The Cook Pages

Blog Migration

I've moved here.

posted by D. Cook @ 4:47 PM 2 comments

The Serious Lack of OpenGL 2.0 Support

At the moment, I should be working on the physics engine for Clockwork. I can't however, because i'm so baffled by the fact that no library's exist that implement the core OpenGL 2.0 spec.

The Microsoft headers have been frozen at 1.1 since 1995 (the year they originally came out). Mesa only supports OpenGL 1.5. OpenGL 2.0 has been around for over a year. You would think that at least one group would bother to release an implementation for it.

If it were as simple as adding the functions and definitions to the header files, I'd do it myself, however I'm pretty sure that it needs to be built into the library's as well.

Perhaps I'll try writing my own implementation sometime.

posted by D. Cook @ 3:34 PM 0 comments

Slashdot Reports: "Games Lead To Violence and Drugs?"

Read the article.

I never get tired of these. Another article about another group of people claiming that video games cause people to smoke crack and shoot up their schools. At least this study was conducted by a university, which makes it legitimate I suppose.

Legitimate or not though, video games do not cause people to do stupid things. People do stupid things, because they are stupid people to begin with. If you are actually mentally and/or emotionally affected by the content of a video game, then you shouldn't be playing the game. Why aren't these people doing studys on the parents of the people that play violent games? Why are there no records of the number of parents that let minors play mature-rated games?

I'm also curious as to why there is no crackdown on how violent movies affect people? Just because the movie industry has been around for a hundred years, doesn't mean it it's no longer subject to this sort of criticism. I also wonder if Jack Thomson has ever played a video game.

...Does Jack Thomson even have children?

posted by D. Cook @ 5:00 PM 0 comments

OS Dev.

I've decided to try my hand at OS design again. This time around, I'm working on a small project that I've semi-officially dubbed EGOS or the Elite Geek Operating System. My plan is to make it a 64bit OS, however that is proving to be a rather difficult task, due to the complete lack of x86-64 assembly information on the net. The most I've found so far (with regards to x86-64 system assembly), is a PDF from AMD.

posted by D. Cook @ 7:02 PM 0 comments

Gushing fanboy love for Linux.

I've started porting the engine code for Clockwork over to Linux (all 10,000 lines of it). I seriously just should have written the thing for Linux in the first place. I'll swap VC++ for Kate any day (yes, thats right. Kate).

While making the code fully cross-platform, I actually fixed some viewer issues that I was having in Windows. I was previously using a quick hack with a faux-GLUT menu, and some bool values for mouse locking (ie. gum and tape). The port forced me to re-write the mouse handler to use GLUT functions, rather than Windows cursor functions (GetCursorPos() and SetCursorPos()).

Due to this experience, I've concluded that you cannot write cross-platform code on Windows. The next (3D) project I start, I'm going to write in on Linux, and port it to Windows.

posted by D. Cook @ 1:59 AM 0 comments