Pierre Phaneuf's Diary

I've become a member of Communauto last week, and combined with getting my bike back, means that I'm at what is going to be my peak mobility for the next little while.

Used Communauto a couple of days later to go to a Quadra hackfest at Rémi's, with slajoie as well. I've had a surge of interest in Quadra, but it is a delicate thing to do: we need to release a new stable version before we can hack on the "next generation" version, and while we're getting very close now, there is definitely a momentum thing that can be lost just too easily. And now the kind of things left are packaging related, which isn't the most exciting (so help us out, dgryski!). We've got interesting ideas for future development, but we can't really do any of this for now, since it would make merging from the stable release very annoying (and it already isn't too wonderful at times)...

Getting my bike back meant going to work on bike, and that is ridiculously quick, on the order of six to seven minutes. That's faster than the metro, by a lot (that's only a bit more than the average waiting time, and I don't have to walk to Lionel-Groulx). In my opinion, that's not even good exercise, I hardly have time to break a sweat even if I go fast, so I might end up taking detours on good days (the Lachine Canal bike path is nearby).

Related to Quadra, I've been looking at SDL (which the next version of Quadra uses instead of its internal platform) and SDL_net. It's funny how game developers are so conservative sometimes! I don't know much about 3D games, but in 2D, people seem to develop more or less like they did on DOS more than 10 years ago, which was very limited back then, due to DOS not having much of a driver model. Because of that, since anything more than page flipping and waiting for the vertical retrace (using polling PIO, of course) is specific to every video chipset. A game wanting to use accelerated blits had to basically have its own internal driver model, and when a card was not supported, either the game would look bad (because it would use a software fallback), or would not work at all. In light of that, most games just assumed a basic VGA card (the "Super" part is made of vendor-specific extensions), using 320x200 in 256 colors (like Doom), or 640x480 in 16 colors (ever used Windows' "safe mode"?), with maybe a few extra extensions that were extremely common and mostly the same.

Then, DirectX appeared and all the fancy accelerations became available to games (window systems like X11 and Windows had their own driver model, but could afford to, being bigger projects than most games, and were pretty much the sole users of the accelerations, so they existed). What happened? Game developers kept going pretty much the same way. Some tests by Rémi back then found that using the video memory to video memory color key accelerated blits (with DirectDraw), getting hundreds of frames per second, where the software equivalent could barely pull thirty frames per second on the same machine. About an order of magnitude faster! You'd think game developers would be all over this, but no, they weren't. They were set in their ways, had their own libraries that did it the crappy way, and didn't bother, overall. The biggest user of 2D color keyed blitting is probably something like the Windows desktop icons.

Then, 3D acceleration appeared, and they just didn't have the choice. The thing is, this hardware still isn't completely pervasive, and especially for the target audience of a game like Quadra, who like nice little games and won't have big nVidia monsters in their machines, so using the 3D hardware for that kind of game would leave them in the dust. Nowadays, DirectDraw has been obsoleted and is now a compatibility wrapper on top of Direct3D, so oddly enough, we're back to 2D games having to avoid the acceleration.

Thankfully, in the meantime, the main CPUs and memory became much faster, so you can do pretty cool stuff all in software, but it's kind of a shame, I see all of this CPU being wasted. Think about it: Quadra pulls in at about 70% CPU usage on my 1.5 GHz laptop, so one could think it would "need" about 1 GHz to run adequately, right? Except it worked at just about full frame rate (its engine is bound at 100 frames per second) on my old 100 MHz 486DX! Something weird happened in between...

Game developers seem to be used to blocking APIs and polling so much, it spills over in SDL_net, which uses its sockets in blocking mode, and where one could easily lock up a server remotely by doing something silly like hooking up a debugger to one of the client and pausing it. Maybe unplugging the Ethernet cable would do it too, for a minute or two, until the connection timed out. How awful...

Whew, I slept really well these last two days: 23 hours in two nights! This was making up for a week of bad sleep, and was quite welcome!

Saturday, after shopping for some items for our soon-to-be new apartment (w00t! I can't wait!), we headed over to the Maison de Jade, in the evil place that is Boucherville. There, we had a gathering of the evil members of the former Club Info of the Cégep de St-Hyacinthe, ate (quite!) evil food and laughed evil laughters with our bellies full. This was (as usual) organized by pdage, evil space burger overlord (retired).

The next day, I shot a bunch of people to celebrate, and also found out that slajoie is now on LiveJournal (better late than never!).

Sweet. Reminds me of my old VT220, hehe.

Crazy day, tried wonderfully interesting software optimizations, which turned out to nothing (or almost). Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

Came back in the snow tonight, very late, to a quiet city. Took the night bus. I could physically feel the memories.

I'm missing some people terribly, and not just the usual suspects (although I do!).

I'm having this theory that people should sleep with their friends more. Not necessarily have sex, just, you know, go to bed together. There's something about just sleeping with someone, where you fade off into sleep together, and wake up together. Preferably in the same bed, but I'd say the minimum would be to be in the same room. Thinking back, I've done it with a good number of my best friends, and it always was a great experience.

I think I might just take up musicdieu on his offer (he replied to my call for a place to crash by pointing out he has a double bed).

I shall be taking the lady azrhey out for her birthday, um, later today. And have some gathering Friday. That should be quite nice, I think.

I had two missions for myself yesterday. The first was to feel things through. I wandered about the city, reflected upon these things, and just felt. It's a sharp pain, but facing it always seems to make it leave me faster, and I rather prefer that to the eternal dull background pain.

The second mission after that was to cheer myself up. I thus headed over to emjayne's "Party like it's 1995" birthday shindig, and even though I didn't drink a drop (because of the first mission still semi-ongoing), I had massive amounts of fun. archdiva reading "Erotic Tales of the Old Russia" was, um, something. Cheetos burns! Met a large number of new people, I just about lost track. Walked back downtown with gregorama, talking about a few different things, thanks man!

I did get hugs, and I did smile.

Now that I'm picking up a bit, I find that I have a ton of things to do. I haven't been doing good at the job search thing, and I feel terrible about that (although I did pick up two contacts for bioinformatics in Europe from boyinsantiago). I decided that this week was going to be going home every evening (no going out tuesday!) at a reasonable hour, and work on these things. Friday will be, of course, blacksquiggles's birthday, though!

azrhey is arriving back from Québec City soon, and I'm looking forward to that. I'm not at all one to fret over a few days of not seeing someone, but these few days have been... special.

Now, I'll go and do some of these tasks, like hanging my damn curtains!