Busy life!

I apologize for my lack of posts lately; I’m cooking up a couple of technical articles with tips I’ve picked up on FreeBSD and spam filtering.

But more important than that, I’ve been working my keister off preparing music for Void War by Rampant Games. We have about half the songs ready that we need, and there’s about six weeks until release.

Suffice to say, I’m stressed 🙂 But the game is looking really good already, plays very well single-player, and Jay and John, the programmers, are working out some multiplayer bugs (though it’s quite playable multiplayer, just not on a link that’s subject to really bad packet loss). It’s not much money unless the game scores incredibly big, but still, the worst case is that I’ve spent several months preparing music for a game that doesn’t take off.

And I really think this game will do well in the independent market 🙂 Otherwise, why do it?

But if nothing else, doing so much music has got me back “in the groove” of it again. Not a day goes past that I don’t end up having a new riff or theme playing in my brain on my trip home from work. I’m eager to sit down to my synthesizers and Cakewalk Sonar 3.1 to compose music when I get home.

Some technical things bug me, like some really weird routing changes in the signal path between Sonar 2.X and 3.X. Why did they route everything to a sound card channel by default rather than to BUS A and then the channel? Why’s the CPU usage so much higher on the same tune as 2.X? Progress, I guess.

Which means I’m saving money for a new computer, too. Got a check in the mail from a good friend who owed me money, and it looks like I should be able to afford that dual Athlon motherboard, memory, and CPU combo I’ve been hunting for.

Dual-processor computing rocks. People pooh-pooh it because it doesn’t “benchmark” as well as a single-CPU system, but if you’ve used the two types, you know the difference. A duallie remains very responsive under heavy load, while a single doesn’t. Simple as that. Sure, you lose some top-end performance, but when I’m adjusting sliders, tracking my automation in setting and killing effects, and trying to use various software synths, I need all the responsiveness I can get. I know what it takes to max my CPU, and if I could just do that, and be able to manually adjust a slider without causing a dropout or jerkiness in the slider motion as recorded due to a badly lagging machine, I’d be satisfied.

Well, OK, not really. It doesn’t matter how much hardware I have, I’ll probably drive it to the max anyway.

So last night I started a new tune for Void War called “Bereft”. Umm, here, I’ll give you a little chunk of it:

“Bereft” Sample. Internet Explorer screws this up if you just click. Try right-clicking and “save as” instead, otherwise it chops it in half. Lame web browser.

(Note: You’ll need a player capable of ogg vorbis to play this. I recommend WinAmp. I’ve changed audio formats; I’m sick of the politics surrounding MP3, and the fact that OGG is half the size for the same quality doesn’t hurt. I’m pretty limited on space here in my virtual server.)

Anyway, that’s just what I worked on last night prior to our playtest. Definitely nowhere near finished, and is a lot of cut-and-paste while I flesh out the structure.

But anyway, to get back to the point of my post: this is why I haven’t had much time to post. Busy, busy, busy. And finding a new job! So if you know anybody looking for a good UNIX admin, point them to my resume, would you?

Off to work now!