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Many of us will remember with fondness Brad Oliver's posts here over the years 2002-2006. After 4/06 I can find nothing, and shortly after the introduction of Boot Camp his blog disappeared. I feared he had left the biz, but apparently it was only hosting issues or the like, and I found his page back, most months accounted for.

He has now tho; but I'll let him speak for himself.

June 28, 2007  Apple and Me

It's now official: I've accepted a job at Apple to work on the OpenGL team, and I'll be leaving Aspyr. I'll be starting my new job on July 16th. It's both exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Looking back on it, almost everyone who I worked with at Westlake back in 1999 is still around and doing Mac game ports. Glenda works for Aspyr now, as does Duane Johnson, Mark Krenek and John Butler. Phil Sulak and Ken Cobb went to MacSoft but we still keep in touch. I've worked indirectly with Mike and Ted at Aspyr since around that same time as well, and of course directly when I moved to Aspyr in 2003.

This is a boring way to say that I've thoroughly enjoyed working with these folks all these years, and that leaving Aspyr for Apple is one of the hardest decisions I've had to make. How do you leave a job you like with people you enjoy?

It boils down to the lure of the so-called "Mothership". I've been an Apple fan for nearly as long as I've known about computers, so there's a bit of fantasy fulfillment in making this change. I'm not as confident as the people who hired me that I'm qualified, but I'm willing to give it a shot. If it doesn't work out or I turn out to be the "Special Olympics" member of the OpenGL team, my pride is such that I'd have no hesitation begging Glenda or Mark for my old job back at Aspyr. :-)

The downside to taking this job is I'll have to relocate from Phoenix to Cupertino. No sugarcoating it - that's going to really suck. In fact, when I first started talking with Apple early this year, I didn't think anything would even come of this because of that (and my piss-poor interview). But here I am, obsessing over relocating with Beth and working out the grueling details of selling our house and getting everything to San Jose and into a place that's ready for 2 dogs, 2 cats and a ton of our junk. Clearly sacrifices will have to be made and junk eliminated.

And as God is my witness, I'll make sure the Universal Binary KOTOR patch has been approved by our Support team for release by the time I leave in 2 weeks. ;-)

http://www.brad-oliver.com:8081/~bolive … 00932.html

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September 27, 2007  Life in The Coop

"The Coop" - that's my hip, urban nickname for Cupertino. I think it'll catch on quickly.

Anyway, I've really been slacking, so it's time to update you, internet-strangers. Life at Apple is good. I haven't been fired yet. Apparently everyone is too busy with Leopard to notice that I'm an idiot. ;-) You know what I've been working on, internet? If you guessed Leopard, you'd be right. In fact, I got a cool fix into GL that I'll talk about once Leopard is shipped. (Or maybe I'll wait and see the reaction and then shut my mouth if it goes over poorly!) The one thing I do know, however, is that I'm not allowed to comment on "future" stuff, so that really means I can't talk about what I'm doing until it's already done and out there. It's not, you know, super-top-secret or special or anything, but I don't want to get fired for something so blatant as that.

Did you know? If you file a bug with Apple, people will read it. If you're a developer, register for an online ADC account at developer.apple.com (it's free) and then go to https://bugreport.apple.com. It's funny - sometimes there will be what's perceived as a common bug and yet no one will have filed a bug report. And if that doesn't happen and we don't see it, odds are great it'll never get fixed. Better to file too many bugs on the same thing than too few. Maybe I should do a blog entry on how to file a report. We call our system "Radar" so you'll probably hear that term a lot if you're on any public Apple mailing lists.

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http://www.brad-oliver.com:8081/~bolive … 00965.html

KotOR: The Last Word
I finally have a happy ending for the VBO performance issues with Knights of the Old Republic. Devout readers of this blog (and its comments) might remember that the VBO performance issue that I filed on KOTOR's outdoor Dantooine levels got assigned to me once I started working at Apple.

Now I didn't look into this immediately - I had to get up to speed at work and had some more pressing tasks to work on - but when I was in Phoenix 2 weeks ago, I did fire up KOTOR on my old PowerPC Mac Mini with Radeon 8500 and run it under the GM version of Leopard.

The money shot: Leopard fixes the VBO performance regression that started in 10.3.7. I tested with both the original GM version of KOTOR and the latest Universal patch (1.03d). The prior workaround - disabling VBOs via the .ini file - caused performance degradation everywhere else in the game, so what you ultimately want to do is keep VBOs on at all times when running KOTOR under Leopard - and enjoy. :-)

http://www.brad-oliver.com:8081/~bolive … 00971.html

Dantooine- fixed! All you need is [s]love[/s] Leopard!

KoToR is no longer the Worst Port Evar!

The Brad Hole


minor edit

Last edited by Bat (2007-12-16 3:17 pm)