Stopgaps

Well, theres a comment! from Xharock, a legitimate comment, meaning my comment spam protection isnt totally shutting off everything :)

Hmm... waiting on calls back from a couple different places this week that I've interviewed at the last couple weeks. E-mailed one place today, I'm gonna call there tomorrow as well. But thats all the current goings-on in the job hunting.

In the meantime, my progress programming has all but stalled. The fan on my 6600's been acting up, and making a lot of noise. I took it out to get around to trying to fix it, and have been running on the integrated x200 on the motherboard. Problem is, that thing is REALLY slow, and I can't really do anything development-wise with it (I can play like HL2 on lowest settings at 800x600 with no problem, but all of my 3D modeling tools need OGL and the support for that on this ATI card is bad anyway).

I've been trying to do research on normal mapping, and loading models with normal maps into Irrlicht. But I need something stable to work with to try this. I've got two models sitting on my desktop right now, one hi-poly at 13824 polys, and the other low-poly at 216 polys (really low-poly :) ). I normalmapped it with nVidia's MeLODy tool, which turned out rather well with the normal map. Only thing is that saves in DDS textures, which are not compatible with Irrlicht yet, nor seem to be working correctly in my Paint Shop Pro either :/

I tried pulling the heatsink off my card earlier, to try to open it up to get at the fan to try to fix it, but I couldn't open the thing. So I stuck it back on, and stuck it in to make my test normalmap object earler. Then I jumped into Garrys mod in Steam, and within like 2 minutes I started getting graphics errors. It seems, the heatsink isn't absorbing the heat off the card very well now, since I pulled it off. -_- And I can't find my tube of AS5 to scrape the sticky thermal material off and replace it with Arctic Silver, either.

So I can't really do anything more programming-wise until I get this problem taken care of. *sigh* Such is life, I guess.