Realizing that Microsoft would never leave me alone, I decided to drink the Kool-Aid (which should be spelled Cool-Ade, but it’s not).

I don’t exactly hate it, but I’m not crazy about it. It’s all very borderless, smart-phoney, and white, except for the grays and blacks. As I imagined, the big emphasis is on tracking and monetizing users. I didn’t expect this to be so unapologetic and in-your-face. It’s everywhere, but it seems to apply more to Windows “apps” than to anything else, especially those you buy in the Store. Since I don’t use any yet, I just turned off whatever system things bothered me, which were surprisingly few in number. Number one irritation was the peer update thing, so I dumped that fast. I think Microsoft can afford the bandwidth to force updates on me.

I miss little things, like the old-school calculator, better defined scrollbars, and some other “3D” things that made earlier Windows interfaces easier to use. I haven’t bothered with Cortana and have no plans to use Skype. I don’t mind Edge, but until I get used to it, I made IE the default browser. (Where is the Home button in Edge?)

I installed Win 10 Home on two machines — my school one and the gaming computer. Since I had 8.1 on the school one, I just did an upgrade and all went well (at least I think so). The gaming one had Win 7, so I decided to do a clean install. The Media Tool made this pretty easy. Restoration of backed up Steam games and Diablo 3 went smoothly. Diablo 3 wouldn’t start at first, but after seeing the word “protocol” in log errors, I knew I had to get proper Nvidia drivers instead of the basic ones Microsoft installed. All was jake after that. Oh, the sound didn’t work either, but Realtek drivers did the trick. All this was on the gaming machine. The school one worked right out of the “box,” probably because Microsoft didn’t mess with the drivers already in place. Even though I’m impressed by a nice clean Device Manager after both installs, I pity the average Joe Walmart trying to get his laptop to work with no clue about driver software.

In sum, the whole thing went pretty well, and while I don’t see any big advantages to Win 10, I guess it could be worse. At least this is Microsoft’s focus now, so I feel like a second-class citizen instead of a third-class one.

Well, I paid a 2D environment artist what I’d consider pretty good money… and he screwed me. I don’t even think it was intentional, he just sucks. Despite his portfolio not containing specific examples of what I wanted, he showed a good skill level over all and I’ve worked with him before, so I went for it.

Well, next time I’ll insist on specific examples. Fuck.

That said, now that I’m forced to produce my own assets, I’m changing to a voxel format, which is not only easy but pretty popular and is already making the game look better. I’m just on a crash course marathon for the next couple of weeks to keep the campaign on schedule. Woo!

The new and improved protagonist, still a work in progress:

My bear person doing the things. Bare bones dynamic lighting at 0:30!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g31i_Gi9MwM

Well, they never really go anywhere.

Just working on my silly indie game and hoping to launch a Steam Greenlight and a Kickstarter campaign in the next 2-3 weeks.

Or I will be as of tomorrow.

Long long story which I don’t want to recount right now, but the gist is, I’m 38, IT is not a kind industry to men of my age. Especially not corporate IT, which is all I know how to do at the level that I can be paid for it by an employer. My nerves are shot, I have no hope of finding another job and even if I did I’d just prolong this slow burning nervous breakdown I’ve been having for two years. I mean there’s professional frustration, and stress, and anxiety, and then there’s cardiac arrests and back breaking seizures.

Sooooo we may be selling our house, since Chris’ pay can’t possibly cover our basic expenses, forget about cutting the budget. Maybe moving south to saner markets (housing and food, not employment, because I am burned out. I am beyond burned out. This probably sounds ridiculous but my nerves are not just shot, it’s like I’ve got shell shock.)

I’ve been kicking around an indie game for 2 years now and I’m using some of our small savings to commission level and promotional art to give it a ride on KickStarter and see how that goes. I mean, I may as well. What I’m spending won’t even make one mortgage payment, and even if it did that would be one month longer to pull off the bandaid and not really much help. Maybe it’ll take off. Self employment I can do if I can get somebody to pay me for my talents. Sadly, taking in wookiee costume commissions won’t cover.

Sorry for sucking at updating this page and such like, and not being into Diablo clones and such well enough to converse. I’m glad that you few have stuck around, I like seeing your posts.

I’m off to finish learning the Unity engine libraries (I’ve got a pretty good start on them already) and diagram some level layouts for my artist.

We’ve been wanting to move out of Connecticut for awhile now, so maybe this will turn out to be an opportunity and everything will fall together. Fingers crossed.

UE4 looks like it’s a great tool for visualisation. I’m working on various projects to show the history of the development of my home town of Lodz, Poland and so far I’ve rendered a few things in Blender, but I wanted something in which I can create some interactive stuff.  And UE4 is quite powerful and, most importantly,  absolutely free for this!

Working on the history of Plac Wolności (Freedom Square), I live just next to it, here you can see how it looks now, I’m trying to recreate the architecture of how the place looked in various stages of its history since its founding in 1823.

Here’s how it looked about 1849. Basic geometry only, almost no textures yet.

If you’re interested, here’s the video project I made last year about a fragment of my town a bit north of here (has English subtitles – not my own translation):

So the latest patch was released with a bunch of fixes and a couple new maps. I’m actually impressed with Robot as they seem to be spending all their time on balance and fixes for Survival mode now which is what they should have been focusing on all along IMO. You can read the patch notes here to see what I mean:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/427270/discussions/3/361787186439543936/

One of the new maps is called The Wall. Its basically a beach siege map kind of like Normandy but with Orcs and Pirate Orcs.

As you can see from the map, its one large middle lane with two smaller lanes that open up later on in the cycle. My basic defense is to load up the main lane with every trap I can afford and place my Guardian in the back. This leaves me free to manually monitor the other two lanes. (also notice the pirate orc. very dangerous!)The upper lanes are much smaller but Robot likes to throw many Ogres at you from up there so you have to keep on your toes.

After a couple of attempts, I seem to have figured the map out but I’m sure later on it will be much tougher.