I'm still around, still have millions of on-going projects and no time at all... I'm currently helping my wife get her website up and running, it's been interesting writing a complete shopping cart from scratch... I didn't like the existing open source ones, so I rolled my own... it's almost done, just need to finish the paypal processing stuff and then have her work with me on the colors and the layout.

This has been consuming all of my spare time, so my super ambitious project is a bit on hold at least until I'm done... hopefully soon. My super ambitious project is also super secret, because until I have something to show, it's not worth talking about it...

Work is awesome, I'm having fun programming again and making a kick ass game... I believe that the quality of your work truly reflects how you feel... and in this project and this team I feel damn good, in time I will be able to share with you some of the amazing stuff we've done.

So, I couldn't find a quick solution to the problem of running a program compiled on Vista on XP so I decided I would use the resources I had available did the following:

First, I installed Perforce on my desktop (XP) P, then I proceeded to sync my project, this was a good thing because it allowed me to see that I was missing a couple of files on perforce, so I checked in all the missing files.

Then I compiled the server (via remote desktop) on the XP system and I compiled the client on the Vista system, after a couple of minor fixes to the client and server code, I was successful in getting the two to connect to each other and I was able to send a good old "Hello World!" across.

Now that I have the most minimal networking support, things will start getting interesting, first I will make a very simple login screen, but to do this I will have to work a bit on the PostGRES sql integration, the API is already on the project, I need to make it connect to the DB server and be able to access the SQL DB, I don't anticipate this being too difficult, so hopefully, by the end of the weekend I will have a very basic client/server with a login mechanism that uses an SQL DB within my game engine.

Now I must sleep, again.

First, I want to say that I'm one of the few that actually likes Vista, I think it's a very cool, very "modern" or grown up OS, but the problem is, I keep running into annoying things that make me understand the global disdain or apathy towards it, not simple quirky things or cosmetic things, mind you - but actual things that prevent me, or make it difficult for me to do what I intend to do.

So this is the deal, I'm messing around with a client/server extension to SGE, I figure I could use a break from working on the rendering stuff. So, I made the server, and decided that to make things easier, I would remotely connect to my XP desktop and install the server there, then I would work on the client from my Vista laptop and connect to the running server. But this is where things start to get annoying, I install the code and the content over on the XP desktop and run my application and I get a message that states "The application you're trying to run has an incorrect configuration, try installing it again"... fine, whatever I thought it must be a manifest problem, so I open the manifest and I see this line:

So, I did the first thing I could think of, and I commented it out, this got me farther, but not far enough, now I got the error:

The application failed to start because MSVCR80.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this.

So, now I installed dependency walker (http://www.dependencywalker.com ) and found that indeed the executable wants msvcr80.dll and that one wants coredll.dll and that also dwmapi.dll cannot be found.

Now, I find myself installing SP1 for Visual Studio on the XP computer, hoping that perhaps that will clear things up, though if it does, I will wonder how a Vista created application is supposed to be deployed onto an XP computer.

Finally, I will say this, while Vista continues to be a source of problems and difficulty, I believe that Windows 7 will be a lot better. Finally, I do have Linux installed, yea, yea, Ubuntu is great... but I don't see myself making any more on it, so it's more of a way to satisfy my nerdy side, and Macs on top of being pretentious, just plain suck, yes, I said it, because it's true, I do love the commercials though, keep 'em coming.

I just wanted to wish whoever reads this a very happy holiday season. Life threw a bit of a curve ball at me this year and the holidays have been pretty tough, I think things will start returning to normal now and we'll pull through, it was very nice to be with family and I will miss them now that they've gone back.

We're looking forward to taking a little vacation soon - should be nice to go somewhere warm for a few days...

Still alive is a small flash video of the Portal song... I haven't played Portal yet, but this song makes me want to play it quite badly, I love when games have a sense of humor like this, especially when it's wrapped in a catchy song like this.

So, what's new? nothing much really, the holidays are quickly coming and I'm woefully unprepared and under funded, but lots of family are coming, so it's going to be great. My brother arrives tomorrow night, he's moving up here, got a job at Eidos... that lucky bastard.. oh wait....

You may be wondering when I will have something game programming related to post, quite frankly so do I, I'm hoping soon, I have a few ideas of stuff I want to do and write, I've been trying to manage several mini-projects, so far it's going well, I've found that if I keep the scope small, I am actually able to do a lot with my limited time. My latest endeavor is to create a visual studio add-in with a suite of functions I commonly use, I want to wrap this up into an nice affordable package, unlike some of the expensive tools I've seen, which do way more than I need and make VS slow down to a crawl.

I'm going to watch a movie now...

For fun I decided to create a CafePress store, I created a couple programming inspired items, many of you will find them familiar, and one with the SphereGames logo that I bought for myself ;) Soon I will have a few more items, always programming oriented, I already started with a couple of designs.

The Store!

Hello, as you've undoubtedly noticed, I've done some changes to the look of the site, including the logo, I'm pretty happy with the results, but this is only the first part of the changes I have in mind. I intend to improve the color theme further and to make everything less blocky, but one thing at a time. sempesoft.com is nearly complete, the only thing I need to do is flip the switch to make it active. I'm also very happy with the results on that site.

Finally, I am making some plans for what will be Sphere Games' first release, it's a small scale project, which I believe is achievable. But I don't want to get too ahead of myself, this is at the very early planning stages, more on this later.

Work is real good, I'm so damn happy to be on this project! (Deus Ex 3).

It has finally been announced! We're working on Deus Ex 3 at Eidos Montreal !

All I can say is that it will be awesome, I couldn't be any more excited about this project, I had not felt this good about working on a game in a while.

So I finally decided it's time to give my sites an overhaul, the first one up is www.sempesoft.com it's not up yet, but the new version is going to be cool, the layout will be improved, but more importantly the site features are getting a much needed redesign. I created a database of products and an admin section to add/modify products, in it I can configure prices, versions, descriptions, urls, etc. Once I have the list of products, the site reads from the database and builds itself accordingly, the menu bar will be generated from the product names in the db, each page will be built automatically with the information in the product table. The bad side of this is that it makes all the pages look very similar (essentially a template), but on the other hand, it frees up a lot of the maintenance work when I add a new product or modify any product data. The next big improvement is on the statistics side, I will have a system in place (already under development) that tracks each download, just which product, and a timestamp, this will allow me to generate reports on how much each product is downloaded a day/week/month... I can then use this data to calculate what the conversion percentage is (how many sales / how many trial downloads). The final improvement will be on the shareit.com side, I will improve the layout of the checkout pages, I believe that a large reason why many potential customers don't go through with the purchase is because they must worry about adding their credit card information to a site they're not sure of, shareit.com is completely secure and I want to convey that across.

I think with all these improvements, sales should go up, and I will feel better for having a good home-brew system than using wordpress (or my previous version, which had its share of problems).

After that I will work on this site, I have already started, but my lack of a logo that looks good on a light background slowed down progress on it.