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.