Ray Batts
Programmer, Student, Shark-Boxer.
Go West, Game Devs!
Mar 18th
GDC 2012. Wow.
There’s a thousand other blog posts out there about how awesome it was. I’ll leave you to browse through them.
I will say that I did have a blast though. A blast is an understatement… I had an implosion. My only regret is that I booked my schedule too solid. I only spent about 15 minutes on the expo floor itself. This is because I booked myself into different talks and lectures from 10AM to 6PM solid every day of the convention. I got to make a quick runthrough to see some of the booths, but didn’t even cover half of the expo hall : ( Maybe next year…
Highlights:
- Finally playing Super Comboman! I first heard about this game at GDC Austin during a talk from the CEO of Interabang, Justin Woodward. I instantly fell in love with this 2D beatemup game! it has a very interesting sticker-based art style, and kept me laughing and entertained. Sadly, I spent most of the time playing with it’s physics system, as the nerd in me was interested. It really is a fun little title, and I’m hoping that they find a publisher soon.
- Gino Van Den Bergen: This guy blew my mind. He had some really good lectures in the Math and Physics game programming tutorials. He really cracked my awe and had me looking at the data we normally mindlessly process in a different way. I won’t get into the details, but he had some talks on GJK collision detection, and the properties of dual numbers. His website has both his GDC slides as well as some example code. I’m really a fan of this guy now.
- Squirrel Eiserloh: Squirrel is actually a fellow Dallas game dev. I’ve seen him at a couple of our IGDA events. You can imagine my surprise when I saw him take the stage at the first lecture of GDC. He had a very good and direct lecture on Beizer curves and splines in the Math for Game Programming summit. It was easily one of the best talks of GDC in my opinion, as it was direct, informative, and to the point.
- Sushirrito: A friend sent me a link to Sushirrito as a joke about a year ago, and I in turn linked it to our company. My boss realized that it was a couple blocks away from GDC. With that we stuffed our faces full of Sushirrito as soon as possible. It was really a fantastic meal, although it has ruined sushi for me. Why does this only exist in San Fransisco! Franchising, PLEASE!
- #AltDevBlog Cigar Bar – I actually wasn’t going to go to this. I was a bit intimidated because Mike Acton (Engine developer for Insomniac Games) was going to be there, and Insomniac is one of my most respected studios. I was nervous of making an ass out of myself there. About a block away from my hotel I manned up and hopped in a taxi there. I’m glad I went! I met a lot of awesome and talented developers, and had a pretty good time once I stopped being so awkward. (Read: Had a couple of brews ; ))
- B.I.G. Party – I didn’t get to stay as long as i wanted to here, because my school was having a dinner across the street about an hour after the party started. It was at The W (Wow!) and was hella nice. Everybody was real cool and I met a handful of awesome people. I also learned that my professor, Derrek Manns, is going to be setting up the Dallas B.I.G. chapter! Why I had to find this out in San Francisco…I don’t know! But I’m excited!
There’s a ton of other awesome stuff that happened here, but there’s no way I can list it all. GDC 2012 was one of the most inspiring moments of my life. Seeing all of the talented developers and their passion for the industry resparked mine. I cannot wait until next year’s.
Hello (Again), World!
Mar 3rd
Man, just have not been into blogging lately.
This weekend I head West for San Francisco’s Game Developer’s Conference. I might blog a bit, but I’ll likely keep the majority of my thoughts on my Twitter.
Follow me @Ray_Batts, or look over there —–>
The other day I wrote a lasso select tool for a project. I oddly had a lot of fun doing so! When I get back from GDC, I’ll look into posting some of the details from it.
To my fellow game devs: See you in Cali!
11/11/2010 1:11:12 (A Second After.)
Nov 11th
So I must say, best wishes to all of those at InstantAction, especially those that I have had the pleasure of working with (directly, or indirectly) on the various Torque products I’ve gotten started with.
Nobody’s opinion of any of the Torque products matters at this point, just send good thought to those at IA. We are all concerned with products, EULA’s, and other awesome legal junk. Though let us not forget that hundreds of people have lost their jobs, alongside a great product finally seeing it’s end.
I guess I should talk a bit about how the news personally affects me. I was working on the Torque WP7 product that everybody had been whispering about in the forums. This product was actually turning out to be pretty neat, I really hope it sees the light of day sometime. The weirdest part about this is I was starting to feel really attached to some parts of the project. It was neat to both write, and understand something that would possibly be used by thousands of people.
The good news in all of this, is this allows me to focus more on Game Development, rather than that of an Engine. I’ve spent almost all of my time working on my game for class, which is doing great. I’ll be ready with an announcement soon, but that’s the reason I haven’t blogged lately.
Speaking of, time to work moar…
PS- I promise posts aren’t gonna go into the “Wat do u think ab00t ___?!” format. Next post I’ll get back into code like I promised ;)
Is Anyone Else Tired Of Cricket Legs?
Oct 11th
You’d think with all of the different products that I test out that I’d have a little more patience for quirky little bugs. I’m quickly finding out that I don’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love finding bugs, and get even more stoked when it comes time to fix them. But what about the times where there’s nothing you can directly do with a bug? It’s like trying to fall asleep, and stupid crickets won’t stop telling you “what time of season” it is by rubbing their legs together. Annoying.
Today, I did the normal “playing around with WP7″ (BTW- I will always call it WP7, IMO, there have been too many failed Windows Phone devices in order to call another one by the same name) and ran across an interesting problem that did not come up on the PC build. One of my favorite exceptions “NotSupported/ImplementedException”.
“GetMethods throws an InvalidProgramException if one of the methods returned contains a type that will not be available at run time.”
The only problem: What if it doesn’t? The same function call was giving me a “NotSupportedException”, with not a lick of documentation on what I did to throw this. Did I have an invalid parameter? Do I need to use a different overload? Whatever I did, it’s obvious that the device, not so much the program, is at fault. But is it? If the device was at fault, it would throw an “InvalidProgramException”, not a “NotSupportedException”. What part of what I did is not supported?
Do you hear the barrage of the Cricketleg Symphony yet? This isn’t the first time I’ve found an undocumented/misnamed exception in the MSDN.
I’m pretty stumped on the moment. Most of the articles I’ve found relating to this topic are many, many years old. Not positive how reliable they are when GS 4.0 released a week or two ago :P
I’m gonna try to include at least one picture every post. People like pictures.
When the XNA forums are down, I get very sad...
All Of Your “What?” Are Belong to “Who?”!?!
Oct 7th
As I highlighted in the last post, it’s very likely that you didn’t end up here by mistake. You also may find yourself asking just what in the world is going on with the URL to this webpage. Hopefully this short post will leave you less confused.
An interesting thing about software development is that people are working in teams together from all over the world. An chart at work showed me earlier that at every hour of the day, there is someone somewhere in the world working on the project. Pretty cool, eh?
A problem with this is localization, which is the idea/process of making sure that the product is well received in any location it may be used in. So things like language, grammar, jargon/slang gets reworked to the region the product will be redistributed in. This sounds like a flawless project, but when you’re down to the wire and hitting some serious crunch time…this can often be an overlooked step.
There was a game in the early ’90′s called “Zero Wing“. I honestly never played it, I don’t believe it was released in the US… But in Europe, the game was translated to English. The game was filled with all kinds of broken English that would make you think Babel Fish was owned by Alta Vista again. There was one phrase in the game that, in particular, was terribly translated.
What the line SHOULD have been: With the help of Federation Forces, all of your bases have been taken over by CATS.
What the line actually was:
Why it went viral, we’ll never know. But when it was time for me to register my domain, RayBatts.com was taken, and that was the second thing to come across my mind. Luckily the potential employers/business-y people that view this site will have a sense of humor. Wait, scratch that Luckily. Let’s go with “Hopefully”.
Hello world!
Oct 7th
Hmm, I guess we’ll try this one time. Ya know, with feeling.
This is my new site. Most of the kiddos reading it are pretty confused right now. “But Ray, don’t you have Facebook?! Don’t you have TwitterFacebook^2?!” Yes, I have both, no I don’t really like either. Call me Glass Half-Empty. (Glass-Half Empty? no.)
I’m a student at UNT studying for computer science/game programming. I spend a lot of my time researching different engines/technologies/forums, and find a lot interesting…I have a habit of posting things to a blog in order to save them later…but was shortly made fun of by all my friends for having Google lectures and MSDN articles for my entire news feed.
So here you are. RayBattsBaseAreBelongToYou.com I’m going to guess that you didn’t get to this page by a typo, so kick your feet up.
I’ll be posting a lot of programming problems/interesting things in the programming/game development community. I don’t have friends that are even remotely interested in these topics, so I will have to rely on the internet. This site also will soon serve as my online portfolio, resume, and distribution platform for the software I’ve been working on. There will also be a free iPad service, just drop me your SSN in a comment and I’ll make sure you’re all taken care of.