Learn to be more like Sir Galahad

This week has been an interesting one. I've spent the better part of it with my son, which has been a blast. I took the week off from work and with the exception of a few days he's pretty much been by my side most of the time. Sadly, I don't really remember the last time I got to spend such consecutive time with him, but I don't think I've ever had a better vacation.

On the server front, I ended up abandoning ubuntu as I was spending way to much time managing system resources and setting things up. Damn it Jim, I'm a programmer, not a full time systems admin. It was just way too involved for the things that I wanted to do and the time that it would have taken to get everything going just how I wanted. So, I ended up re-installing windows and simply going with an Abyss server app. Now, I'm very pleased with Abyss so far very user friendly and easy to use. I also got setup with a dns redirect for decipherone.com and now we're in action. I just have to write all the stuff that I need for the website and PLOW! no more paying outrageous prices for hosting and or renewing or registering domains with over priced registrars. Thanks Google, enom,, and
Dyndns.org

In engine news, I finally finished the directinput functionality for the engine. So now you can use 360 controllers and generic controllers at the same time, as long as the developer puts interfaces to it in the game that they are creating. I started getting the GUI class fleshed out last night, but I'm guessing that it's still going to take me a while to get that finished up. There's just a lot of functionality to consider when writing a full fledged GUI. It'll be good to get it going though and be able to get the editor more object based. Currently it's written as an object simply called Editor and all the drawing for the menus and everything is done directly in functions in the class. This is bad. It works, but it kills frame rates. I'm also looking into using FBO to turn text files into textures once the text is read into the engine. Currently it simply reads from the file each pass and writes the bitmaps fonts to the screen each pass. This is very inefficient. Lots more to come.

Sir Galahad was the knight who successfully found the Grail. A king among men. We should all strive for such greatness.