A note about the end of a journey aboard a Battlestar

I wanted to commemorate, after watching the finale of what has undeniably been one of the most successful and powerful television show in the past 5 years, the end of Battlestar Galactica. On the finale itself, all I have to say is Bravo. It was a masterpiece of storytelling and it dared our imagination. As a whole, Battlestar Galactica took millions of us through a 5 year long journey amongst the stars and the lives of incredibly real yet larger than life characters.

It will be remembered. The lives that have touched ours, despite having been created by the talent and dedication of writers, composers, actors, artists and so many others, will be remembered.

So say we all.

Riven X 0.7

Riven X 0.7 is now available. This release introduces fully functional implementations of the rebel tunnel and boiler puzzles. In addition, several levers and switches have been made operational throughout the game. Finally, significant engine enhancements have been made. See the release notes for more details.

I’m sorry that it took so long to produce this new version, but the amount of work done on the engine cannot be understated. I feel that, with a few exceptions, I now have a near final engine in terms of functionality. There certainly is room for a lot of optimization, but nevertheless I should now be able to implement the core gameplay puzzles much more rapidly.

The next release of Riven X will focus on exactly that. I will also try to produce more frequent intermediate releases, perhaps every 2 weeks.

I hope you enjoy this new build, and make sure to file bug reports for any issue you encounter!

Download Riven X 0.7 (5.05 MB).

AMD to release full OpenGL 3.0 drivers today

From FireUser.com:

The first official driver release with the full support for OpenGL 3.0 on Radeon HD 2400 and above is built into ATI Catalyst Release 9.1, set for public consumption on January 28, 2009. It will be available for download on the AMD Support & Drivers page. This release will enable full and forward-looking GL3.0 contexts on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux.

OpenCL 1.0 specification released by the Khronos Group

The Khronos Group has released the OpenCL 1.0 specification today, after an incredible effort to ratify a complex specification in a very short amount of time.

With all the major hardware vendors onboard, OpenCL has the potential to become the de-facto interface to access heterogeneous compute devices (be they GPUs or CPUs) on a wide variety of operating systems.

http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/the_khronos_group_releases_opencl_1.0_specification/

http://www.khronos.org/opencl/

Python 3.0 released

Grab your copy while it’s still warm: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/

Python is by far my high-level language of predilection. It has a comprehensive standard library that makes sense, powerful language features like generators and metaclasses, an outstanding collection of third-party modules and packages to extend its functionality, like SciPy, an equally impressive array of application frameworks to develop powerful applications, such as SQLAlchemy, Twisted and Django, and rich platform integration on Mac OS X with PyObjC 2.