My machine is an Antec 900 case with a Corsair 850w power supply. The video card is an older BFG GTX275 with a 160GB Raptor and 1TB WD 7500 and Edirol MA-10D monitors. All of this was previous hardware and now on to the new stuff.
- Intel Core-i7 950
- 12GB DDR3 1600MHz
- ASUS Sabretooth x58
- Zalman 9700 (with i7 kit)
- LG DVD Burner
So, why the DVD burner you ask? Because the newer motherboards no longer come with PATA connectors. So of course, my previously purchased DVD Burner is no longer useful and I am forced to purchase another SATA drive. So much fun, but hey $35 isn't bad for a DVD Burner now.
The machine is running quite well; everything works except of course my keyboard. The fun part about doing an upgrade (especially because of catastrophic hardware failure) is that you tend to find a piece of hardware that had some other issue which may have caused your actual failure. In this case I am convinced that my keyboard shorted out my old Fatal1ty board. Regardless, I threw that one out and settled in with my old Dynex until I remembered that I had a Cherry ML4100 lying around. I put that on and am currently typing with it until my wife gives me my card back and I can purchase a Space Saver 104 from Unicomp.
Regardless, I don't see much use in complaining; the machine is running fantastically and I cannot wait to see what this thing can do with some VM's. Right now I am more concerned about getting VS2010 up and running with XNA4.0 so that I can work on getting a new game out. Hopefully that will be my next project and this machine will last me until the end of it.
This is the topic of my discussion today. Currently I am working out the details of my game; I want to pay homage to the old school Mario/Sonic style games but I don't want to just create some basic knockoff. Instead I think I am going to instantiate some uses of static variables within classes in managed languages and do what would be "enmity" on a global scale. As your enmity increases for a specific enemy type, the more they will try to kill you in crazy ways. For example, based on your enmity, as jump to try and jump on the head of an enemy they will try to navigate faster/slower to be right next to you when you land. The faster they move, the better reaction they will have to being able to be directly next to you.
Or in some instances, being able to force you off a ledge early etc... Of course, with enmity comes a way to decrease it; each enemy type will have a foe enemy type. If you kill an enemies foe, you will decrease your enmity for that enemy of course increasing your enmity for the foe type. Of course you will be able to gain points and finish the game, however the majority of points will come from killing enemies. This means that to get any kind of decent score, you will have to increase your enmity.
What will be interesting is to have multiple endings based on the amount of enmity you have for each enemy type (i.e. if you have more enmity from turtles than mushrooms or koopas etc...). This will also give the ability for harder achievements since one could be made for finishing the game with the most/least enmity from XXX enemy group. The holy grail basically being to finish the game with 0 enmity across the board. This would mean that you would have to finish the game without killing a single enemy.
Can't wait to start working on this, should be quite interesting to see what happens!
