February 12, 2008

The Most Unhealthy Food in Texas

While I'm not sure my lunch is the worst thing you can ever eat, I can definitely say it is pretty high up the list. After game design this morning, Dan and Charles asked if I wanted to go to lunch, which I did. I did not, however, know that the purpose of this trip was to try what was apparently supposed to be one of the most unhealthy foods you can eat: Snuffers Cheddar Cheese Fries. The whole trip apparently began with Charles reading a news report that said the Outback cheese fries were one of the worst restaurant foods available weighing in at around 2900 calories. The amusing part of the report was that a handful of Texans responded by basically saying, "2900 calores, psh, Snuffers Cheddar Cheese Fries are 3500 calories, now that's REAL food."

Well, I can safely say they are correct, that is "real" food, so real in fact that Dan and I split a basket that we couldn't finish (in addition to our burgers), and Charles couldn't manage to finish his own, even though it was his entire meal. That story may not resonate as much with you all, not knowing who they are, but suffice it to say, they can eat, and this is the first time I have seen either one of them not finish something. In addition, it's a meal that really stays with you and I think it has basically killed my productivity, even now. Maybe that's just an easy excuse for not wanting to do work, but it's definitely been a slow day.

Outside of that little adventure, classes were pretty typical. Game design this morning was a work day and each of the departments was working through some issues as we prepare for integration tomorrow. We got some general feedback from one of the professors about needing to design a bit more for optimization so that we have a good idea what our final game can handle. Since Extinction features entirely outdoor locales, it can't make use of portals as many Unreal maps do, and generally our game calls for larger maps closer to the Onslaught game type, which just increases the load. Looking at the statistics in class today we were basically trying to render almost 700,000 triangles at any one time, which is almost double what we want. This basically means the level designers have their work cut out for them to figure out how to bring that number down as much as possible through level design tricks or else we'll need to more severely limit the poly counts on our assets.

Programming class was pretty standard as well, we went over a few things about bug tracking and playtesting and then we had the rest of the class to work on our documentation of LuaQuest (the game we are working on) and our final project which is to implement a bunch of functionality into LuaQuest in addition to eliminating some of the game's more major bugs. I got a fair bit done, but as previously mentioned my productivity has been severely hampered by the cheddar cheese fries that have somehow seeped into my brain. Now, this afternoon was nearly as productive as I would have liked so I need to do some work on my Oblivion project before I send it off to him and head to bed. Things look like they're beginning to ramp up around here as we close in on the end of the term, so wish me luck!

3 comments:

  1. Now, when you say that you couldn't finish the fries, does that mean you couldn't finish the whole thing, or that you couldn't finish the half that you weren't planning on taking home for later? :)

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  2. I think we need pictures of the cheese fries.

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  3. I'll try to get pictures next time we go, and as for finishing half of my half, I may not have even gotten that far...

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