Jay McGavren's Journal

I was picking Lenny up from school today, and I walked by a fourth or fifth grader who was asking his friend, “So does the Master Chief die?”

Halo 3...

Jeremy and Nate had the good sense to get to bed at 1 AM (their time). Why didn’t we?

Halo 3 isn’t spectacular, just rock-solid. On a system plagued by connection issues, it hooked us up to people 2,000 miles away without a hitch. In an era where split-screen gameplay is rapidly being abandoned, my wife and I were both playing co-op (not just deathmatch) over Live. We fired up the movie editor and reviewed a game that was (automatically!) saved, and marvelled at explosions frozen in time with a flick of the pause button.

I am not a game developer, but I know enough to know these features were not easy to implement. They required careful forethought, and in some cases, intentional sacrifices in game performance. And they are great. It’s nice to see a company care about the overall quality of the game experience, rather than fitting a few more polygons into the back-of-box screenshots. I hope they license the movie, party, and lobby features as a framework, because I know other developers won’t (can’t?) do this stuff if they have to code it from scratch.

As I drove down the 202 this morning my phone buzzed, and as I answered I glimpsed Lenny’s kindergarten teacher’s name on the caller ID. “Oh, no,” I thought, “how can he be in trouble already?”

But no, she was calling for direction on releasing the Monarch butterfly, which was waiting on the remains of its chrysalis when she walked into the classroom this morning. Evidently the kids were at that moment painting pictures of the butterfly, and voting on what to name it.

Whew. That worked out well. Many thanks, Aunt Laura!

0.5.1...

The zyps GUI is actually tolerable now - the main addition was a simple speed limiter EnvironmentalFactor. The Push and Pull actions are pretty cool, too. I also ripped out user-defined conditions, as they just made things complicated and didn’t offer much useful functionality.

The GUI actually isn’t my top priority, but it will be most people’s introduction to the library, so it’s important to put my best foot forward.

Now to get a reliable, safe dRb server (is that an oxymoron?) going before the next Ruby users group meeting. The programming challenge at Desert Code Camp showed me a shared environment for programmers to play around in, however unstable, can be a great deal of fun.

This is a test post to see if new LiveJournal entries will show up on Judy’s friends page. So far, they don’t.

Edit: Fixed!