Empty Shells
The amount of work that goes into creating computer programs borders on ridiculous. You might have seen hundreds of snazzy applications, fancy web pages and cool games out there. Computers have made all of that possible, but the fact remains: computers are dumb, dumb, dumb. All they can really do is handle numbers. They can do math with those numbers and they can move them around from one place to another. That's it! When a computer plays music, it is just sending a long list of numbers to the sound device. If the value of the numbers goes up and down quickly, you get a high pitched sound. If they go up and down slowly, the pitch is lower. Every little colored dot that you see on your computer screen is there because a program has moved 3 little numbers (amount of red, green and blue) into a place in the video memory. Programmers spend most of their time trying to find a way to translate ideas that sound very simple in plain human language (i.e. "find the number of people who frequently go shopping for skiing equipment") into the limited, retarded instructions that a computer can deal with.

You hear us talking an awful lot about libraries. Our libraries have little to do with books. They are the work of some poor soul who took the time to write the code needed to make the computer understand instructions that resemble human language. With the right one, you can simply tell the computer to "play Beethoven's fifth symphony" or "draw a sphere". And we're always looking for programs to help us with our work, hopefully without annoying us to the point of making us kick our laptop out the window. It's a never ending quest.

And why all that useless rant? Well, I spent most of the last few days doing a lot of preparation work for my game demo. I did not do anything too interesting, just a lot of stuff that has to be in place before I get to the meaty part. It would be beautiful if I could just instruct my dumb little laptop to create a bunch of monsters and let them run around so I can shoot them, but that is just not how it works. It does not bother me, really. I am, after all, a natural born software geek. I LIKE it! (yes, pity me). So, after setting up my programming environment, laying the basic foundation of my demo and learning how to create a program you can install over the internet, here is my first release. It does not do absolutely anything, but if you can install it and run it, you will make me a happy little man. Click on EngelDemo.msi to install. Sorry mac and linux people, it will not work for you. If you have not downloaded or played any games in your computer and you get an error with some mention of "direct" something, something in it, try to download DirectX, the windows game and multimedia library most games use. If everything goes well, you will find two icons on your computer desktop. One runs the demo and the other uninstalls it. If you run it successfully, just press the 'Esc' key to exit and click on the uninstall icon right away. No harm done. Hopefully...

Please, please, let me know if you have any problems with it. I would greatly appreciate any help testing this. Add a comment here or email me at _@yahoo.com.

Maybe next week I can finally get to work on those screaming monsters... :)