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DC Gamer Club / Game endings (no spoilers)
« on: May 17, 2009, 11:52 AM »
Ok, so you slave away playing a game for countless days, destroying your social life and turning pale through a lack of sun.  And then you complete it, but your sense of achievement is destroyed by the most pathetic, pitiful ending ever.  Think Monkey Island 2, where you woke up and it was all a dream (sorry, that was a spoiler, but the game is ancient).

Anyway, how about a DC list of games that are worth playing for their great ending.

Your starter-for-ten: Portal (one of the funniest endings ever)

12
General Software Discussion / A bit of Microsoft loving
« on: May 02, 2009, 08:24 AM »
Before I start, I will say that I am in no-way affiliated with Microsoft.

I'm currently using a self-built desktop (old AMD64) running Windows 7 RC (takes some getting used to, but is a great step in the right direction), a low-end Dell laptop running Vista Business (never had any problems with it at all) and a Tranquil home server running Windows Home Server.  The desktop and laptop back-up their important files to the server via Microsoft's Synctoy (Windows Home Server offers the ability for the computers to completely back themselves up, but I'd rather just re-install Windows from scratch and copy the important files back).  Files that I want easy access to are managed by Dropbox and off-site backups are performed using Jungledisk on each machine, backing-up to Amazon S3.

Switch-on either the desktop or laptop and they automatically login to the home server.  Jungledisk runs once an hour and does off-site backups.  Dropbox does its syncing without asking.  Synctoy runs once a day to backup files to the server.  Each time I switch on my Xbox 360 to watch a video, the home server serves the files without complaint.

It all just works.

I've tried to love Ubuntu and even went so far as to install Ubuntu desktop, syncing with Ubuntu server (serving the xbox via Twonky server), but it was all so fiddly and Ubuntu server would occasionally throw its toys out of the pram and fail to share its folders with the rest of the setup.  After a while, there's only so much tinkering I can take before I just want the bloomin' thing to work.

So, I never thought I'd say this, but are Microsoft actually getting it right?

13
DC Gamer Club / [Already Gone] Another copy of Half-Life 2 available as a gift
« on: April 27, 2009, 03:57 PM »
This is rapidly becoming a forum for giving away HL2 gifts  ;D

I have a spare copy of HL2 available as a result of having bought it and then having bought The Orange Box.

Again, first PM will get the gift of gaming.

tinjaw is now a HL2 owner.

14
Developer's Corner / Unit Testing - Do you do it? If so, how?
« on: April 11, 2009, 11:03 AM »
I'm a "gradually improving" newbie developer and currently have a fairly blasé and ad-hoc approach to testing.  Having done a bit of reading, it seems that the next thing to learn is unit testing.  However, although I get the principle (ensuring that code changes don't break the overall code), I don't really understand how unit testing is done - especially around unit testing frameworks.

If you're writing your own applications at home, do you use unit testing?  If so, how do you do it?  Is this just a list of tests and values to use in those tests, or do you employ a more automated method?  (Any references to how to do this in python will be given extra points).

Thanks.

15
Developer's Corner / Deisgn of applications at home
« on: March 23, 2009, 01:53 PM »
At work, we design Java applications using "UML as a blueprint", having separate people designing and coding the applications.  Although this is a tedious and long-winded process (mainly due to the synchronisation of the UML classes and the developed classes), generally the objects designed reflect the developed classes that go-live.

During coding at home, I've always tended to jump straight into coding applications - almost always meaning a complete overhaul of the objects halfway through the development process due to them becoming "just a load of barely-related subroutines".

Does anyone do any up-front design on their applications when working on an application where they are the sole developer?  Or, does the whole "re-architect half-way through development" always happen and it just gets better with experience?

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