Hi folks,

In case any of you wondered, I had comments turned off for a while because I found the site flooded with pornography-related comments. I’m now starting to deal with that, so I have turned the comments back on.

I have just celebrated one year of working. Wow, that went quick. I’ve learnt a lot of C# programming and now that I have Visual Studio running again at home I can start programming here. The goal is to learn to program in Unity, a cool game engine. I have previously played around with the Unreal Engine that requires C++ knowledge, but my C++ is a bit average. Hopefully over time I can improve both.

Now is a very exciting time for game developers, movie makers and digital artists. Graphic Card makers NVIDIA have released a graphics card that permits real time ray tracing. If you don’t know what that means, or the implications (I’m sure many of you do) then let me explain simply: ray tracing is the emulation in digital graphics of the behaviour of light. All those great computer generated effects that you see in films have, up until now, been painfully created one frame at a time with powerful computers figuring out the behaviour of light to make the computer-generated substances/objects look real. They used to have entire server farms rendering frames for movies over days and weeks. Now, it can happen in real time – just like walking through a game. Wow! Here is a movie from NVIDIA demonstrating it:

Pretty cool, eh?

In other news, last week I rehearsed at Western Suburbs Leagues Club last week. It’s a great venue with a large auditorium. I have three songs (Alice Blue Gown, Around the World, I still Call Australia Home) and it is beginning to look like I will have to take on another song as the current singers don’t feel comfortable with it. My daughter Rhiannon is performing in a crazy number of dances, including a few solos. She is really developing well, both as a dancer and as a choreographer.

As for my writing, yep I am back to it. With my eyes definitely improving the writing (and eventually the art) will be back on the table. I have started using Scrivener again and am finding it really good at organising my thoughts and ideas. Most prominent of these is finally working out the motivation for my story’s antagonists. In the first version (2013) this was kind of vague. Now it is not. I will write a proper post about this at a later stage.

To finalise this post, can I please ask those of you with avatars not currently linked to your own posts (or with outdated addresses on them) to please update. I have recently started using some of my morning travelling time to read blogs and I do this by a) checking recently posted posts and b) clicking on your avatars if you are a regular here so as to read your stories. Some of you are dear to me but have old links. You know who you are. If I have not reached any of my regulars’ pages yet, then I apologise. I do intend to work my way around to you all. My life is still a bit of a rush.

Anyway, my wife is waiting for me now so that we (as a family) can watch an episode of Riverdale together. So hideoho.

Greg