Categories
Personal Philosophy

On Stuff I’ve Been Thinking About.

I am starting this blog project with some friends of mine that is similar to the 24-Hour Blog Day 1 and 2. If you took 24-Hour Blog Day and stretched it out you’d have this project. The basic concept is that a rotating person (a new person chosen from a rotation of people not a person who is spinning. Duh, guys.) chooses a topic and we all have to write a posts on it within a week. Simple. To prepare myself for it I decided to write just a short post just to sand some of the rust off.

Basically, I want to just present you with some things that have been on my mind grapes.

  • VCRs, Cassete Tapes, Film Cameras, Vinyl Records. They are all analog devices. We are, or are getting very close to being, completely off analog storage standards for our media. Given our high definition video and audio and it’s storage being in a digital format; Do you think that we could have achieved this kind of fidelity with analog devices?
  • How everything can be described by a mathematical function, eventually.
  • How incredibly elegant computers are. I mean we take fantastically enormous functions and problems and break it down to a series of functions on 1s and 0s. How amazing.
  • How the SNES is great. It really is great.
  • Why people who claim to be Christian forget the golden rule of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Would you want another to restrict your rights as a person? My guess is no, but it’s hard to look at things from another’s point of view. That being said it’s important to try. Tolerance and acceptance can only be found in another’s shoes.

These are just some of the myriad things I have been thinking about. What do you guys think about any of this? Lemme know and stay tuned for at least weekly blog updates thanks to the blog project. First one is coming up in a couple days.

Categories
Personal Photography

Some photos!

These are pictures taken over the last couple of months. The first parts are from Marshall/Battle Creek, Michigan. The Fightin’ Creeks! The last ones are from when Ad Liberation performed at the University of Illinois. I want to start posting more now that I have the backend stuff all snapped up. Here is to that.

Categories
Video Games

New Life for Old Games

I have been doing a little research lately on game engines. Game engines are those things that make all those great looking video games work. It’s the core, like a car engine (crazy, right?!?). I won’t go down that particular rabbit hole any further, but it got me thinking about old games and how you could theoretically upgrade those engines. These upgraded engines could really modernize gameplay and graphical fidelity. I started with a game series/engine that defined the FPS genre, Doom (Doom II to put a finer point on it). Here are my findings.

Here is a list of all the resources I used:

The game can be bought on the cheap on Steam and works on any modern Windows install.

High resolution texture packs really make a huge difference.

Two of the most popular Doom engines.

I was surprised at what I found. Doom II has no reason being able to look this good. I mean fully realized 3D models and true polygonal environments. If it can be done on a game that came out in 1994 think about how much can be done with games now. Yeesh. I made a video comparing the differences. There are so many modifications I could of made, but these seemed to look the best to me to bring it as close to a modern shooter as possible. Doom originally didn’t allow for free-looking even though the environments had levels. The new engines do allow for that to happen, but I turned it off for the video because I wanted the comparison to reflect visual changes not gameplay changes.

I didn’t get into the nitty-gritty of installing and configuring everything because that wasn’t necessarily the point of this post, but if anyone is interested and can’t get it working let me know in the comments, Facebook, or Twitter and I would be more than willing to help out.