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4:00 pm (CST): All random bantering and project updates from now on will be posted on the Dick Stream. Additionally, I have database-ified my entire project library over there. This site and its structure will remain intact, because tons of people link here and it's just easier to keep all of the old isolated projects (Jumbot, Scientist Hunt, even AVALANCHE) where they are in their own isolated sites. However, the short of it is that you only ever need to check richwhitehouse.com now. It even has RSS! 2:30 am (CST): I'm planning on going to Vegas in June now, and if things don't go horribly, I should have from April to June free to work on my tech/AVALANCHE. I keep coming up with new features that I want for the next AVALANCHE release. I guess I have to draw the line somewhere, but I can't bring myself to draw it yet. There's stuff on the plate all the way from more renderer abstraction to new rigid body physics. On that note, here, have a screenshot of the current reactor level. If you compare it to the v0.4 reactor, you can see a lot of new features already at work. 
In other news, since I don't think I've mentioned this in public in a long time, my efforts to see the Jedi Knight II engine source GPL'd never actually halted. I've been working behind the scenes and trying everything possible to get a good contact at LucasArts, from going through recruiters to asking John Romero to give me a hand. However, they seem to have no interest in replying to either Romero or myself, and the final prognosis is looking a bit grim. Getting a job at LucasArts as an engineer and taking care of this myself by dealing directly with legal has crossed my mind, but I don't seem to care quite enough to go that far. Then again, there might come a day when I just don't have anything better to do. Who knows. On a completely random tangent, I also find the recent Shacknews sell-out to be sadly lamentable. It had been going downhill for some time, and their powerful liplock with the metaphorical genitals of certain studios and companies was to a point where it had become common public knowledge. However, since the shack had its roots in the first Quake community, I believe it is appropriate to morn its final passing. On the up side, the shack comment posters that like to spend 16-20 hours a day posting intellectually devoid comments and links seem to be very happy to remain, so the shack now serves a good purpose in becoming kind of like a mental prison for the intellectually disabled. Hopefully they'll never escape. I loved reading the serious commentary from developers on there, but wading through the trash was too often not worth it. Old Quake fan sites selling out, developers being ignored in their pleas to see their work opened and freed to the public. What has the world come to? Let us ponder, my dear children. Let us ponder. 6:00 pm (CST): I've uploaded a whole mess of things to my YouTube channel. There's old in-development footage for numerous projects, footage of projects that were never released, trailers, and Goto Maki strangling a chihuahua with her pantyhose. I'm sure at least one of those things must interest you, so go take a look. Also, I'm still working on the iPhone thing. My producers keep extending it with more completely previously-unmentioned features, though. So, I no longer know when I'm going to get the chance to get that new AVALANCHE release out. Hopefully within a few months, at worst. 10:00 pm (CST): Still doing the iPhone thing. I've had a chance to get back to my other stuff for a little while over my holiday break, though. I've got lots of awesome new tech items for the next AVALANCHE release. Here are some screenshots:   On the left, I've got some fragment fog going on, which supports a variety of blend modes and modulation effects. I also have a new concept that I call an "atmosphere map", which allows true volumetric fog throughout the level for what is actually a relatively small memory cost. However, since it involves raytracing through a texture volume in screenspace, it's too slow to use on anything but top-of-the-line video cards (with massive fillrate power). On the right, the scene contains 0 dynamic lights, and shows off the new lightmap stuff, including correct per-pixel specular highlights (with cleverly scale-and-biased alpha values). That scene is managing to maintain a high framerate on my terrible GeForce Go 7600, even with the nice depth-correct soft shadows enabled. I've done a ridiculous amount of work on my tools as well. I'll be rolling all of this out sometime after my iPhone project is done. If not in the next week, but I'm guessing I won't get everything done that I want to get done before my break is over. 10:30 am (CST): I got a contract for an iPhone project, so I've been working on that for the past couple weeks, while staying with a friend in Ohio. But anyway, my old lead at Raven has released the Heretic/Hexen source under the GNU GPL here. As some of you probably know, the original license was totally janked and was basically the EULA for a commercial title, making it impossible for people to legally do a whole lot with the source. I released the source to my Hexen DS port despite this, because I knew it was just a screwup, but it has prevented branches of that project from flourishing and being hosted on certain free repository servers. So if you still have any interest, you're now free to do what you want with it (as long as you abide by the terms of the GPL). I'll get around to re-packaging the HexenDS code under the proper license eventually, but in the mean time feel free to treat it as if it were under the license. If anyone questions it, we'll just lie and say I already sent you the new package with the GPL license. That HL2 mod I mentioned last update is still alive, even though I'm not actually doing anything on it while I work on this contract. If you're interested in mapping for us, let me know. It's a fairly good opportunity if you want something to beef up your portfolio, or if you just want to work on something terrible (terrible in an awesome way). I'm going to go searching for mappers at some point. It would be nice if one were magically reading this and contacted me first, though. If I don't get lured by gigantic amounts of cash into doing another publisher-funded iPhone game after this one, I've got a few ideas for things I'd like to make for it on my own. If you ignore the instability and general brokenness of a lot of the tools (anyone who bitches about Visual Studio's stability obviously has not spent much time in Xcode, and that's ignoring the half-assed "simulator" implementation that doesn't even run the native ARM binary), it's a pretty nice development platform. The hardware's real weak point is actually the PowerVR chip, but the CPU is actually quite powerful, despite being underclocked. Of course, I came from developing on a 66mhz ARM with no FPU, so I probably appreciate it more than most. There is a whole lot possible on this platform, though, and the fact that you aren't developing for 50 different pieces of hardware with a shitty interpreted language under varying runtime environments makes it several thousand magnitudes better than normal cellphone development. I've got the R-Cube engine running pretty nicely on it already. 8:00 am (CST): It's general update time. AVALANCHE is up to version 0.4. It's had something over 50,000 downloads worldwide, I lost track a while ago with all the mirrors it's on now. So that worked out well. I noticed that it was a link of the day for Edge Magazine a while ago, and there's an article about it coming up in the September issue of Chief. At least that's what I've been told. Lots of other reviews and praise from indie games sites and other random gaming media outlets as well. I was pleased with the rate of propagation. I also did an interview recently, over here. It's related to my long-term participation in the Quake community, and my answers branch out into all kinds of random crap. One thing is for sure, it will make you want to hold me just a little bit more. I'm working on a Half-Life 2 mod now. Two other people are on it with me, they're actually doing most of the mod work. I'm just mapping and doing some voiceovers and other random crap. Modding HL2 is actually a huge pain in the ass, and we'd be using Doom 3 if HL2 didn't have all the users. We're already running into stupid limitations with Valve's new particle system, and there is just such a massive amount of broken stuff in the scratch SDK they have up there. I can only guess how many more modders would be active if there was an actual reasonable platform to start with. I've been tempted to just add some HL2 bsp/mdl importing functionality to mesh2rdm, and then we could use my own engine and make all of the game code from scratch and require HL2 on install. The only thing we really want is the assets. But that's just an unreasonable amount of work in the end just for the sake of not having to work within engine limitations (and the game code is a bit disgraceful here and there, but it's workable). Additionally, I'm moving on August 1st (still in Madison, just across town), so I'll be out of contact on e-mail/forums for some period around there while I move and get re-situated. I'm also planning some iPhone prototype work after I get moved in over there. And I'm going to Ohio for a bit after I move also, so generally all of next month I am going to be spotty on the communication. I know that quite a few of you have been meaning to confess your undying love and devotion to me, especially after reading that interview, so please get that done by August. Otherwise I may be unable to reciprocate appropriately. One other thing, Dixerius could really use a build with the latest R-Cube engine and a few other enhancements. I have been putting this off, under the assumption that not a single person in the world cares about this except for me. If you care, please e-mail me and tell me to stop being lazy. Dixerius could actually use a complete overhaul, an adaptation to a bit more of a Panzer Dragoon perspective with more procedural music stuff. It's too bad I don't have slave developers to do these things for me. If you would like to apply as a slave developer, please send a portfolio and resume to my e-mail address. Having "Rich Whitehouse's Development Slave" on your resume is like a free ticket into any game development studio. Seriously. 10:00 pm (CST): AVALANCHE is here. 3:00 am (CST): I'm going to say, ready by June. Barring any unexpected medical circumstances, because I appear to be falling apart and my jaw is killing me, and as always there is significant chance that someone is going to try to kill me for being such a Dick. Oh, and today is the birthday of a very special person. The person with the power to change the world. That's right, I'm not just talking about someone who happens to be delusional and overly-conceited, I'm talking about George Lucas. I think that George's birthday should be declared a national holiday, so that we can all dress up like Star Wars characters and celebrate the shallowness of our existence. I know that's what I'll be doing today. I call Han, don't copy me you bastards. 12:00 am (CST): It's already been a month. I guess I'll push out that Dixerius release I talked about. I haven't actually been developing Dixerius at all, but since it shares the engine code-base with my active project, it's getting free benefits. Here's what's new in version 2.2:
  8:30 pm (CST): I'm actually not being lazy, I've spent the last month working non-stop on the Next Project. I don't intend to reveal anything until it's ready for an initial release. I have no idea what the timeline is currently, but probably within another month. Maybe a couple weeks depending on how the content creation phase continues to proceed. I'll have a new Dixerius version up soon with a ridiculous amount of added technology items as well. 11:00 pm (CST): It's that time again. A new Dixerius release (v2.1) and SDK release (v0.2) are now available. Here is some of what's new:
11:00 pm (CST): I've been working a lot over the past couple days, and have another Dixerius release with the following new features:
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