Topic: Where I've Been

[silicone_milk]

I kind of disappeared after setting up some projects for myself (q3map2 executing on the GPU and my website).

The reason for this is I landed a full time job. I currently work at an IT consulting company. I handle enterprise level database administration, data analysis software development (think google analytics for MS SQL, MySQL, and Oracle databases), network security, and in-house software development (auto status reports on all active servers, ez-sync programs to get computers with fresh OS installs updated with necessary updates and necessary software before being connected to the internet, etc...)

So, yeah. I've been really busy. I also just moved in to a new place three weeks ago and I still haven't gotten around to hooking my desktop back up

Looking forward to pay-day so I can get my hands on a cintique 21ux

[kat]

That's a bit of a departure isn't it? Going from a game developer into IT? Are you doing any game related stuff at all now?

[silicone_milk]

Hm.. I suppose it is. 

I'm still doing game related stuff... just not as much nor as often.

I have a couple contracts to finish up at Chronic Logic and I'm not sure what's going to happen after that. I still dream of working for SquareEnix or Kojima Productions some day

[ratty redemption]

this is another topic I previously missed *ratty bangs head on desk*

@ milk, good luck with your new job. my gf works in IT for a london insurance company heading up their help desk among other things. she's found it very stressful at times, I hope your job doesn't turn out like that.

[silicone_milk]

haha no worries. It's not too stressfull. I just work with people from Peru and Mexico with really thick accents so communication breaks down at times.

They also don't listen to my suggestions. Such as the security measure that just requires us to connect to a machine at our shop then to our clients computers to encrypt our traffic to protect sensetive information. According to them it's "too complicated"

[ratty redemption]

@ milk, understood and one of my gf's suggestions of not leaving laptops containing clients sensitive data on trains was also dismissed for similar reasons.

considering how incompetent her bosses are, it's amazing they make any money, but they must be doing something right has they keep buying out smaller companies. to which my gf has tried to explain to them that they should spend some of their profits on employing new IT staff but apparently they don't understand the concept.

[silicone_milk]

bought a gts 250 and picked up work on q3map3 (q3map version 3.0.01)

CUDA, for the record, is a royal pain in the ass to set up a proper development environment for (in windows at least).

[ratty redemption]

@ milk, how does nvidia's cuda compares to ati's equivalent if there is one?

[silicone_milk]

not sure. Haven't touched an ATI card in many many years.

[ratty redemption]

@ milk, understood.

do any of you other guys know?

[Shaderman]

ATI (AMD) has the Stream technology.

Here's something like a comparison.

[ratty redemption]

@ shaderman, cool and thanks for the links.

[silicone_milk]

agreed. Was an interesting read.

[silicone_milk]

As I've been doing some more research I've been more and more aware of the fact that a lot of people have ATI cards rather than NVIDIA.

Unfortunately, CUDA is an NVIDIA exclusive technology and will only run on their cards. This cripples the ability to distribute q3map3 and ostracizes non-NVIDIA users.

I've shifted focus from CUDA to the younger and more experimental OpenCL which will allow the program to make use of both the gpu and cpu to balance workload (instead of gpu only as in CUDA) and is device agnostic. This means that q3map3 will be able to run on any device with opengl support. (Mac, Linux, and Windows users with either ATI or NVIDIA cards will be able to run it).

That is all.

[silicone_milk]

So, a couple updates:

OpenCL, being a fairly new tech, doesn't seem to want to work properly on my machine even though I have an OpenCL compatible video card. Whatever.

Secondly, this is going to take much longer than I thought as the GTKRadiant and Q3Map2 sources are heavily coupled (they depend a crapload on each other). I'm in the middle of decoupling the code. I'm thinking about keeping the q3map2 code interface the same so existing GTKRadiant sources can build with the q3map3 source, but this is only benefitial to people who want to compile the Radiant source with the new compiler.