Ye olde geeky blog

For the last 6 years I've had Samsung phones. First one was the horrible Omnia, and boy oh boy that phone sucked! After that, I jumped on the Android bandwagon and got the awesome Galaxy S2 - I even blogged about it (read that blog here ). I loved my S2, but sadly, close to the end of the 2 year contract it died a miserable death. It just failed to boot, and I tried and tried to do the factory reset thing, but it didn't work. Then I got the Galaxy Note 3. It was slightly bigger than the S2, about 1.4 inches bigger haha. It was great. At first. I say "at first" because at some stage it got so ridiculously slow it wasn't even funny. I backed everything up and did a factory reset, but it never felt as fast and responsive as when I first got it. I was still a Samsung fan, however, and for my next upgrade I would probably have gone with the S6 or Note 5.  Then one of my friends came to visit, and she was bragging with her new Hauwei Ascend P7. I played a bi...

South Africa is slowly but surely getting on the online shopping bandwagon, and we have a few big online retailers, but the one I'm going to be talking about in this blog post is Takealot. They used to be called take2, but there was some issue with the name so they changed it. They've also absorbed Kalahari a few months ago, so I think it's safe to say they're the biggest online shop in SA. We buy from them often. Especially because they deliver for free if you order over a certain amount, and they have those damn daily deals which are hard to resist. But, and it saddens me a great deal to say this - their searching SUCKS. Finding an item on Takealot is akin to finding that proverbial needle in the haystack. It's much more difficult than it's supposed to be. So many times I've searched for something on Takealot, then I'm bombarded with irrelevant results. And complaining about this on their social media doesn't do anything. Now, I'm a web...

I discovered how awesome Dictionaries are this week (yes I haven't been coding in Unity C# that long ok hehe). It's basically a key-value pair fancy array thing :) Here's how you'd use it: Dictionary<string, string> nameOfMyDictionary = new Dictionary<string, string> (); (Remember to include the System.Collections.Generic; namespace at the top of your file, otherwise this won't work...) Then, you can add stuff to it with code using the Add() function, etc. Similar to Lists. Anyway, I discovered that they don't show up the Editor like normal arrays do. And that made me a little sad. So, here's a small workaround I discovered. I'm sure it's not the best way to do it, but it works for me. Firstly, create a struct containing the key-value pair variables , and remember to add System.Serializable to allow them to show up in the editor: [System.Serializable] public struct NameOfStruct { public string  string1UniqueKey; pub...

Living here in good old South Africa we get to experience something I think everyone on earth should get to experience - Load Shedding. Ahhh load shedding. Nothing speaks of a government's incompetence as something like load shedding does. Anyway, with our power going out way more than it should, I have to shut down my PC way more often that I would like. I believe in turning the thing on, and leaving it on. Anyway, if you don't shut down your PC as often, the updates kinda builds up, and when you do want to shut down, your PC decides that this is now a great time to install the updates first. And yes, it sometimes takes more time than what you have! I foolishly thought one afternoon that 15 minutes would be more than enough time. Sadly it was not. In the middle of updating, where the PC says "please do not turn off your machine" the load shedding kicked in. Luckily nothing bad happened, but still. So, there is a way to shut down your computer without installing t...

Ahhh good old Terraria. The indie game that got me interested in game development. And they've done it once again! Their previous major update was 1.2, and boy was it of epic proportions. It seems that 1.3 will be nothing less, promising over 800 new items. Eight HUNDRED good people! And, no DLC bullsh!t, this is a FREE update - all devs, including every single AAA one can learn from these guys! Best $10 I ever spent in my whole life! From their forums , here's the list of changes coming on 30 June: Features and Mechanics: Revamped Town NPCs. They now sit, avoid monsters, socialize, avoid sitting near chests, and fight back against threats! Chest open/close is now animated. You can now join multiplayer games through Steam. Steam Cloud saving is now available. Achievements are now available through Steam and in game. Character Select Menu has been revamped to show additional character information. You can now toggle Screen Capture mode by pressing F1. This allows fo...

A while back, Jayson and I bought a little game called Unepic. It's a side scroller platform RPG, and it is truly epic! The story is great as well - you and a bunch of mates are playing a tabletop RPG. You take a bathroom break, and the lights go out. When it comes back on again, you're in a fantasy world with your trusty lighter and your witty comments, and a full on fantasy adventure ahead. The reason we picked it up was a combination of the numerous yes votes on Steam as well as the promise of co-op game play. As you know by now, we are forever on the lookout for the next awesome co-op experience, and sheesh does Unepic hit the proverbial sweet spot a thousand times over! The game is also brutal, you will die and you will die often - sometimes it cannot be avoided even! Pull that lever and a massive boulder will crush you. Or make the floor disappear, impaling you on the spikes below. I've never been as cautious of levers as in this game haha! There's loo...

Although we're playing GTA 5 on PC every single chance we get (Jayson and me), I'm still keeping a very keen eye on the 7 Days to Die development, and boy oh boy, the game is impressing more and more. When we played it a bunch of times last year it was a massive amount of fun (we started when it was around version Alpha 8 or so). Now, the game version is almost at Alpha 12, and sheesh it's going to be a massive one from the looks of things. Firstly, there's now a craft-able mini bike in the game, the first of (hopefully) many vehicles in the game. The random generated game worlds are absolutely huge, so having a way to get places quicker is going to be awesome! Then, there's HUGE improvements in the graphics - the update from version 10 to 11 took a good while, because Unity (the engine the game is written in - we're actually developing in it as well!) released a new major version - version 5 - and the devs upgraded the game to the latest version, which in...

The bug has now finally properly sunk it's greedy little teeth into me. After taking part in the last Ludum Dare (where you get 72 hours to make a game from scratch!), I decided to give it a proper go as a Indie Game Developer. I have LOTS to learn. I've dabbled a little bit in Unity, but now I'll put a proper effort into learning the platform. I have teamed up with my best friend, Jayson, and I'm now officially part of Alister Software. Please click here to Like our page on Facebook Jayson is the lead programmer because he has about 2-3 years extra on me with Unity development - he's even released his first game, Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant, which quite recently got Greenlit on Steam! I have seen how Jayson developed into a full on game developer, and it's something I actually always wanted to do - since I was in school in fact! I'm not bad at programming myself, just need to start grinding and learning Unity. I do, however, have other strengths I...

I have always had a bit of interest in 3D modeling. I wasn't too bad at 3D Studio Max back in the day, but I haven't used it in years! Last week, I decided to give Blender a go. It was rather intimidating to use at first, because it's not like Max at all, and there are TONS of shortcuts! I decided to do a tutorial to make a simple low polygon scene, with the thinking that this will help me get used to the program and teach me how to use some of the features. I'm happy to report that it did! I'm now a lot more comfortable with the program, and the EXCELLENT tutorial I did was this one:  http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/secrets-to-creating-low-poly-illustrations-in-blender--cg-31770 And here's my attempt - not too shabby hey! If you are keen on learning how to use Blender, do this tutorial, it really helped me a great deal to get started with this excellent free software!

My awesome wife bought me GTA 5 for PC as an anniversary gift. I already own it on my Xbox 360, but I always knew that the PC version will be the definitive version by a long shot! The game arrived a day late, but I didn't mind too much, since we had some friends staying over and I knew there wouldn't be time to play even if I wanted to. I did the install of the SEVEN discs, and was greeted by a nice 5 gig day 1 patch. Anyway, I let that run and started the game. Yes, this is the definitive version for sure. Indeed! Sadly, I haven't had much time to put into the game as of yet, but over the weekend I finally got a good amount of GTA 5 in, and my good friend Jayson also got his copy last week, so we were extremely eager to boot up the game and do some co-op stuff! I never played GTA 5 online on my Xbox, so I didn't really know how it works and stuff, but it basically comes down to what they call game sessions. When you join GTA 5 online, you join an existing session...

My good friend Jayson asked me to join him in the next Ludum Dare - for those out there who don't know what that is, it's basically a competition (although there isn't really anything to be won, except for exposure and the oh-so-needed experience) where you can take part in either the compo or jam - for the compo you must create everything in the game yourself, and you have 48 hours to complete your game in, and in the jam you get 72 hours, but you have the ability to opt-out of various aspects, like sound or graphics. Another interesting part of the dare is they give you the theme! This time around it was "unconventional weapon"... I was a bit skeptical to join in, but decided to go for it! My Unity skills aren't close to as good as Jayson's, so he was in charge of coding, and I decided to go for the one thing that really makes me uncomfortable - graphics! The whole idea, after all, is to move you out of your comfort zone and to let you push yourself...

Hehe, the title of this blog post really makes me happy. If you've read through my blog, you would have seen that I was due to purchase a GTX 960 graphics card in the upcoming months, but something bugged me a little with that card... It's also a mid range card, like my GTX 560 ti was back in 2011 when I got it. But this time around, nVidia's mid range card is mostly a "power consumption" upgrade from the previous generation. I read that the GTX 960 is a perfect upgrade for a 560, but if you have a 660 or a 760, then it's not really worth it that much. Also, being stuck at the bottom of Africa means we pay a lot more for stuff than the lucky guys in the first world countries. And, as an added bonus, South Africa is experiencing numerous issues like load shedding (for my overseas readers who aren't familiar with that - basically our local government didn't think of upgrading our power generating abilities as our population grew exponentially in the la...

Edit: Full disclosure - since writing this review I've joined up with Jayson and we're now both part of Alister Software. So, when I wrote this I was just writing a review for a friend's game, but now I'm part of the team and actively working on it. Armed with this knowledge, I hope you can still find something useful in my review below: My good friend Jayson and I have been playing around with the elusive art of Indie Game Development. It all started when Terraria was released, and I learned that it was coded in XNA. That got me to start tinkering around with it as well, and boy oh boy, what an interesting thing it turned out to be! One of the first major things I realised was that the maths I so hated at school, actually had a place in this kind of programming. Working with sin, cos and tan, and calculating degrees and radians all of a sudden had a real place in my life! Anyway, I didn't delve too much in it (although I still want to!), but Jayson carried o...

The guys over at Re-logic have finally release a lot more info on Terraria: Otherworld, and boy do they look glorious indeed! Check this video first: The video is pretty sweet indeed, and here's what they had to say, and my thoughts on some of the things: Combining the sandbox gameplay experience with role-playing and strategy elements, Terraria: Otherworld explores the Terraria experience in an innovative and unique way - providing a fresh approach to the “open world” genre. The whole "cleanse the world" kinda thing I really like, it gives the game much more purpose than the original Terraria (not that I didn't like the original, it's probably my favourite game of all time! bold words hey!). In the video you can see the machines built in order to fight the corruption, and I saw some really cool looking defensive structures as well - something that was missing a great deal in Terraria. The game will include a core story line – a “purpose” if you will - ...

I am forever in the search of something awesome for online co-op. For a while we've been playing 7 Days to Die, but damn, they really messed up the zombie spawning with the latest patch - the game is still in alpha though, so I'm sure it'll get sorted in the near future, but now, the game is rather annoying to play. Not fun to actually see a zombie pop into existence in front of you. You can never clear an area of zombies and be safe, because if you turn around a new one will be right there ready to rip your face off. Don't get me wrong, I am crazy about 7 Days to Die, and when it'll finally get fully released will be a glorious day, but that day is not now, I'm sad to say... Things I like about it - survival, crafting, fighting, building, rpg, loot and most importantly, co-op. So, for now, my fix is coming from a rather overlooked gem that has been out there for quite some time - Planet Explorers. Now, I haven't put in tons of hours into the game ...

I was sad when I learned that GTA5 for PC has been delayed yet again, but on the other hand I don't really mind that much - it just means we'll get a even more polished game. I'd much rather wait for a quality title than have to sit through a massive day 1 patch that I need to download on my African "broadband". But, to keep us on the edge of our seats, good old Rockstar has given us some extremely hot eye candy of what is going to be the BEST version of Grand Theft Auto Five. Here they are, for your viewing pleasure: