest job in the world :-). (Apart from possibly being a llama-gynaecologist).

There were some events that took place outside of the environments of CodeWright and not involving a joystick, since my last update... my mum came down to visit for a couple of days over the Bank Holiday (and, bugger me, nice weather over a bank holiday, what is wrong with reality?) and she had a reasonably good time here, I think - we went out for curry, and I took her to this big shopping outlet place on the M4 near Sarn Park services (where it was an absolute zoo, loads of screaming spawn everywhere, but I digress) where she did that uniquely female thing of being able to go around a load of shops (clothes shops at that, I am not talking anything cool like computers or hi-fi) with every appearance of enjoying herself but without actually buying anything. Strange. I came away with two pair of black 501's, two books (one entitled Sheep and the other entitled Cows, so no surprises there) and an extra pillow (you can tell I was out shopping with a female; since when have blokes ever bought pillows of their own volition?). On the way back from there, I felt compelled to stop and have a browse somewhere where there was actually some tech for sale, and bugger me, if I was not smitten by technolust and ended up buying myself a rather spiff new camcorder :-). Naughty Yak :-).

Now I remember the first camcorder I ever owned - I got it back in the early 80s, when such things were almost unheard of; it was called something like the JVC GRC1, and it came in its own purple suitcase thingy, and it had all these little bits you had to slot together to get it to work, and you ended up with a fairly meaty chunk that you had to rest on your shoulder to use. At the time it was still unspeakably cool; ISTR that before that, if you wanted to video you and your mates getting lagered up on a Greek beach, you had to have this setup which was basically a fairly hefty VCR on a strap that you had to dangle over your shoulder, with a separate camera that plugged into it. So my JVC, although decidedly having eaten all the pies by contemporary standards, was nonetheless considered to be something of a marvel, and indeed it went with me to many places on the planet, and videod me and the lads becoming out of it in various different ways in various different locations. It was sufficiently unusual to have a camcorder back then that it would seriously impress other tourists, and it would cause Greek customs men to take you to one side during immigration and examine it closely and make lots of odd little notes in Greek in your passport.

Of course, the size and the palaver of having to actually build the flipping thing whenever you fancied taking an amusing video of Mark vomiting off the balcony into the lemon trees didn't exactly make it great for spontaneous videography, but nonetheless we had some good times with it. Nowadays though, camcorders are commonplace and no longer as large as a medium-sized ungulate. I no longer had the old JVC, since some smegforbrains had nicked it one time when I was burgled, back when I used to live in Cwmcych while I was away in the US (finishing off T2K, as I recall). I did get a Canon 8mm job with the insurance money, and whilst it was certainly an improvement in terms of size, it was still sufficiently large to make carrying it around a bit of a hassle. The first rule of cameras, still or digital, is that they should fit comfortably into the pocket of a llama thang, because only then will you be bothered to take them with you and therefore actually have them to hand when someone looks like they are about to have an amusing emetic experience.

Until recently, video cameras were definitely well outside of the possibility of passing the llama-thang test, but reading T3 recently and seeing these lovely new miniDV cameras made me realise that it was indeed possible to have a camcorder that would sit comfortably in a recess of a Peruvian garment; so I went for a snoop around and ended up with a tiny, semi-infinitely sexy little device called the Sony PC1E. It is just unspeakably cool. Picture quality is amazing, if you want to get geeky you have all kinds of silly digital FX you can do with it, you can zoom in and actually see the turds falling out of your shitting dog's arse from halfway across the field, and its diminuitive size means that the pockets of my llama thang can now comfortably contain, between them: digital still camera, digital video camera, packet of fags, a colour Game Boy and still have room for the car keys, a lighter, one of those big plastic Polos with lots of little ones inside, and a bogey-encrusted handkerchief in dire need of a boil-wash. Very cool indeed.

Of course, I only got the camera recently, so I don't have much interesting video yet, only stupid stuff I shot to test the thing out (Vindy having a dump, deep zoom into Flossie's right eyeball, ripped packet of Rizlas in low light, Vindy's nose filling the whole screen on maximum zoom, kind of thing) but I have a couple of trips coming up (to go and see the new Star Wars film, and later to see the eclipse) so I look forward to actually shooting some stuff that is at least interesting.

The eclipse trip is with Mark, too... no lemon trees where we are going, but maybe he will vomit amusingly onto some other bit of herbiage, and this time I will be there to capture every last chunk and carrot in outstanding digital clarity :-).

Near-broadcast quality, and not much bigger than a packet of fags. Sexier than a giant herd of over-friendly wildebeest in rampant season, and probably the most expensive thing I own in terms of cost per cubic centimetre :-).

The other day I had to nip into town to go get some cables (you know how it is) and while I was there I picked up a copy of Robotron 64 for the Ninty. I had been meaning to buy this for ages, since I did enjoy the versions on the PC and the 'Station, and I thought it would be handy to have the game in Ninty form - cartridge games are just so convenient. Wandering about Carmarthen in a shambling, somewhat malodorous manner, absently chewing on a corned-beef and potato pastie from that shop on Lammas St, I came across a copy of Robotron 64 and only twenty quid, so I did the decent thing. Of course, it is only today that I actually unwrapped it and plugged it in, since E3 preparation made Nintendo-time disappear for a while. Expecting just a Nintized version of the same game that I knew from the PC and the 'Station, I was surprised to find that they have changed a few things in the Ninty version.

First and most obvious difference is that the levels are a lot shorter. In this respect the early levels are a lot more Robotron-like - you have to shoot only the enemies you see immediately the level starts, not so much of the endlessly-rezzing-in-grunts stuff that was a feature of the other versions (at least until the later levels, anyway). When rezzing-in does occur, it is made more obvious by converging streaks of colour on the arena floor - a nice touch that does improve the gameplay. The only thing about the game is that (at least for me) the default difficulty settings are way too easy. In my first game I romped effortlessly to around level 56. I changed the difficulty to "Insane" and had another go - got to around level 83! Now I know I am fairly good at this kind of game, and I had played the PC and 'Station versions, but nonetheless I think that that's just a bit too easy. Enemies which used to bring on palpitations no longer cause even a mild sweat, at least with the game on anything near the default settings. I have found that if you put the difficulty on "Insane" and turn the overall game speed up to maximum, then at least I sometimes get stopped before level 50, and the game becomes at least a bit challenging.

Worth it for twenty quid, but if you are in any way proficient at this kind of game, make sure you push up the speed and difficulty or you'll stomp all over this game like that giant herd of sex-crazed wildebeest I mentioned earlier, right from the start. Although the Ninty version is indeed convenient, I think overall I still prefer the PC version, which is much higher-rez and smoother (and more difficult), even if not quite such a Robotron-y experience due to the extensive use of enemies rezzing in during the wave.

Speaking of Ninty, interesting to read today how they are planning to bring out a system at the arse end of 2000 and maybe even use the chipset in, er, DVD players. Now I wonder where they got that idea? Hehe...

Most of my gaming time recently has of course been spent on T3K :-).

Well, I am going to upload now - possibly more updates later, over the weekend. Mind you, it is Grand Prix weekend, so we will wait and see :-). Maybe I had better have a bath, too. I am starting to smell like an ox :-). Mind you, maybe the amorous wildebeest would like that :-).

VLM-2. My favourite toy. Don't leave your skull without it :-).

April 1999 Gruntings