Started vaguely on time. Spent all day building data near enough. Very dull. Everything is beginning to work though. Weather was nice for once. Walked Sasha. Worked quite late. As data was taking forever I downloaded that GCHQ Christmas puzzle, got well into it. Was going perfect until I fucked it up. Printed it out again and I’ll give it another go. It’s a bit like a sudoku puzzle, but more complex. Went for a run, it rained. Torture porn night, last one for a while I think, just cancelled my LoveFilm membership as to be honest the price hike is taking the piss.

Started late as I had a total crap nights sleep last night. I went to be very late, very tired, watched TV, and still didn’t sleep all night. Still finishing off little bits of the new shader system. Today was very cold, but dry. So walked Sasha. Walked to the gym, did Pump, walked home. Then had a bit of a crises about weather to do UpdateSubresource or map/unmap on constant buffers. After much research, the map/unmap seems to win the day. To be honest it’s all a bit shit anyway, if I was allowed to just allocate my own buffers without all this buffer renaming crap going on in background. I’m back on the wine tonight, I need to sleep. I now have to go through a ton of emails that were sent to my mother as she’s managed to sign up to some spam mailing list and it’s overloading my server.

Started late as I drank too much and went to bed far too late the morning before. Had a load of shadow stuff to sort out. Found an interesting issue, don’t early out of a shader and not write to a colour buffer if you have alpha to coverage enabled, it will never write anything. All sorted now and runs without a single DX warning, so pleased with that. Weather has been shocking all day, Sasha went nowhere. I drove to the gym and ran eight and a half miles. The firewall is doing some weird shit and rebooting, I think the memory is on the way out, I’ll run a full mem test on it over the weekend, so there will be very intermittent server access during that time, be warned.

Cracked on, considering it was a Monday. I spent the best part of nine hours today tracing one bug and it was a strange one. Had a fence that wasn’t casting a shadow properly. After all those hours of tracing I found the problem inside the shader, the program string for the pixel shader was always being set to ‘null’, even though the actual compile program was set. Nasty bug, will have to add something to the compiler to detect this. Now have another issue that all my trees have vanished, well their shadows have. At least now I have a good understanding of the whole problem. I’ve also found that VS2015 has a pretty good built in GPU debugger, which is very much like PIX, came in very handy today. Has put me a day behind though. Sasha had a bit of a weird walk as we had to avoid another dog, so we shot down a side turning and ended up on a new route, Sasha enjoyed it. Walked to the gym. Did Combat. Had an interesting chat with my sister, everything is indeed my mothers fault, we now have professional confirmation. Came home and worked far too late. Think I’ll have a glass of wine and watch Donald Trump make a twat of himself.

So yesterday we got up eventually and managed to end up in town. Went to a toy shop and failed to buy anything. Went to T.K Maxx and bought items for the holiday we don’t actually need. Came back home and shit, showered, shaved. Headed out. The less said about that probably the better. But we ended up going to bed in the late hour of this morning. I was perfectly okay, actually my lager consumption over the period of time meant I was actually below the drink-drive limit. I went to bed with a nice half bottle of wine and an episode of ‘Air Crash Investigation’. Jamie said he was going to sit in bed and order some shoes, I didn’t think anything of it. We eventually went to sleep just as the sun was getting up.

So this morning I kicked Jamie to let Dillon out, he brought me breakfast, which is a world first as I didn’t actually ask for it. He then checked his phone and said, ‘Shit I bought two pairs of shoes last night’. He had no recollection at all. I had a phone message from mother last night, together with a creepy text, “I do hope you can help me with my curtains…’. Freaky bitch. I phoned her eventually and she’d, managed to fuck her curtain rail up. So I went there and sorted it out the best I could. There was a limit to how many contortions I was going to pull on top of a pair of steps. She can now manually close them, she needs the fucking exercise.

This afternoon we ventured off to look at beds. We’ve decided that we don’t actually like the fifteen hundred quid memory foam mattress I bought three years ago. So we tried out quite a few. We found the best one was a pocket sprung one with a latex top. Unfortunately we found it also had some appalling reviews, so I’m a bit unsettled on the whole idea at the moment. We did find a new bed frame thing we like though. Now we have to pick a size. We have a standard double at the moment. This means Jamie and I are too close together. A king size doesn’t seem to make much sense. It’s an extra six inches, admittedly if those were on dick length it would make a lot of difference, but on bed width, not much. So we are looking at ‘Super king’, this would allow us to be intimate every four years, have a cuddle on a daily basis but then sleep apart by almost a complete time zone. Whats more it will fit. So if your in the market for a three year old fifteen hundred quid mattress, a solid pine bed that cost me two grand and a shit load of bedding, let me know, or it will end up at the tip.

Had an ‘ok’ nights sleep. Jamie killed my alarm so overslept somewhat though. Got stuck into work and basically wasted most of the day on trying to sort strings out. Someone in the past in their infinite wisdom decided it would be a great idea to output them using multi-byte, which is fine if you know what locale you’re in, or in the case of multi-player what locale everyone else is in. So I changed it to Utf8, then everyone kind of moaned (mostly for valid reasons), so I changed it back again. Spent all afternoon and all evening working on DX warnings, getting some really strange shit come up. Like we copy a multi sampled texture to a normal render target, binding it to a Texture2D, god knows how it works, it produces a DX warning saying that it doesn’t. Weather was dryish but miserable, Sasha had to make do with a shorter walk. I was kind of fuming by that stage anyway and my chest was feeling very tight.

Got a message from an old friend I worked with over twenty years ago. He was starting a new job at a media company. He was saying that artists were finding it difficult to find jobs. He was an artist, he once said, “Programmers are like secretaries without the tea making skills.” At the time I didn’t have a comeback. But twenty years later, I came back with, “Any fucker can use a pencil.” It was worth the wait.

Had a reasonable nights sleep. Started work on time. Another good day on that to be honest, sorted out all my input layout crap. Now just getting to the bottom of a load of DX warnings. A lot less than it started with, when I first took this over you couldn’t run it with the debug driver as it would just spam continuously. Raining today, well spitting anyway, if somewhat warmer. Walked Sasha. Worked quite late but went out for a run in the drizzle this evening.

Made a video a couple of weeks ago when Ben and I flew to Lucknam Park for a coffee, may be it’s somewhere you’d like to visit?

Not the greatest nights sleep, not the worst either so I’ll let it go. Fairly on time start. Got stuck in. Shit loads of asserts to deal with and then just left with a blank screen. Another beautiful day, walked Sasha. Walked to the gym, did Pump, fucking busy, walked home. Found the root cause of all my problems and then the main menu appeared. All down hill from here as that’s the worst of the problems over with, just a lot of fix-up to do. It’s very cold still. Jamie still has yet another cold.

By the time I went to bed my place had been taken by a dog and Jamie was rather spread eagled. So I went in the spare room, read for about ten minutes and then had no problem sleeping at all which was nice. Woke up fairly refreshed this morning. Cracked on with work, rather frustrated by some tools issues, finally got it sorted out so spent the rest of the day debugging my new stuff. Still requires a lot of work but getting there now. Beautiful day, bright sun, clear skies and a lovely view of the full moon. Bloody freezing though. Took Sasha for a long walk. Drove out to do a home check, it wasn’t far from the gym so called in there on the way back. Looking forward to another nights sleep, wonder if it will happen.

Not another great Monday morning, pretty much followed the standard. Took bloody ages to get into it. Weather is freezing and bloody miserable. At least it isn’t raining, yet. Walked Sasha anyway, she got the long tour. Walked to the gym, did Combat, walked home and did a couple more hours of work, finally getting somewhere with it now. Big day tomorrow, when I start testing it all, and it all goes completely to shit. Did a Sudoku, drank my Camomile tea and popped a pill. Jamie has another cold so sounds like a train, I’m looking forward to some peace in the same room.

A week or so ago we filmed a couple of videos, one is on Jamie’s channel so you can do your own bloody searching for that, the other one is on mine.