Seven Hours On One Task - But It Was Worth It

I started with about eight or so high critical tasks, and ended the first part of my day (9AM-7PM-No-Food) with seven left to do, but it was a great day though as I have increased the loading speed of the whole test game pipeline, largely by moving plenty of the 'load once' instructions to before the editor starts, and also making a 4 second improvement in the step that generates a mega texture for distant terrain rendering. On my system, an empty level used to take 16 seconds from clicking Test Game to starting the game, but in the new build it now only takes 9 seconds and I have identified a 1.5 second pause when generating water and 4 seconds when initializing physics, both of which I think I can shave down, but it might not make it into the priority list, moving on.

You will notice I am exceeding my two sentence barrier today as it's Friday and you will need some mind fuel for the weekend. Happy to provide!  Above is a cool new character skin from our artist Adam, who will no doubt be making an appearance as either a default character or a skin choice for the future Character Creation Kit.

It's now one week back, and 5 dev days into 2015 and I am still feeling very charged from my rest over the holidays.  I have booked my flight to San Francisco to attend GDC in March, and my all accounts looks to be a great show with Intel exhibiting outside the Expo hall for ALL FIVE DAYS (of which I may very well be part of), and Steam are preparing something pretty big it seems surrounding their mysterious Steam Machines device(s).  I will be blogging and tweeting there as per usual, so if you want to catch up for a drink of Guinness and a Pie, I'll be following the attendant crowds as we stumble from one drinking hole to another.

Work on the Steam side is also going very well, with our resident Steam-tech-head Ravey solving the various challenges that will allow you to create, share and play not only your stock asset levels, but also store and custom content too, in glorious multi-player.  I can't wait to see what the community does with THAT, exciting times and let's hope we cover enough bases for our Steam launch (early access build).

My Friday night plans are pretty typical of a bedroom coder, eat something quickly (as the body needs energy after 10 hours in the saddle), walk the dog, make some tea and continue my quest to knock all the high priority items off my list before I go to bed.  Rest assured there will be more on Monday, but I'll still get a buzz out of clearing my proverbial inbox.  As it is Friday, I might treat myself to a J.D & Coke, a recipe I have improved by substituting regular for something called Coke Zero Cherry, which makes an awesome mixer and is literally one calorie (could them, one).  Now if only they could distill a 1 calorie bourbon, fat gits like me can rejoice the world over and drink ourselves thin!