Been playing a few games lately. First up was Assassins Creed. I thought this game was fantastic. The graphics are amazing, the story is really good. A lot of reviews seem to complain that all the missions are all copies of one another, and I’ll admit they are fairly similar, but I didn’t even notice. It’s just too much fun to sneak up behind someone and stab them in the throat. This is the first game I’ve played straight through without injecting another game in the middle.
All in all, I’m very happy with the purchase.
Next up was Mass Effect. I borrowed this from Basil who said it was good. I’ve been playing for a few hours now and my god an I disappointed. The textures on the characters look like cheap knock offs compared to Gears. The loading scene goes away just to have more loading. The textures pop-in after loading. I’ve seen characters run their hands through their own bodies. The shadows move randomly all over the place. It feels like this game should have had another 6 months of development time to get it cleaned up. The story is interesting, but the tech behind it is missing the mark. (Whoever through radial menus was a good idea needs a beating.) I’m very glad I borrowed this instead of purchasing. Takes a bit of the sting out.
Oh, and the decision to have a Mission tab and an Assignment tab is silly. I spent about 3 hours doing the assignments as I thought they were the required missions for me to move on. Until I randomly got caught back into the main story that is. Very annoying.
I’ll play it through for the story but I feel the need to get Gears back from Basil to cleanse myself.
We made a release of Ewl last night. This is our yearly release (we really have to get these out quicker). Given its been a year there is a pretty big list of changes. The diff file was almost the same length as the code base itself. Below is the summary of changes.
- Obligatory yearly release
- Rewrite of autotools scripts
- Reorganization of default theme structure
- Fixed general build of embed test support files
- Updated doxygen theme
- Restructuring of test application
- Extensive addition of unit tests
- Addition of XCB, SDL, and Windows engines
- Refactoring header files for faster build times
- Simplification of debugging macros to reduce code duplication
- Improved box layout algorithm
- A variety of bug fixes and typo corrections
- Rewritten combo container based on MVC framework
- Expanded support for config value handling
- Revamped dialog layout and API
- Custom DND cursor support
- Generalizing of canvas terminology
- Abstracting engine support
- MVC based filelist container
- Expanded default view support
- Convert icon and mime type handling to Efreet
- Improved menu event handling
- Reduced number of required callbacks and expanded custom callbacks
- External main loop support
- Improved general MVC API and implementation
- Better layout algorithm for paned widget
- Popup sets better window management hints and follows parent
- API changes for radio button selection querying
- Range extended to handle unknown end values
- Improved doxygen image handling
- UTF8 fixes for the ewl_text widget
- Abstraction and cleanup of tree2 internals
- General widget handling performance improvements
- Removal of deprecated DND code
- Widget layer and stacking fixes
- Support for additional general window management hints
Give it a try. If you find any bugs they can be logged to Bugzilla.