Trials and Tribulations

I built my current machine 3 years ago in the winter of 2017. It had been running like a champ for all those years, but one day, while editing a video in Davinci Resolve, I noticed things were just chugging. Super slow. I went to look at the resource manager and was confused when I noticed there was 8GB of RAM available and 8GB of RAM hardware reserved. wtf? I tried different things, reseating the RAM, clearing BIOS, fidgeting with BIOS settings. Then suddenly the computer failed to POST (Power-ON-Self-Test). I swapped the memory into single channel RAM mode (slots 1, 2) and it booted up with full RAM available. Ehhhh…. This was not right.

2 months pass by of Googling, BIOS updates, Firmware updates to no avail. Then one day – yesterday in fact – I decided to down clock the RAM to 2133Mhz from the 2400Mhz I *thought* I had been running and placed the memory into dual channel mode (slots 1, 3) … BOOM, machine booted up. All 16GB of RAM was available and CPU-ID confirms it’s running in dual channel mode. Ok. Maybe I had been running at 2133Mhz all this time but forgot. The moral of this story is, I let this bother me for 2 months, but I finally “fixed” it. In the meanwhile, I have 64GB of RAM on the way from Amazon because 16GB for editing 4K videos in Davinci Resolve is still too low.

DevLog 01. Design and Prototyping

When developing a game, it’s important to figure out the fun factor. During the critical design phase, it’s always a good idea to get your idea into a playable form. This is where prototyping comes in. The goal is to quickly create something tangible and get an idea of the “feel” of the game. From there we can tweak and improve or trash it altogether. Don’t focus on making it beautiful. Focus on making it playable!