Recently I’ve been playing around with gaming engines, I haven’t spent too much time in the 3D graphics world but rather 2D.  Mostly due to nostalgia, being able to develop games and effects that I recall from my past, this gives you something to shoot for while still learning.  I find it much easier to stay motivated if you have small goals to aim for.

Needless to say I eventually came across the Godot game engine.

Thus far I’m pretty impressed with it, the system requirements are extremely low, installation extremely easy and there are tons of youtube articles on how to be productive.  I used a long old game I played on the Amiga called Omega Race as a guide to learn how to do 2D programming using an engine.  In the past I had simply created my own engines (many moons ago) but it’s clear that most game development done now uses an engine to simplify a lot of the gory details.

You can find the link to the game here:

https://pr0cs.itch.io/omegarace2021

I recently picked up an Oculus Quest 2, I am a pretty big VR mark but wanted to wait until PC-centric headsets had bumped up another level of resolution and/or FOV.  Even though the Quest 2 has been out a while now I still planned on skipping it for the resolution alone.  The screen-door effect on my aging CV1 was driving me crazy but it didn’t feel like the Quest 2 was enough of an upgrade to consider moving over.  The thing is Oculus kept improving the headset seemingly every quarter suggesting that they planned on selling the Quest 2 for a while.  I think the best products are those that get consistent updates both firmware and software so on a whim I went out and grabbed the Quest 2 and thus far I’m really impressed.

The screen-door is much improved, it’s not perfect but it’s a huge step up from the CV1.  The FOV isn’t great but I can overlook that for all the other features.

• No more external cameras, no need for active USB3 cables which were a PITA
• Lots of accessories, I changed my Quest 2 headstrap for a ‘halo-style’ head strap making the headset a LOT more comfortable
• Quest 2 is wireless, not only for Quest 2 titles but is also capable of streaming PCVR titles over WIFI to the headset, allowing you to use your PC software wirelessly
• Simple set-up, seated, standing, different rooms, different light in each room, it all just works.  Simplicity is one of the major improvements to the software side of things when comparing against the CV1
• Easier access to curated VR content, the Quest 2 has a nice dashboard where you can quickly access new content
• As I mentioned, Oculus is updating the Quest 2 software/firmware consistently, offering new features, improvements, for free

It’s not all roses and puppy-dogs, the headset isn’t perfect but for the price it gets you access to a lot of great content for cheap, at least when comparing against legacy PC only VR.  Some things I don’t like about the headset:

• The default head strap is pretty bad, not much different than the CV1 but it would be difficult to go back to the default strap after using halo-style
• battery life is not great.   Wireless is nice but the headset eats battery life, luckily it was easy to add a small battery pack which also helped balance the headset a bit more
• Gigantic gap between PCVR and Quest 2 native titles, not surprising since native titles need to use less graphical options since the GPU on the headset is still a mobile processor, this is more of a note than a negative

Well, it’s probably safe to say that no one will be sad to see 2020 end, what a disaster of a year.  While personally it wasn’t too terrible, some changes made with my career made my life much easier, all the negatives probably outweighed the positives.  I won’t say that I expect 2021 to be much better and I’m not convinced that we’ll ever see “normal” again but there isn’t too much point in being negative about the whole situation so I’ll just bid farewell to 2020 and look forward to the challenges that 2021 brings.

I haven’t worked on any new dev projects since Oct, I’ve just been enjoying my time with my family and gaming more as the weather turns less pleasant (the joys of the seemingly endless Canadian winters).  I upgraded my PC finally.  It was time, the 980 was showing it’s age and just couldn’t compete, especially in VR anymore.  I managed to find a RMA 2080TI on Kijiji for a reasonable price after waiting months for a 3080 or 6800XT to appear in stock.  I wanted a brand new GPU but COVID put the dampener on that idea.  Thus far the 2080 has worked out well but not before I BBQ’d my CPU in the process of rebuilding my machine so I sadly had to upgrade the CPU and mobo as well during Christmas.  The Haswell-E CPU I used to have worked well and I hadn’t thought about upgrading it but after hooking some pieces up wrong I fried the mobo (and maybe the CPU too) so I had no choice to effectively start over again.

Thankfully Windows10 is much better at allowing you to migrate licenses over from machine to machine so I didn’t have to reinstall or repurchase Windows, keeping the cost down.  I went to a Intel 10600K and B460 motherboard since they were both on sale at the time.  I wanted to switch teams to AMD but again, COVID killed any chance of getting a Ryzen 5600X so I stuck with what was available in my local area.  The overall cost was much cheaper and for what I’m doing the 10600K is more than adequate.

I managed to finish Half Life Alyx which was really well done, it’s a shame Valve hasn’t made a lot of games recently because clearly they still have their game dev design and dev chops.  Alyx is probably the best, most cohesive VR experience I’ve had to date and well worth the price of admission.  The developer commentary is also very good giving insight into their design philosophy around making a pure VR experience.

I haven’t updated in a while but the world has basically changed since Feb, what with COVID and other crap injecting itself into our lives it’s not surprising that so much has changed.  It was clear that COVID early on was going to have a serious impact what with lock-downs, social distancing, mass layoffs, entire businesses that still haven’t really gone back to work.  For me though luckily COVID has been mostly a good thing, work wise anyway.  COVID encouraged companies to ‘work from home’, and I believe initially that the thought was that the company would lose productivity not being in the office but within a few weeks it was clear that most of management’s fears were unfounded.  I can’t help but think it was difficult for management to let go of the concern that people wouldn’t do their job, but with the full time move to AGILE and weekly sprints there really wasn’t much to worry about.  It was clear that if people weren’t doing their job that it would be easy to tell who wasn’t pulling their weight, with weekly retrospectives it was clear what issues were holding people back so being in an office or being at home really makes no difference.  Now people can be comfortable working at home, the company usually gets more time out of it’s employees since they no longer have to potentially spend hours travelling to the office and overall most people’s outlook improved as the work from home concept has helped a lot with the work-life-balance.

My office basically shut down, we moved all the IT infrastructure to AWS (Amazon Web services) and for the most part the overall day-to-day work process has improved.  Yeah sometimes AWS is unreliable, getting IT support can be a mixed bag, voice comms and meetings can be a mixed bag, mostly because I despise Microsoft Teams but I can tolerate it if it means I don’t have to travel on the cattle car daily to downtown to an office cube that is noisy, disruptive and effectively spirit-crushing.  Probably didn’t help that I had to switch offices 4 times in the span of 2 years, each switch worse than the previous.

With COVID and the lockdowns I had a lot of time to improve my knowledge of Angular, bought a few online courses and revised my long-standing game prototype from Thymeleaf and Bootstrap to a pure java REST servelet to an Angular front-end.  The code is a lot easier to understand and maintain as Angular is a great framework as opposed to loose and raw HTML and javascript everywhere.  I did have to relearn a bunch of things that I was familiar with Bootstrap, some things are harder to do (stuff that expects to run on bootstrap javascript) but overall I found work arounds with Angular that work well.

I also found Selenium which I have playing with recently.  In using Angular and Arquillian I was pretty confident that I could unit test a lot of functionality but with Selenium there is no reason why the entire application couldn’t be tested as well.

On the topic of gaming I will likely skip the new console launches this fall, there just isn’t enough compelling software for either machine at launch.  COVID likely put the hurt on a lot of dev houses so it feels like a lot of software won’t really be available to 2021 so I can wait until then, consoles should be a lot easier to come by then as well.

I do want a new GPU but considering how hard it is to get a 3080 I might have to wait until 2021 for that too which is a drag.  I’m hoping AMD has a competitive product so I could skip Nvidia this gen but I’m not convinced yet.  I’ll happily eat crow if the new Radeons are as good as the Ryzen CPUs at being competitive.

I’d also like to pick up the Quest 2 or the Reverb G2 however without a new GPU there isn’t much point, my current 980 just isn’t up to snuff for the beating some of the newer headsets would put on it.

I took the last few months off doing development at home, spent some time with family and friends and taking a break from development at home.  I find that I get burnt out programming all day then spending a large part of home time programming as well.  It’s not that I don’t love programming and learning but I personally need that good work/life balance to stay sharp.

In the meantime however I’ve finished the Witcher 3, I had it in my backlog for a long time but didn’t want to start playing it because I knew it would be a significant time investment and not really something you can pick away at without forgetting story-lines, characters or the myriad of controls required to be any good at the game.  I finally finished Witcher 3 and all the DLC which clocked in around 125 hours which was good value if you’re talking cost/vs time spent playing.  I enjoyed the game a lot, it feels like it’s been a really long time since I’ve played a good RPG, I’ve started others but abandoned them due to either boring combat, silly storylines or some other game coming along that caught my fancy.  I had tried previous games in the Witcher series however the combat in there just felt dull so I never did get very far however Witcher 3 is significantly better from an action point of view and the storylines were really memorable so it’s worth your effort if you’re considering it.

I also got invited to the XCloud beta Microsoft is putting on.  Overall I’m pretty impressed, I can’t help think that much of companies cloud offerings have been a lot of hot wind (Looking at your Stadia) however XCloud has been really stable and really easy to use.  If Microsoft packages XCloud as part of Gamepass they will have a winner in my mind.  It’s biggest downfall is bandwidth used.  Playing for around 45 mins used 1.6gb of data (when I was on WIFI) which is pretty crazy.  You’re not going to be using XCloud when you’re on mobile anytime soon, certainly not with how overpriced mobile data is here in Canada.

I also starting doing courses on Angular .  Last year I spent quite a bit of time learning Thymeleaf and Bootstrap as well as familiarizing myself with javascript so I thought it would be interesting to approach web development from a different angle (see what I did there) and since Angular is well recognized it felt like a good topic to learn on.  I’m still very early into my research but thus far I’m excited.  I like how typescript has a lot more type-safety than regular javascript however I find it’s still pretty easy to chop your feet off in Angular and get into a state where understanding where your bug is pretty difficult.  It’s pretty easy to mistype something or poorly name a field or method and have the code break without a lot of feedback why it isn’t working.  Much of that I’m sure is related to my inexperience however.  We’ll see as I get further into my online course if I am off base and being too critical of the tool after being spoiled by using eclipse/intelliJ for so long where I’m very familiar with finding and fixing bugs.

So in fall 2018 a new title by Rockstar (the developers behind the infamous Grand Theft Auto series) released their new project. Red Dead Redemption 2, a sequel to their first Red Dead title released 8 years ago on the XBOX 360/PS3 generation. They had been working on the sequel for 8 years which to me is a good thing, not only because the first game was so good but because RDR2 is amazing.

I won’t go into too much details on the premise of the game, there are enough reviews and blogs about the title that if you want to know more Google can help you, in general though the game is an open-world title set at the turn of the century. Cowboys, robbers, villainy… that sort of thing.

I really enjoyed the title, I upgraded our XBox One S to the XBox One X and RDR2 runs very well on the X in 4K. The HDR support is pretty bad, enough so that I turned it off on the console but the game is so pretty and believable that HDR off didn’t impact the visuals in the game. What actually stands out about RDR2 isn’t visuals, it’s how the game world is so seamless. Often playing sandbox games you can see the hole in the game, where the AI or gameplay or activities feel ‘gamey’ or clunky but RDR2 didn’t have that feeling. It plays more like a ‘cowboy simulator’ as opposed to GTA set in cowboy land. What also really stood out for me were all the random events that happen in the game. Strangers met out on the road, fist fights that break out in the saloons, people asking for help that you meet organically playing the game.

Some of the controls and aiming in the game aren’t perfect, some of these issues are likely due to all the animation they implemented in the game but none of this was something that I couldn’t live with. I didn’t get too much into the online option of the game, after finishing the single player story clocking at 97 hours, I felt I got what I wanted out of the game.

Well maybe not lazy but I’m certainly not proactive in actually updating this place.  I had a lot of personal changes in my life this year.  Broke up with a partner of 4 years, blew out my knee requiring surgery (meniscus tear from practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu), cleaned myself up, met a new partner.

In the process of all those changes I had time to actually enjoy my life and the things that I love.  I was disappointed about my injury since BJJ has been an important part of my life for the last 5 years but it did give me time to get back into tech and gaming, something I had started at the beginning of this year as my last post suggested but wasn’t really enjoying as much as I wanted since I was using a lot of it to escape my unhappiness in my relationship.  I seem to try and escape to gaming whenever I’m unhappy.  I am gaming again but this time because I’m enjoying it rather than escaping to it.

This year I’ve finished:

• Battlefield Hardline
• Titanfall 2
• Doom 2016
• Gears of War 4
• Mafia 3
• Borderlands 2
• Grim Dawn
• Dishonored
• Mad Max

I enjoyed the majority of them, all were finished on PC, none I paid full price for.  It’s a side effect of Steam and endless places to find deals on Steam keys.  GOG, Fanatical, Chrono.GG, CDKeys,   Humble Bundle,  all are fantastic for finding deals on your games, and when used in tandem with sites like IsThereAnyDeal and SteamDB it’s easy to make sure you pay the least money for the most software.

I also managed to borrow a friends Oculus DK2

VR Headset

which was a lot of fun.  I found the setup relatively easy, mostly because my PC can handle VR without too much fuss but I did find the screen not very good and saw the ‘screen door effect‘ too pronounced.  It did show how far VR has come in the last 30 years.  I recall in college being very interested in VR, it probably helped that at the time the “Lawnmower Man” was popular in the theaters as well.

If the retail kits of Vive or Oculus weren’t so expensive I’d consider buying in but as it stands I think I’ll wait at least 1 more generation before jumping in.  By then I’ll need a new video card anyway and since I’ve seen bundled kits (with new GPU) there is a good chance similar bundles will be offered for the next generation.  Hopefully they’ll be wireless by then too.

I also bought a new AVR and TV as well.  My AVR is an Onkyo TX-NR757

Which wasn’t a huge upgrade from my existing AVR but I got a good deal (less than half price) and this new model will support 4K and HDR which is something I’m interested in.  At the time my TV was still a 2012 1080P Panasonic Plasma which still looks nice but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of framerate and size.  I recently upgraded to a Vizio P65-C1 that I got from Costco which so far has been really good.  It’s technically last years’ model however the panel itself is identical to the E1 which is the 2017 model yet the C1 comes with a nice tablet to control the device.  We can never have enough gadgets can we?

I haven’t actually been gaming at 4K as my 980GTX can’t really keep a consistent 60fps and once you’re used to gaming at high framerates it’s difficult to go back to console level 30fps.  I still have the XBONE and PS4 hooked up to the AVR and TV but with the Vizio I have my PC hooked up to the high-framerate HDMI port which allows gaming at 120FPS which is pretty nice.  It’s really uncommon for TVs to have an uncapped 120fps HDMI connector and it was one of the reasons why I bought the Vizio over the Sony X900e.  Perhaps next year I’ll upgrade the GPU and then play at 4K@60hz but for now I’m happy with 1080P@120hz

Looking forward to some time off work in December, hoping to finish some more of my backlog like Halo Wars 2, Prey and Dark Souls 3.  That and sleeping in a few days with luck.

Happy New Year!

Back in the 90s and early 2000s I was a full time PC gamer, I cut my teeth on Doom, Quake, Unreal and the myriad of 1st and 3rd person games using mouse and keyboard and felt like I was competitive, or at least could hold my own against random gamers in the game lobbies of the day.

In 2005 with the release of the 360 and eventually PS3, the downfall of the PC industry (mid 2000s were in my opinion the dark days of PC gaming) I switched to consoles for simplicity. I had kids at the time and didn’t have as much spare time to tweak my PC, upgrade and Steam was still not the convenient behemoth of software that it is now. It just made sense to switch to consoles.

Now I recall playing Call of Duty 2 on the 360 and thinking, “using a controller sucks, it’s so bloody difficult to feel accurate, I wish I could use m&k or buy some addon to use M&k, I’ll never get good at using a controller”. It took time, but I did eventually get decent at using a controller. Eventually I did end up love using a controller, it was common for all machines (no different key layouts, no different weights per-controller if compared to mice). It was nice to be able to game at home then go to family’s house and play on a different console and not be bothered about the control mechanism because in the end all controllers are basically the same. This last year I got back into PC gaming, I got a good used gaming PC off my local Kijiji, loaded steam and realized that it was time to go back to PC gaming. It was easy to use the 360 wireless controller dongle to use controllers and thus I figured I could just replace my console gaming with PC gaming, save money and enjoy games at a better graphical fidelity. Until last night when I decided it was time to go buy a nice gaming mouse and keyboard.

What the hell happened to me? I feel like a club footed, one-eyed gimp monkey playing shooters (in my certain case, The Division). I can’t remember all the keys to play the game properly. Using a keyboard doesn’t feel intuitive for movement, opening inventory, mantling barricades, sticking for cover, etc. I died 5 times in the span of 15 minutes because the mouse felt TOO fast, movement too twitchy.

I never thought going back to M&K after 10+ years away from it would be so damn difficult. I love my new mouse and keyboard but I won’t lie, I was seriously questioning my decision on buying the new components.

Anyone else find the same? Anyone else decide to skip M&K and stick with a controller?

I played a few competitive matches with a controller in Gears 4 PC but I could tell that to get to the ‘next level’ online, at least in Gears4, I would need to use something that allowed for faster aiming but damn, I suspect I would suck so bad using M&K people on my team would question if I was drunk.

TLDR: Going back to M&K from a controller is a lot harder than I thought.

This is the mouse that I bought:

Logitech G502 Proteus Spectrum

And here is the Keyboard:

Logitech G610 Orion Brown Backlit Mechanical

Since Demon Soul’s release date back in 2009 I’ve avoided FromSoftware’s games.  Mostly due to a bias against Japanese games but also from what I had read online.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t HATE Japanese games but rather I have a low tolerance to their storytelling and voice acting (which in the past has been pretty sketchy).  Don’t believe me or disagree?  I’ll post this animated GIF here from the “beloved” Metal Gear Solid series to remind you how goofy some Japanese games can be:

Now bizarre character story and storytelling with cringe-worthy voice acting is one thing but a game that punishes you is another.  Not all of us are college or younger kids who not only have lightning fast reflexes but endless hours of free time that they can dedicate to playing a game that punishes them for mistakes.  Probably the biggest barrier for me to wanting to even try FromSoftware’s games was the online notion that their games punish you when you make a mistake, possibly throwing away hours of game-play when you die, forcing you to retrace your steps.  I avoided even reading about their games when I first read that mistakes can be very costly.

Well, this winter, on a whim I noticed on Steam that Dark Souls : Prepare To Die Edition (aptly named I initially thought) was on sale for $5.  I was bored and figured that since I had upgraded my HTPC (another post on this topic on the way) I would ‘waste’ $5 to see how the game ran and see firsthand how bad the game really was.  After about 20 hours in I could see I was sorely mistaken and gladly happy to say that the crow I was eating was delicious and that I was now a fan of FromSoftware and their ‘Soulsborne’ game design.

The graphics and setting for Dark Souls was good, I mean, I did grow up reading the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and played D&D as a kid so I like the medieval fantasy setting.  Dark Souls doesn’t deviate too much in this respect, yeah there are some odd monsters/creatures that don’t fit in the Tolkien-esq realm but I am okay with that.  Yeah, Dark Souls does have some odd storytelling, certainly the introduction movie will raise your eyebrows and leave you scratching your head saying “WTF?!?”.   But within the first few hours these issues that were my first notion that I wouldn’t like the game went away.  The game starts out with a sense of mystery, foreboding doom and horrors waiting for you around the next corner.  The game gives you a sense of fear and excitement about what is coming next, something I hadn’t experienced in a very long time in gaming.  After playing for a while and making to the first major area in the game the dreaded “punishing” gameplay mechanic began.  Not because the game was unfair but rather the game punishes you for rushing and not taking your time.  For myself the lions share of ‘punishment’ was seen when I died and had to retrieve my work, often I would try and rush back to where I left off, make another mistake and thus lose my progress.  It was my fault, I was impatient, didn’t think things through, or got pissed off and in the process made critical errors because I didn’t take my time or was playing too aggressively.

This is the crux of my post.  The adage for the Soulsborne games is “get gud”.  When I initially read about Dark Souls this “get gud” statement was used commonplace on the gaming forums for reply to posts about the game being too hard or punishing.  Get gud was one of the reasons why initially I ignored FromSoftware’s games, it felt like a scapegoat for the game being designed poorly or punishing for the sake of being a ‘hardcore’ game.  When you play Dark Souls however you realize that there is some merit in the moniker.  There are some sections in the Soulsborne games that are difficult, there is no question…but, when you take your time, learn the timing of the enemies, understand the strengths and weaknesses of your equipment and essentially ‘get good’ or skilled with what you are working with there is a colossal sense of achievement when you actually pass a particularly difficult section or finish off a boss that handed you your ass on more than one occasion.

I’d say that I’m at this point a huge FromSoftware fan.  I finished Dark Souls in around 80 hours.  I didn’t do all the DLC expansions, to be honest I only went through one of them.  I was happy with what I played of the game though and finishing the main game storyline prompted me to pick up Bloodborne on my PS4 when I noticed it went on sale.  Again, I was thrilled at the game, initially it started off difficult but with practice, time and patience I got better and due to the improve graphics was blown away at many of the locales in the game and enemies (boss and ‘generic’) within the game.  I haven’t clocked exactly how much time I spent in Bloodborne but I would be surprised if it was less than 50 hours.  Lastly I picked up Dark Souls 2 on PC a few months back before summer and just finished it (and 2 of the 3 DLC expansions).  Clocking in at over 60 hours it’s clear that there is a lot of game in all of the Soulsborne games.  I have not yet picked up Dark Souls 3 but it’s on my Steam wishlist and once I clean up my backlog a bit I expect to pick it up, hopefully during Christmas.

I am happy to be wrong about Dark Souls and FromSoftware’s other games.  I think anyone who hasn’t actually given them a chance is missing out.

For a while I’ve had a HTPC.  At first it started out as an old laptop that I put a new hard drive in and installed Ubuntu Linux on, along with Kodi/XBMC.  Near your TV though having yet another screen to clutter the display and no access to multi-channel audio (the laptop only had stereo out) made the laptop less than perfect.

I camped out on Kijiji and found a guy selling an older case with mini-itx motherboard and older intel CPU.  I was more interested in the case to be honest but oddly enough the mobo and cpu (and ram) fit in another server application I wanted to update so I used all 3 parts from the system I bought used.  The case was one of Silverstone’s receiver-like cases, it looks perfectly normal sitting next to my receiver, XBOX, PS4 and myriad of devices I have in my home theater setup.

Silverstone Grandia GD08

I bought an integrated motherboard CPU combination (AMD APU) and some ram and threw it all in the case and was happy with what I had.  I ran this way since 2013 but on a whim this last December I decided to find out how much a CPU upgrade would be since I was pretty sure that the motherboard was end of life (EOL) and usually that is a good time to upgrade the CPU to the maximum the motherboard will support to try and squeak out a little more life from the unit.  I bought an upgraded CPU from TigerDirect (they’re usually pretty good at matching EOL hardware and CPUS).  I decided to upgrade the power supply that came with the original HTPC case from the limited 380watt power supply to a used power supply from Kijiji.  Normally a 750 watt power supply would cost at least $100 but I got a good brand name model from Corsair for $50 which was nice.  The unit was hardly used and while the fit was tight (the power supply wasn’t modular so finding room in a tiny case for 400 power cables was tricky) it ended up working perfectly.

At this point the HTPC was fine, the CPU/APU upgrade was significantly faster than the old APU I was using.  By the way, APU is an integrated video GPU and multi-core CPU.  APUs in general are perfect for building a HTPC since the APU takes so little space compared to a regular CPU/GPU combination.  As usual though, camping Kijiji found me a GTX660 GPU, while not top of the line it was significantly faster than the APU, and more than double the speed of my full size computer’s GPU.  I reviewed the dimensions of the GTX660, they would fit inside the HTPC case and I had more than enough power connectors to feed the GPU so I bought the GTX used for $125 when new they were going for $209+tax.

So now I have a HTPC that plays all my media files but will play most new PC games as well at framerates significantly better than the XBOX One or the PS4.  Overall I’m happy with how it turned out.  With so many more fans in the HTPC case it is a lot louder but when watching a movie or playing a game you don’t really notice the sound considering that my media case seems to help muffle a lot of the sound of the fans.