Guess who's back...
by Nicolas Quijano · 07/14/2013 (12:14 pm) · 5 comments
Not Slim Shady, just me. Albeit truth be told I'm both slim (actually a fighting trim cut ;) and kinda shady, lol.
One of them old timers who use to pollute the IRC channels with violent, gory, sexually explicit textual imagery, hehe. Where is that silly British git named Tom B. btw ?
Slowly getting back into coding, as it's been a bit more than 7 years since the last I did any serious coding (if such a thing does exist ?!?)
Where have I been ? Well away. Doing stuff, or not...
And then, I went back to one of my favorite jobs, which was to be a wild billposter, although as it's legal in Montreal, not a lot of wild left in there. Did that for 3 years, rose to be the assistant supervisor of all our outdoor network, meaning I still spent 40 hours a week in the trenches with the troops, like any good sarge would, while being a buffer in between my boss and them youngsters ;)
Me in a local rag, end of winter, early '12 :
And another shot of work well done ;)
Now, what perked my interest to come back and check things out was stumbling (while updating mine) upon the linkedin profile of someone's who's still at GG, and has been around since the beginning or close enough, a certain Dave Wyand, a fellow Canuck to boot (Hi Dave !!) that lead me back to the site, to lo and behold, see things had gone MIT (woot !), and that T2D is on its way to Android (double woot !!!)
See, I own two Android cellphones, my first 2 cells actually. The cellphones I had before were always job provided. And I decided that getting back into the flux of things, programming and designing wise, as well as hacking, would be best served by going Android : I worked at gameloft montreal nearly a decade ago, when the fist prototypes of hw accelerated OpenGL handsets were being delivered to top tiers devs. I dabbled with them, but mostly I did software rendering (and all sorts of glue and gameplay code) mostly on the BREW platform, ,with some forays on the nGage and some pseudo micro Java (more like bytecode C if you ask me, with all the restraints you face....) as I was taking 2d games and making them 3dish. Fun times, it was like being back in the first half of the 90s in some ways, with a lot of hand optimization and careful thinking and planning of memory allocations, writing custom allocators as well as the eternal pleasure of hand crafting assembly or even weirdly written C to bypass the stubbornness of a certain ARM compiler...
Ah the memories... They fired my arse too for having too big and loud of a mouth, lol.
Amyhow, I believe I have the right skills and tools to work in the constrained environment of Android or for that matter, iOS, 'cause don't let yourself be fooled by the seemingly huge clockspeeds and up to 4 gig of RAMs of upcoming top end handhelds, they can go from lightning fast to slow as molasses as fast as IE8, Not kidding ;)
So yeah, very curious how they're going to go about porting T2D to that platform ;)
Not to mention that there is some heavy duty 3d eye candy games already on the google play store so...
Anyhow, hi new faces, and hopefully there are some old farts around still ;)
Cheers, dev on !
Edit : D**m it, I lost my stripes, erh Associate badge ;)
One of them old timers who use to pollute the IRC channels with violent, gory, sexually explicit textual imagery, hehe. Where is that silly British git named Tom B. btw ?
Slowly getting back into coding, as it's been a bit more than 7 years since the last I did any serious coding (if such a thing does exist ?!?)
Where have I been ? Well away. Doing stuff, or not...
And then, I went back to one of my favorite jobs, which was to be a wild billposter, although as it's legal in Montreal, not a lot of wild left in there. Did that for 3 years, rose to be the assistant supervisor of all our outdoor network, meaning I still spent 40 hours a week in the trenches with the troops, like any good sarge would, while being a buffer in between my boss and them youngsters ;)
Me in a local rag, end of winter, early '12 :
And another shot of work well done ;)
Now, what perked my interest to come back and check things out was stumbling (while updating mine) upon the linkedin profile of someone's who's still at GG, and has been around since the beginning or close enough, a certain Dave Wyand, a fellow Canuck to boot (Hi Dave !!) that lead me back to the site, to lo and behold, see things had gone MIT (woot !), and that T2D is on its way to Android (double woot !!!)
See, I own two Android cellphones, my first 2 cells actually. The cellphones I had before were always job provided. And I decided that getting back into the flux of things, programming and designing wise, as well as hacking, would be best served by going Android : I worked at gameloft montreal nearly a decade ago, when the fist prototypes of hw accelerated OpenGL handsets were being delivered to top tiers devs. I dabbled with them, but mostly I did software rendering (and all sorts of glue and gameplay code) mostly on the BREW platform, ,with some forays on the nGage and some pseudo micro Java (more like bytecode C if you ask me, with all the restraints you face....) as I was taking 2d games and making them 3dish. Fun times, it was like being back in the first half of the 90s in some ways, with a lot of hand optimization and careful thinking and planning of memory allocations, writing custom allocators as well as the eternal pleasure of hand crafting assembly or even weirdly written C to bypass the stubbornness of a certain ARM compiler...
Ah the memories... They fired my arse too for having too big and loud of a mouth, lol.
Amyhow, I believe I have the right skills and tools to work in the constrained environment of Android or for that matter, iOS, 'cause don't let yourself be fooled by the seemingly huge clockspeeds and up to 4 gig of RAMs of upcoming top end handhelds, they can go from lightning fast to slow as molasses as fast as IE8, Not kidding ;)
So yeah, very curious how they're going to go about porting T2D to that platform ;)
Not to mention that there is some heavy duty 3d eye candy games already on the google play store so...
Anyhow, hi new faces, and hopefully there are some old farts around still ;)
Cheers, dev on !
Edit : D**m it, I lost my stripes, erh Associate badge ;)
About the author
Veteran and even a casualty of the mainstream game industry, as well as one of the early adopters of GG's tech : did the first builds of Orbz for MacOS X. A (great) Old One? And like one of 'em Cthonic thingies, from a great slumber or depths, I rise...
#2
So in Montreal bill posting is legal, what happens between billposters you cover each other up all the time? A bit of a battle there? Could be a game in that, like a phone game you got to post bills and use your resources (people) to put them up faster and conquer areas.
07/15/2013 (4:28 pm)
Welcome back! I hope you enjoy yourself here with the changes to MIT.So in Montreal bill posting is legal, what happens between billposters you cover each other up all the time? A bit of a battle there? Could be a game in that, like a phone game you got to post bills and use your resources (people) to put them up faster and conquer areas.
#3
Edward: sounds like JSRF. Just add magneto-skates and the future :D.
07/15/2013 (7:54 pm)
Howdy! Welcome back.Edward: sounds like JSRF. Just add magneto-skates and the future :D.
#4
07/15/2013 (9:23 pm)
@Daniel, Yeah it does! I heard of the game before but didn't actually know what the gameplay was.
#5
@dan : Not quite, not quite. See I was covering graffitis with my glue and paper ;) And even with a jetpack lugging the glue around, not to mention a few hundred 24x36 posters, plus a few 4x6 feet billboards... Well ;)
Granted, we had guys working on bikes, human engine ones, but they had trailers, and couldn't approach things the same way you can when you have a dedicated vehicle (we have a full blown moving company in town that only uses pedal bikes for moving....)
@Dan : well, there isn't much competition left in Montreal, and PS (Publicite Sauvage, e.g Savage Advertising) not only does 90+% of the business, it built most of the network of palissades we use since big construction projects tend to rent those metal modulock fences nowadays.
As to there being a game in there, maybe a mini game or tech demo for an Android port... Or some humor : instead of the usual free ads you have a character that comes and go, postering said ads on your hideout, options screen, whatever ;)
As for what I'm up to, well, still on the R&D and very early design stages of the porting project, well it might be two of 'em, as I think we also need a form of T3D on that platform, for the high end users.
Going to get a Nexus 4 in the next week or so, as the carriers are nearly giving them away in exchange for your first born, erh, I mean a 2 or 3 year contract at 50 bucks a month. It's one of them Google phones, that one built by LG, and they cannot have locked bootloaders (e.g what makes it hard for Joe Blow Average to root his phone and play with the linux distro inside), not sure if carriers are allowed to lock them to their network (the SIM locking part), not that's a worry once you have access to the whole file system and OS, hehe.
So I'll have 3 devices at 3 representative points in the Android market.
Guess I'll just be missing a tablet, and I'll have all the droids I'm looking for (lol, I'm not done with lame robot and droid jokes, not by far ;))
It's going to be an interesting project to work on, for sure.
Bunch of things to sort out in the logistics, financing, etc.
A full blown blog coming on that soon. Thanks god I don't have to use MS tools for that project, no budget for a VS seat (or are we allow to deploy commercially with Express now ?)
More soonish
07/26/2013 (7:55 am)
@all : Thanks for the welcome back. @dan : Not quite, not quite. See I was covering graffitis with my glue and paper ;) And even with a jetpack lugging the glue around, not to mention a few hundred 24x36 posters, plus a few 4x6 feet billboards... Well ;)
Granted, we had guys working on bikes, human engine ones, but they had trailers, and couldn't approach things the same way you can when you have a dedicated vehicle (we have a full blown moving company in town that only uses pedal bikes for moving....)
@Dan : well, there isn't much competition left in Montreal, and PS (Publicite Sauvage, e.g Savage Advertising) not only does 90+% of the business, it built most of the network of palissades we use since big construction projects tend to rent those metal modulock fences nowadays.
As to there being a game in there, maybe a mini game or tech demo for an Android port... Or some humor : instead of the usual free ads you have a character that comes and go, postering said ads on your hideout, options screen, whatever ;)
As for what I'm up to, well, still on the R&D and very early design stages of the porting project, well it might be two of 'em, as I think we also need a form of T3D on that platform, for the high end users.
Going to get a Nexus 4 in the next week or so, as the carriers are nearly giving them away in exchange for your first born, erh, I mean a 2 or 3 year contract at 50 bucks a month. It's one of them Google phones, that one built by LG, and they cannot have locked bootloaders (e.g what makes it hard for Joe Blow Average to root his phone and play with the linux distro inside), not sure if carriers are allowed to lock them to their network (the SIM locking part), not that's a worry once you have access to the whole file system and OS, hehe.
So I'll have 3 devices at 3 representative points in the Android market.
Guess I'll just be missing a tablet, and I'll have all the droids I'm looking for (lol, I'm not done with lame robot and droid jokes, not by far ;))
It's going to be an interesting project to work on, for sure.
Bunch of things to sort out in the logistics, financing, etc.
A full blown blog coming on that soon. Thanks god I don't have to use MS tools for that project, no budget for a VS seat (or are we allow to deploy commercially with Express now ?)
More soonish
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