Its been a busy week. Oh. My. God. Anyone who still thinks our graphics suck can perform some unspeakable act because I dont care anymore. The afternoon that Rob showed us the new DirectX specular lighting and reflections, I thought Kevin was going to join Nanook wetting himself in excitement. Definitely an exciting day, I cant wait until the Build drops into the hands of our Limited Testers to be oooh'ed and aaaah'ed over. Lord knows it got me excited, no question about it. Im currently in the process of working with Juan to replace as much of the graphical content on the site as we can manage in the time we have to do it. Those of you on the IRC channel will hear about it first as I announce it there in near-real-time. One of the nice things about HAVING an IRC channel. Just another reward for our faithful idlers.
I also have to announce that I am officially changing video card camps. You nvidia loving people can now call me a traitor because I am officially defecting to ATI. Why? A number of reasons. First, Nvidia's latest part is a piece of crap. It lags behind in speed, still cannot get close to ATI in feature support, and most of all the drivers nvidia has been releasing have been fixed to rig benchmarks. These "application specific optimizations" have caused me to lose trust in the video card company that redefined computer gaming rendering. Meanwhile, ATI has been working hard. The 9x00 line of video cards was a gem, (mostly) rock solid parts, high-end feature support, blazing speed, and nice bundles. Additionally, ATI has been going out of thier way to court the developer community, offering developer support, answering emails, etc. True, ATI has flaws just like nvidia. The Radeon high-end parts have some major bugs as do the FX9X00 from nvidia. ATI is looking forward, however, and if these bugs can be fixed, the implementation of "automatic overclocking" that DOESNT void the warranty frankly has me salivating. With the comprehensive implementation of DirectX 9.0 spec in the Radeon 9800, and the brilliant speed the 9800 XT offers, its definitely my high end card of choice at the moment.
My only gripe is that ATI still needs to get its act together on thier driver offerings. No doubt they are much better than they used to be, but still unstable and error-ific at times. The stability gets even worse when you run the card/drivers with the AGP set at 8x. Turn on FSAA and things get downright freaky. Who cares that you can run an extra 5 fps if half the frames have visual artifacts? And what good does 5 minutes of better rendered gameplay do me if in the 6th minute I BSOD? Both companies have improvements to make, and XGI Tech is starting to look promising, although they still have some distance to go before they can really compete directly with either major company. While on the subject of other video cards, the parhelia all but died. Thats too bad, really, it could have been something special with the ability to support triple display natively. Yet another prized technology bites the dust.
All right. Now that I have rambled on for a while, lets get to the office stuff. Many people have been interested of late in the office and how we work. Well, frankly each one of us has a working environment as individual as our personalities.
Juan surrounds himself with his GI Joe collection, thousands of dollars worth of childhood play things standing or hanging forever as sentries over the office of our creative production. Juan's desk, however, is fairly organized, much more so than either kevin or myself. While none of us can really claim our office is "neat", juan's is by far the "neatest" and most organized.
Kevin finds more solice in his detailed gundam models and various bits and pieces of comic and action figure memoribilia. Highly detailed gundam models, built by hand by kevin, touched up with paint, etc and are then carefully placed on kevin's shelves. Kevin's desk is often messy, owing to the number of things that he is often found doing at any given time. Arenas, help files, documentation, layout work. The Gundam warrior sentries stand guard, overlooking the varying complexities of Kevin's work.
My office is rather crowded. I have an extended L-shaped desk which divides the room in half. I need the extra desk space to take apart computers, work on equipment or set up test machines. Two KVM switches provide six additional availible PC connections in addition to my primary machine. Seven different machines run 24/7 in my office, not including the one that you see on the side of my desk currently being worked on. I have a very modest collection of 12" Ultimate Soldier figures from 21st century toys. A sharpshooter, SWAT breach officer, and a SWAT officer in modern urban camo watch over my desk, protecting against the pathetic marches of GI Joes and Gundams that go on in the night.
What about rob? And Judy? Judy most often works offsite, Rob lives and works in a dark tunnel, deep underneath the offices. Unfortunately, the tunnel is classified top secret so the security HARs tried to smash my digital camera when i snuck in there.
More to come soon, i am sure.