Born of Hope
by Loren on Feb.12, 2010, under General
An awesome girl and a bunch of volunteers in the UK have produced an excellent prequel for the Lord of the Rings trillogy! It can be seen for free here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qINwCRM8acM.
I have a lot of respect for her and her efforts, using her own time and money to write, direct, and produce the film. It has excellent quality and really feels true to Tolkein’s style while also capturing the film style set out by Jackson’s Trillogy.
DirectX Integration
by Loren on Feb.11, 2010, under Development, Guildhall
Work has begun on integrating DirectX 10 into my API agnostic renderer. Got a pretty good design done up that falls in kind of the middle of the road between DX and GL, favoring one or the other depending on the issue. At this point, the interface is slimmer for my API than using either one independantly and should lead to some much nicer code. Really enjoying this…
Goo Gun
by Loren on Feb.09, 2010, under Development, Guildhall
Current beta state of my math final project. Its a physically “realistic” goo gun. I’m working on a shader system for it to make it look more like goo, UT3 style, as well as moving it into a geometry shader.
Tutorial Complete
by Loren on Feb.09, 2010, under Development, General
Alright, I’m happy to announce that the UDK Networking Tutorial is complete! The attached source code should help explain what everything means and if you have questions feel free to leave a comment. And to show just how awesome this tutorial is, it is already the top hit on Google for “UDK networking tutorial.”
In other news, I switched themes to one that doesn’t bug me so much when I view it at night. Tweaking it now to get some of the fonts bigger. Also, I set up a new spam filter and re-enabled free commenting.
DirectX 10
by Loren on Feb.08, 2010, under Development
Nothing says “I love you guys” like making the creation of the depth buffer take almost fourty lines of code. Nothing.
UDK
by Loren on Feb.07, 2010, under Development
Writing an introductory tutorial to networked mutators for the Unreal Development Kit. This is a brief team project and will result in both a written tutorial and some YouTube love. I’ll post it when it is complete.
[EDIT] The tutorial in its current state can be found under the projects menu.
Particles
by Loren on Jan.27, 2010, under General
One might love the particles but the particles may never love back.
New Year and NyQuil
by Loren on Jan.01, 2010, under General, Personnal
Nothing beats vacation than being sick on vacation. What a new year -.-
Its a NyQuil New Year!
Hope everyone is having a good time, hopefully I can find myself some la la lands now 
Pace.
Canadia Continues
by Loren on Dec.29, 2009, under General
Still in Canada for a few more days. Checked out the aquarium today and some great viewpoints. I have a few studios up here that I need to look into more as well as some in Quebec.
In other news I have been reading the book Snow Crash. Very reminiscent of Neuromancer making it soon to be another favorite book. Books such as this make me feel inspired, not sure why but something about the rush just kicks ass.
To accompany the feeling from the books is a saying of wisdom which further invigorates. The saying goes that one “should show contempt for shoji.” The idea here is that the only barrier between oneself and one’s goals is nothing more than a paper wall. Be it fear of failure or the unknown, or some other personnal experience, one need but walk through the wall to begin on the path to these goals. Remembering that I should show such contempt has given me the strength to move toward when I otherwise would not have.
Pace.
Break and Canada
by Loren on Dec.29, 2009, under General
Above all else, the nicest thing about break is sleeping. I love the Guild Hall, from the program to the people, everything about it rocks. However, OMFG sleeeep. So nice.
As it goes, break is not completely break. I picked up the official GLSL book and have begun learning about utilizing it, as well as perusing the official specification. Similarly, I have begun creating a portfolio of sorts of my work. The portfolio information can be found under the projects tab and currently only contains some information and screen shots of a scene graph project.
Right now though I am up in Canada with my girl friend’s family visiting Vancouver. Since arriving we have not had to use the car once because, amongst other things, the public transit here is fantastic. So is the food. And the people. And the shops. And the food, did I mention it? It rocks. Anyways, we have visited the science center and tomorrow we will be hitting the aquarium.
I have been taking the opportunity to also scout out the city itself. There are a number of game studios here, and about six or seven that pique my interest. The scouting has primarily been looking at if this would be a nice place to live and I must say it seems to be so. It is also close enough to Seattle that I could visit my girl friend while she finishes graduate school. With this step complete and a year to gradumacation, I shall now commence attempts to become hired up here. Hopefully Lord Cthulhu will make it so.
