MaW’s Blog

I’ve been playing C&C Generals far too much this weekend - although before Ninja got me playing multiplayer I did manage to get some bugfixes done for Westlands, which is good. I’m going to have to try mapping for it though, there are nowhere near enough maps supplied with the game for multiplayer and skirmish, and of course some story-based single-player ones would be pretty cool too! I want to play with the cinematic system, although it doesn’t look all that dissimilar to that employed in Warcraft 3 there are more possibilities with the SAGE engine.

I’m still reeling from last night’s food though. Oh, that was good. Mmmmm was it good! Ginger has to be one of the most fantastic ingredients ever to grace this planet. I shall have to get some.

Hurrah! Valentine’s day, that bastion of commerce and soppiness and pink things, has passed without incident. I didn’t see a single heart-shaped anything, which was fantastic.

Instead, I went to the PCV lecture, understood it all (gasp!) and played Command and Conquer: Generals quite a bit. It’s an excellent game, and doesn’t seem to suffer from the general drag and boredom which marked so many games of Tiberian Sun. Hopefully they’ve moved away from that for good now. The SAGE engine is very nice, anyway, although what does bug me is that when they talk about 3D RTS games from Westwood, nobody ever talks about Emperor: Battle For Dune which was fully 3D and feels very much like a prototype of SAGE, and although SAGE may very well be a complete rewrite, it would be nice to know what’s really going on with that. Emperor is a very good game as well.

Looks like the Westlands Tower site has another problem with the forum posting system under certain rare circumstances. Evidently a previous fix I developed and applied wasn’t comprehensive enough, so now I’ve got to do it again for another set of code. This is really starting to show up a lot of structural problems with the site when it comes to maintenance, and now I see reasons behind a lot of the seemingly obscure things my former boss does.

However, I’m working on another site which is structured in a completely different way, and so far it’s working very nicely indeed. This will probably provide the pattern for a rework of Westlands to make it both more maintainable and slightly less… how shall I put this? Oh yes, sieve-like.

Firstly, I got my exam results for semester 5. Not as bad as I had feared, and PAL is nothing short of a miracle. Here’s the list:

Programming Algebra: 63%
Principles of Programming Languages: 68%
Artificial Intelligence Programming: 66%
Documents and Typesetting: 63%

So that’s quite cool, average is 65% and I’m nicely on course for a 2:1. A First is out of the question now of course but I find myself curiously unworried.

Also just watched the Shawshank Redemption. Good film. Wish I’d seen it earlier.

I must stop having takeaway two nights running. Or at all, perhaps… it’s very nice, but it drains the budget very quickly and can’t be all that good for me either even when the kebab is served with salad…

And no, before you all start vomiting, it wasn’t doner kebab. Can’t stand those things! Chicken Tikka or Sheesh kebab are the best kinds for me.

Tomorrow I think I may have pork. I like pork, and if I cook it with some coriander seeds and honey and serve it with carrots and rice… mmm, lovely. Maybe Graham will be interested.