How to Restore the Windows 7 MBR (Master Boot Record)

So I had this crisis where the MBR got broken and Windows would not boot. This can happens for many reasons, maybe you tried to dual boot your PC and something went wrong. Anyway where’s a quick tip on how to fix it (You need a Windows 7 DVD of course)! 1 – Boot your computer to the Windows 7 DVD 2 – Select your language and click next. 3 – Click the button for “Use recovery tools”....

January 21, 2012 · 1 min · 177 words · David Amador

Find/Replace in Visual Studio using regular expressions

Usually Find/Replace gets the job done for what I need, although sometimes using “Replace All” can break more stuff that it fixes. But today I had this function I wanted to get rid of and simple change it with a public variable. So I had something like this. object->setLayer(/*BLABAL BLA CODE, */); I want to replace it with something more simple object->Z = /*BLABAL BLA CODE, */; So using Visual Studio Find/Replace in regular expressions mode I used this as a search string...

January 14, 2012 · 1 min · 207 words · David Amador

post mortem of another year

Another year has gone by, not quite what I was expecting developing wise, like putting another game out there, but things never turned out as planned. Still over the last year I’ve gradually saw out little Different Pixel brand reaching more and more places which can be very helpful in the future and sure hell is nice to see work recognized. From the top of my head I recall Kotaku article on the Xbox360 release, we finally managed to release the Xbox360 version, which was the first one we made....

January 1, 2012 · 2 min · 410 words · David Amador

Basalt code swarm

I discovered code swarm a while ago and decided to test on my own repositories. This is a test on Basalt, and although I’ve been working on the engine since January 2010, only in 2011 did I placed in on a repository so a bunch of stuff is added right on the beginning. This is the result.

December 23, 2011 · 1 min · 57 words · David Amador

Revert To The Old Tweetdeck

If you use Tweetdeck you probably already know they screwed the new version (1.0) and you want to revert back. Unfortunately since they are now part of Twitter I had a hard time finding the older build and decided to share it. And that’s why you are here too probably, here it is: Tweetdeck 0.38.2. Don’t forget you need Adobe Air installed. Edit 29-12-2011 Some user have experienced a “This application cannot be installed because this installer has been mis-configured....

December 20, 2011 · 1 min · 166 words · David Amador

november progress

So as I mentioned a few weeks back, since November 1st I quit my job and I’ve been mainly focusing on our next game for Different Pixel. After a month, I think so far progress has been good. I’ve been able to work almost entirely on the game itself instead of the engine because most of the stuff is stable enough since Vizati. It’s kind of rewarding now and instead of reading tons of docs of other engines each time something doesn’t work right I usually know where the problem may be and can fix it, as good as I can at least....

December 7, 2011 · 2 min · 341 words · David Amador

Rage

So being a big fan of Quake, Quake 3 Arena and Doom I was eager to get my hands on id Software latest game, Rage. Like most developers out there I’ve been impressed by John Carmack’s work and breakthroughs in gaming and computer graphics for years. When I first heard Rage was targeting 60FPS I got intrigued. Almost every game targets 30FPS and targeting twice as that leaves less time to render each frame, even more since they were promising vast wastelands, detailed characters, top notch animations and AI....

December 7, 2011 · 2 min · 316 words · David Amador

something new in the horizon...

So I’ve been out for quite some time, and this is just a quick update. First, I have tones of unread, thus answered emails on my inbox. I haven’t managed to go through that lately. I usually scroll to see if there’s a really urgent one, I will eventually read them all. I decided to quit my current job, my last day is October 31st. I couldn’t glimpse a very promising carrier there and I practically staggered learning-wise for the past months due to the type of work we develop so yeah, that’s it....

October 27, 2011 · 1 min · 165 words · David Amador

Hurry you only have 16 ms to render everything

So I’ve been working on my new game and I’m doing some tweaks here and there on the engine. Mainly with the rendering section, trying to squeeze as much as possible, thus maintaining an acceptable framerate. It’s not like I’m doing a heavily graphic game but I like to know that It can be used even on slower pcs and that I’m not using more cycles than necessary. This past week and after reading a bunch of stuff and keynotes from John Carmack about Rage (60FPS ftw) I decided to measure my own stuff....

August 8, 2011 · 4 min · 654 words · David Amador

Using Git for revision control

If you are coding, no matter what it is, games, software, websites, you should be using a code revision control of some sort. Are you using? Cool. Is it Git? Smart choice, so you probably don’t need to read the rest of this post. For the rest I’m giving some help on how to start from scratch. First of all I recommend some reading on Revision Control so that you understand what I’m talking about....

July 8, 2011 · 2 min · 363 words · David Amador

So what have I learned after eight months on the App Store

First of all I think this is my last idevblogaday post for a while. I my math doesn’t fail me this is my 10th post and it’s time for someone to take turn. Actually it’s just the 9th. I hope my words have somehow enriched your knowledge, in case you want to stick around just bookmark my feeds. I keep this fairly updated. Also since I’ve been working on a new game...

June 24, 2011 · 4 min · 672 words · David Amador

Playing sound using OpenAL

For sound I use OpenAL, it’s free, cross-platform, I’ve managed to get it working on iPhone, Windows and Mac. Setting up OpenAL to play a sound is pretty straight forward, a bit like OpenGL. First you need to create a context. ALCcontext *context; ALCdevice *device; device = alcOpenDevice(NULL, ALC_DEFAULT_DEVICE_SPECIFIER); if (device == NULL) { // Handle Exception } //Create a context context=alcCreateContext(device,NULL); //Set active context alcMakeContextCurrent(context); // Clear Error Code alGetError(); Now for the second part, loading a wav file....

June 10, 2011 · 2 min · 269 words · David Amador