Importing a photographed with a very low focal length to test the effect of variation over the alphabet.

Here is a set of images showing the result of assesment 1 as a work in progress.

P.S. I am always looking for more game developer work, you can view my LinkedIn profile here,

Maybe I’ll just release the tools for this themselves but I’m thinking I’d prefer to do a step by step run down of the existing system, explain why I changed what I changed and why it’s saving as much in terms of performance as it is. Some feed back here on that idea would be nice if any willing visitors would care to comment.

Your faithful coderer.

When approaching the job of modifying the Portal2 code to become  Dear Esther I decided at first to go with the option of removing the preprocessor commands that specified that I was building the Portal2 specific game dlls (server and client). This was akin to approaching a game of Jenga by knocking the whole tower down and rebuilding it. Jenga in reverse… Maybe ‘pick up sticks’ is a better childhood game related analogy to use.

I was faced with over 300 linker errors where files were demanding that the portal2 files be located (and low level objects at that) I shifted my tact to pulling thing out bit by bit and leaving the preprocessor commands in. 300 linker errors isn’t 300 linker errors. Each file you remove will often cause another file/s to scream out with it’s own linker error demanding you locate the file you just removed… And you go on like this until you can either negate the screaming (with hacky macros oh joy!) or the screaming stops.

I quickly got a game running this way but unfortunately it suffered erroneous rendering (it was rendering EVERY viewport overlay material all at once aswell as rendering in splitscreen with the second player screen rendering an empty frame buffer). So then, and I guess this is where the Jenga analogy comes in, I set about carefully removing all the non-Dear Esther vital components hoping to be able to strip out all the Portal2 specific objects without causing too much of a hassle… There was hassle. All too quickly I was facing 200+ linker errors and realised that my original plan was probably just as good.

So I re-removed the preprocessor definitions and have spent the last 20 hours dealing with them all one at a time (aswell as building a dummy UI which is essentially a carbon copy of the Portal 2 UI with Portal2 specific features ripped out of it). Finally now I can run a game, there aren’t too many asserts being thrown to the debugger (for some reason it hates me noclipping around…) and by 3am this morning (or 3 am tomorrow we’ll see) I should have a build fresh off the press to run over to Robert.

I have drunk upwards of 20 cups of coffee in this period… Probably well up

And of course to all those who have come here with full prior knowledge of this blogs existence I beg of you please, sit down, be comfortable, help yourself to whatever you have in your own fridge or cheese pantry and let’s help create a charming atmosphere for all the stumblers that might come stumbling.

Greetings done and discarded, let me begin again by introducing the intention of this particular nook in cyberspace. The crux of it is I’m a computer programmer having recently acquired some work doing said programming under contract from a studio calling itself ‘The Chinese Room’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/

I think here I should outline the major players at work in this circumstance beginning with the founder and proprietor of The Chinese Room Dan Pinchbeck.

http://twitter.com/#!/danpinchbeck

And then we come to Robert Briscoe. A man who had been frivolously wiling his time away working on a remake of Pinchbeck’s Dear Esther.

(http://www.littlelostpoly.co.uk/)

Which I suppose brings us to the actual meat of the blog. Seems all Briscoe’s wiling was not so frivolous at all. Not quite at all indeed. Seems people tended to admire Rob’s art, the depth of Dan’s story, the genuine sense of a true artistic experience that was inspired in people through this strange and new experiement in game design. And the thought occurred that the project, with all this interest, with all this love borne for it in the world, might have achieved an unforeseen commerical viability. I myself had been grinding away at the project’s lines upon lines of code with my standard programmer issued programmery things under the direction of Robert (some might have called me a ‘wiler’ too) and was never concerned for a moment that it might see a dime, or a nickle, come roll my way (no not me sir, a resounding no!).

And yet, you welcomed stumblers and comfortable fellows, it has become a thing which is now a commercial pursuit. Software licenses have been purchased, investors found and investments secured and we are all ready and go here friends. And what of this blog? Why are you being informed with all this? Because I intend for you to share my journey, the programmer’s journey, as Dear Esther is built.