Cody Russell

Back home

I’m back home now. I already got a call from Ron Houston for another gig. Whee. I’m fixing up my mom’s computer today. She’s still got this old Pentium Pro with 64 megs of memory and an S3 Virge video card, so I’m giving it a little boost today with my old AMD K6-3/450, 128 meg, and Matrox G400. I meant to leave GTA2 for Cameron to play, but now I’m glad I didn’t because I’ll be able to play it on my mom’s machine.

Parhelia 512

The new Matrox Parhelia 512 looks pretty badass, and they say it’s coming out in June. *drool*

They always have to have a cool name for everything now, so Matrox calls 10bit DACs “GigaPixel”. I can’t wait to see it. The new 3DLabs board is also going to have that in it. For some reason they have screenshots on matrox.com under the GigaPixel section, as though they think I can view over a billion colors on my mom’s S3 Virge. It’s also got some really fast texture filtering, 16x anti-aliasing, four textures per pixel, 36 stage shader array (which certainly beats my 0 stage shader array in my GeForce2 or my mom’s S3 Virge!), and hardware-accelerated font anti- aliasing with gamma correction. Matrox always focuses heavily on high quality screen output, and so I expect that things will incredible with this board.

I’m excited. I can’t wait to see it!

Spider-Man

I went with Cameron and Rebecca to see Spider-Man the other day. Jenny was going to go, but then couldn’t. It was a pretty cool movie. We all agreed that it was the best comic book movie to come out yet. There was a short trailer for HULK before it. I guess they’re trying to make all the comics into movies now.

Grand Theft Auto 2

I got GTA2 and played it some yesterday. That game is so hokey, and so freakin’ fun to play. I got a “Get out of Jail Free” card, then found a good camping spot that had health and machinegun items, then I just went nuts blowing up all the passing cars. When the cops came, I would kill them and blow up their cars too, all the while getting more machine gun and health as needed. At one point I killed so many cops and blew up so many cop cars that the game said COP KILLA’ at me. That was so cool. Kill frenzies are fun, but very difficult to pull off successfully.

I absolutely cannot wait to see Grand Theft Auto 3. Whoa.

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

The name is just a little bit cheesy, but that’s okay. What I hate about this game are their stupid-ass names. Kyle. KYLE the Jedi. Come on, give me a break. That’s so stupid sounding. The only thing that could be worse would be STEVE the Jedi, or BILLY BOB the Jedi.

The lightsaber fighting is fantastic. The guns are not so interesting. The thing that sucks is that at the beginning of the game you have no lightsaber and you have no force powers, because Kyle the Jedi forsook the Force and gave up his lightsaber. All you have are guns. And this game is really hard. When a dozen storm troopers come at you, they’re all shooting at you and it doesn’t take that many blaster shots to kill you. Furthermore, I think this game has hit zones like Soldier of Fortune (which would make sense, since it’s made by the same people who made Soldier of Fortune), so if the storm troopers score a head shot and you have little or no shields, you’re toast. Overall, single player is probably the hardest FPS/action game I’ve played. Multiplayer is unbelievably awesome.

This game is pretty advanced too. In the demo they have some beautiful reflection mapping. Apparently it has support for vertex shaders, judging by the video preferences. Having only a GeForce2, I can’t take advantage of that feature though. I’ve been wanting a GeForce3 or 4, though. I’d like to program around a little with the vertex shaders.

Lesley’s recital

Lesley’s recital was last night, and it was awesome (of course). Here is a photo of Lesley and me playing the Halvorsen Passacaglia for violin and viola.

PHP

In order to sort of get a basic understanding of how to write simple stuff in PHP, I decided to convert my homepage into PHP code. It’s all finished now except for the photos page, because I figured while I’m at it I should learn enough to make that page not suck ass, which it currently does.

Vardi’s Paganini recording

I heard Emanuel Vardi’s recording of Paganini caprices (on viola, of course!). It’s pretty good. I wish I could play a couple of them like that.

Opera Smackdown!

It’s an Internet radio station. Yes, it does play opera. Check it out! This kicks ass.