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O! Q! Oooooooohhhhhhh!

October 15th, 2004 · No Comments · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I got an email from the people at OQO today! They’ve finally released the first model of the OQO UPC (Ultra Personal Computer) for $1999 (with WindowsXP Pro). Whooo! I’m so excited. I was afraid it might cost as much as Sony’s, and that would have been too much for me. But I can handle $2000.

So what the heck would I use it for? Well, for one thing I’m not a 3D developer. I’m quite content to bang out the 2D titles. So I don’t need a huge proc and amazing graphics card. I mean hell, I’m currently developing on an 800MHz P!!!m Sony Vaio with only ~368MB of RAM and I’m getting along just fine. This is an upgrade!

Secondly, it’s a tablet PC as well with its digital pen, so it’ll function great as a PDA. My old Handspring Visor Pro has seen better days. Another upgrade. Yey!

thirdly, the battery should have enough charge for watching a single movie* on the go, and is just cool for toting around videos to show friends from Ebaum’s World

Finally, it’s just damn cool to have a fully-functional* PC in the palm of your hand.

* Okay, here’s the catch that I still haven’t figured out. How do you load stuff into the OQO? There aren’t any external media drives available (yet). I’m at a loss to explain this, and I’ll have to look into it further.


So okay, besides that wonderful announcement, today was pretty good. Great Adventure kicked us out early cause it was raining, so we didn’t get off any shows today. But we have a two-show minimum in our contract, which means I just got $70 for sitting on my ass and reading a magazine for an hour and a half. Nice!

I was going to see that Team America: World Police movie tonight, but it just didn’t happen. That’s okay, I think I’ll see Taxi instead. That looks funny.

I also managed to get some more work done on Tanto. I added some more UI elements and made some engine changes:

  • I noticed that the SDL event loop was processing multiple mouse motion messages in one loop. Seems they pile up quick if the FPS are down. So my message system was also dispatching a buttload of MOUSE_MSGs all at once. So instead, each mouse motion message just updates the cursor position, and then at the end of the event loop, the last mouse position is dispatched to the game objects. Just once. Much better.
  • I tracked down a bug that was mis-labeling the receiver field when global messages were dispatched. It was making me tear my hair out, but it’s solved now.
  • I recoded the scene manager to load viewports with the subscenes. I used to have to code the viewport creation, which was a pain, but now I can just define them in the scene’s data file. Less stuff to code and now it’s easier to edit viewports – no more rebuilds!

So yea, good stuff, good stuff. Crap I have to get to bed early – gotta wake up and go power kiting with some of the Batman cast. Winds are forcasted at around 15mph, which means we’ll get some good jumps in hopefully.

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