Category Archives: My Rants

…I ain’t paying $12 for a domain name renewal (well, renewal + whois privacy)…especially for my ‘hobby’ site ie. this site.

So after 3 years using vortex69.net – although I only have the blog since ~6 months ago – I’m moving it to vortex69.tk .

The 25 visits in 90 days will be biggest enemy now.

For future reference (for myself, or anyone who finds this), this is the code to mass replace a string in mysql:

UPDATE table_name SET column_name = REPLACE(column_name,’original_string’,’replace_string’)

on wordpress, updating the posts would be:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `post_content` = REPLACE(`post_content`,’old domain’,’new domain’)

I’m starting to like blender for simple objects, despite the wasted time doing stuff that had a button on 3ds max – chamfer comes to mind, as does the shell modifier – by simple objects I mean most things under 1k tris, hence most of the props on my current project fit that description – yes, I’ve heard that too little tris end up being as bad as too many, but why in hell would I use over 1k tris on a bullet box – so…yeah, that is all.

For now there’s no free version, only the Pro trial. Scrap that, there’s an option to activate free

Which I was already using for a couple of days, in a fast and easy explanation: Google is a good friend of mine.

In a bit longer explanation, google indexed a download page for the f1 version (RC1, if I’m not wrong) and you could register it as trial. And Unitys update check feature took care of keeping me up to date.

Now, stuff…(Consider I’m using the pro features and I’m a noob, so I’ll only talk about graphic stuff)

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By blender, I guess what I mostly missed was the interaction of 3ds max.

As I posted earlier, I’m playing around with blender – a piece of software I’ve disliked ever since I first touched it, a few years ago – and for now, I’m able to model simple stuff – that means I’m able to assemble cubes together in a way that makes them resemble something – then I wanted to put some textures on it and it took me quite a while to find out how to do that, reason? The “Texture” tab was out of my monitor viewing area, together with whatever tabs come right after it.

Then a little, simple bit of UV mapping, not bad, overall the same as max.

Remember those ‘sticks’ I posted earlier, that didn’t export very well using fbx?

They were an actual prop for one of my projects (Colina Silenciosa). A little old, beaten pier.

Here’s a magnificent ‘look mommy, I’ve used blender’ WIP:

The best part of using blender is: Next time I say I hate it, no one will be able to tell me: “But you never tried it!!” and be right.

Today I finally decided to search for a 3ds max interaction preset for blender and found one.

And magically blender started working for me – not really, but better than before – now all I have against blender is that it has a tendency to crash. That and it lacks any way to measure an object, which is bad, very bad, since every model I make always uses the correct, real life measurements. And FBX exporting on blender sucks…a lot…it might be my fault, but it’s not normal that this (quick “Oh, look I’m able to use blender now” test):

Becomes this in Unity:

Same thing if I import it into max, only 1 ‘stick’ in there. Thinking positively, Collada works  and imports ok into Unity.

*edit*

If I’m not wrong, the problem was my good old nemesis “Export Selected”

Finally finished “At the Mountains of Madness”
Now, a long stop from reading anything by H.P. Lovecraft, back to my computer related books, I miss them.

As for my game projects, “Project 32” (the point and click, escape the room project) is on hold, not currently in the mood to work on it, the project I’m working in with a friend, Colina Silenciosa (we fucking need a name for it…) is back to my work table since I decided to at least end the terrain. Talking about terrains, Unity’s terrain editor sucks.

Talking about Unity, seems like the release date is getting near and still no official feature delta. All I know is that Beast will be there in a ‘light’ version and the object occlusion thing (forgot its name) is pro only. Hopefully someone will release an occlusion add-on – if I’m not mistaken there is one for 2.6.1 – or else at least one of my 3D game projects will be killed due to technical limitations, if not the two of them (the unnamed sniper game and Colina Silenciosa).

On – personal – computer related news, my old mouse broke and now I’m using this wireless POS that randomly double clicks.

Thought of the day: Damn I hate to be poor...

Believe if you want, but I’m still reading “At the Mountains of Madness”

Probably one of the factors for such thing is that I normally only read in the instants before going to bed, when both my eyes and brain are already tired. To help the ‘my eyes are fucking tired’ effect, I normally wake up at 10 or 11 in the morning and go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning, around 80% – or more – of that time is somehow wasted in front of a computer.

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One thing I’ve learned to love – since I started using dropbox, around 3 months ago – is how useful those ‘Online Backup’ websites are.

Right now I have an account on 3 different sites – ADrive, Dropbox and SpiderOak (referral link, we both get 1 extra GB) – and since ADrive offers 50Gbytes for free – not that I really believe I’ll be able to use them – it can be considered my ‘main’ one, storing five compressed backups of my websites and my projects and a few misc things, Dropbox is used to store the latest – compressed – backup of my websites and my projects (until the projects folder grows too large…) and some small documents – due to dropbox syncing stuff, which is nice – and SpiderOak stores an uncompressed version of my projects folder (which is only 1gbyte for now). All of that using a connection with 1mbit of upload, yes, I’m a very patient guy when I want.

Now, obviously I’m waiting for the day when I’ll need to retrieve those files for some reason and then I’ll find out why those are free.

It is you, the last real hero!

At least the last one who had a personality…

Let’s see if this time the darned game will really be released.

Now listening to: Motorhead - One more fucking time