Bush Mackel

The short answer to that is “not yet”. Here’s the longer answer

If you’ve been following along recently, you know that I was pretty much forced into reformatting my hard drive. Of course, nothing is as simple as just that (because of a semi broken mobo) but it all led me to reformatting a spare ATA drive, abandoning my SATA drive for the time being, and really setting it up from jump as a solid dev box. I mean – Figured might as well since I’m doing a lot of web development these days anyway (hint hint) and up to this point I didn’t even have IE 6 on my computer.

So after I got Windows updated to SP3, got all my updates in and then got IE 6 on there, I wondered what else I should put on my new box. Well for me, the first thing to go on is usually Paint Shop Pro (since I’m a Photoshop n00b). After that I thought about installing Creative Suite, but since I didn’t have a full legit copy, I didn’t want destroying my new box on a bitTorrenting spree. Plus, since I’ve used CS products for so long, I figured I ought to buy at least one version in the next couple months.

Onto the Cool Stuff!
So for those of you who don’t know, my background is really in “traditional Computer Science”, whatever that means. And just because of where my life has gone professionally, I tend to do A LOT more of “web programming” than anything else these days… Which is to say that ActionScript, CSS, and PHP are pretty much my constant companions. One of the things that I had always wanted to learn but “never had the chance to” was .NET. I knew I had a full copy of Visual Studio 6.0 laying around so I put that in, but unfortunately that didn’t seem to have .NET on it. Then I remembered that a friend of mine was toying around with XNA for 360 and had downloaded Microsoft’s Visual C# 2008 Express Edition…

And I said why not?

So now I have Visual C# 2008 Express with the XNA Game Studio 3.0 on my desktop PLUS I have Maya 7.0 on there too! YOU may not be excited, but for the LONGEST time I’ve wanted to try my hands at some basic 3D Game Programming and now I’m finally all set to do it!

The Cold Hard Reality
Though the truth of the thing is that I have a TON of things going no right now the least of which is my 9-5. I mean, I just have no idea when I’m going to have the time to start working on this thing. But, back in the days of DirectX 6 and stuff, I don’t know that I had the time then either… I just stopped sleeping. (#):) So we’ll see. How cool would it be to see something up on Live from yours truly?! PLUS, I think I already have an idea of a stellar game (though I’m pretty sure someone has already made it and it’s probably already caught up in M$ Legislation). Stay tuned true believers!