NoteMe

For a long time I was a dedicated member over at vbforums.com. I even moderated the game and graphics section for quite a while before I moved to Switzerland and work took over most of my time and energy.

One of my good friends over there is called Adam Neil Ward (Wossname), and he had just found out how much fun C# could be, and I agreed although I had not touched it in a year or two.

We decided to do something awesome, and to prove that even a language like C# can pull off amazing speed as long as you know how to treat the language well. The idea we came up with was to make a Doom look a like and feel 3D engine and game with no help of OpenGL and DirectX just to show it was possible.

With his extreme knowledge of GDI+ he took care of most of the rendering while I took care of all the underlying code. Everything from making vector and matrix classes to transforming map coordinates to world and view coordinates, as well as keyboard and mouse handling.

We got pretty far using more or less all our time outside work on it, when some big changes in Adams life made us throw in the towel for an uncertain amount of time. A few months later it was my time to bail out because of moving, and we never managed to get back on track with the project. But we had great fun with the project, and even today when we occasionally talk on MSN we talk about finishing the project, although this time with the help of Mono. But until then the only remains will be this album I made for the occasion with old screenshots from development as well as some sketches.

Well enough rambling, I was going to talk about the avatar. Well we wanted to make an icon for the game, and since we used C#, and we got the idea from Doom, we ended up calling the project DoomSharp, or D# for short, and that's how the icon came to life. We did have a web page once as well, but I managed to destroy vital parts of it when I moved my hosting, and have not had the time to fix it, and don't think I will either.

Now for a long time I have wanted to redo this avatar in SVG to beautify it a bit. And while chatting with Oleg yesterday on GTalk I found out I should give it a try so we could both be drawing on something. It didn't take me too long before I understood this was not going to be easy. And after not too long it was skewed and ugly and I had to ask Oleg for tips.

After just a couple of minutes I got more than just a tip, but a full version of the logo in SVG, perfectly lined up. I don't know what more I should say than, thank you a lot Oleg it looks like I owe you an other beer. If every coder had a friend with design skills like Oleg, and a friend with coding skills like Wossname, then I am pretty sure people would be much happier in life.



- Øyvind Østlund -