Thursday, May 15, 2003

Looking through my referrer logs today I see a lot of Google requests for 'SEND MORE MONEY solution'. I'm guessing someone has set an assignment for people to solve this problem. One of the searches was 'SEND MORE MONEY c++ solution'. I've posted the Common Lisp version here previously, feel free to translate it into C++. It'd be an interesting exercise to try that... 11:36:00 PM

I've got a pretty old development PC with a Matrox G400 video card. It does hardware accelerated OpenGL under Linux and I was pretty pleased that it ran Massive well enough for me to do development on it. I recently did some benchmarking comparing gcc vs the Intel C compiler and the person I showed these to was surprised at how very slow my times were. He suggested upgrading to an NVidia graphics card. So I did. I didn't buy top of the line, just a GeForce 4 Ti4200 card. But what a difference! In some simple rendering benchmarks the NVidia was 5 to 8 times faster than the Matrox. Obviously it's not a fair comparison since the NVidia card is much more recent, has more memory on board, etc, but I was really surprised given how slow my PC is that the card was that much of a factor. And pleased. I wish I'd updated ages ago! 11:31:07 PM

It looks like the game Creatures has been rescued from the brink of death. According to the Creatures Community website the rights to the Creatures brand have been sold to a company called "Gameware Europe": The new owners of Creatures are a company called "Gameware Europe", which was set up, in part, by a gentleman called Ian Saunter who, if you consult your old Creatures manuals, you'll see has been involved with Creatures for a long time. In fact, he has been Development Director for several years and, before that, contributed in no small part to Creatures 1. In fact, it was his idea to make Creatures 1 an artificial life product as opposed to a "Real Game", and he was the producer on Creatures until appointing Toby Simpson to take over the role back in early '96. He has been more low profile to most of the community, than other employees of Creatures Labs, but has been a serious driving force behind the Creatures games over the last ten years, from when Creatures was in its conceptual stages, up until present day Creatures. 1:24:58 PM