I see people with Jeep Patriots all the time with troop-supporting bumper stickers attached. Why hasn't Chrysler made the Dodge Asshole for people like me?
I'm afraid updates will be scant this week; I am working on my work term report paper, due on Tuesday. Once that's out of the way, though, I will continue my maintenance and construction of the bar.
Propane Injector
Earlier, I participated in a thread that made me think about how well I'm handling my own data flow in Propane Injector. In particular, I remembered (with great hate) how the "does everything" header of Propane Injector forces me to include OpenGL with my unit tests if I want to use Propane::toString, for example.
So fixing that is obviously job #1 on my list of honey-dos for Propane Injector.
Apple
Apparently Apple has some sort of crazy iPod event on September 5. Feel free to put your crazed predictions in the comment thread.
My hope: Apple announces Zune support for iTunes, and then buys Microsoft's Zune division and rolls it into their unstoppable digital media juggernaut. I really like the Zune's UI even though its joypad is complete shit.
Other stuff
I'm sorry this entry sucks. I just made it so I would have at least one week this month with an entry for every day.
Anyway, so today I dedicated to fixing several small niggling issues in Novarunner that I had held off until later because they annoyed the hell out of me to fix.
This means that I've killed off the following bugs (at least):
Console hooked up
Can no longer click through the star map's UI elements to hit the star map behind the buttons
Dockable ships' serialization is now complete for the time being
Various radar glitches (these were all taken care of with the new '2.5D' radar implemented last night)
Bug fixing isn't glamorous, but it needs to be done. I hope you guys understand that.
What will come tomorrow? Probably not much other than bug fixes, if anything. I'll get back to working on the bar on Thursday. I mean the game bar, not the literal bar. Though I might work on that one too.
In case you weren't following it earlier, Stick Soldiers III has officially been canned. There's simply no way we could've completed it with the original plan and the current code. We will probably try again in the future with something else.
Chunks of the code will find their way into Propane Injector, of course, and I encourage you all to read the postmortem of it.
Speaking of, in less than a month from now I'll be pushing out the Glow postmortem. I hope you read it!
If someone can translate the content of the subject line for me, that would be ace, thanks. Being raised on the Queen's English, I don't quite understand your "icy hot gangsters" and other kinds of pseudo-American gaucheness.
That said, I do have some fine spinners. Number spinners. You'll use 'em to bet. You'll waste all your money on them too!
This is the scrollable text area required for the 'rumours' component of the bar, as well as certain other locations throughout the game UI. Having planned out the entire space station UI is a big help to me in terms of identifying problem areas -- this was definitely one of them. Another obvious problem here is the size of the scrollbar thumb. It's virtually impossible to hit with a trackpad, so I'm going to make it bigger and beefier.
So what's next for Dr. Rav? Well, I'm going to go off and watch a bit of TV and have some lunch. Because that's how I roll.
Oh, and to inspire further comments on this journal entry:
So I started planning out all of the various panels of Novarunner's space station interface, as well as finishing off Bioshock this morning. I told you guys I'd finish it off and then bust ass on code.
Right now all I have working is the main menu, but as my sketches become code we'll have some more screenshots.
On a closely related topic, writing all this damn user interface code is also really shit, so I've added some kind of XML-based resolution independent user interface layout as a plan for Afterglow's 2D layer. I don't know if XSLT or XUL is appropriate; jpetrie's XML-based GUI system is using kind of an "XSLT Lite" schema. I think I'll go that way too, and then write up some sort of GUI editor so I can bang out a GUI definition file and tie it to the strings in a controller.
Those of you who are fans of the gambling system in CSRPG2 can rest assured that the old "gamble on completely stupid things at insane odds" minigame has returned in Novarunner. Except now the odds are actually changing, and you can read flavour text about what you're betting on (ever wondered what a llama farming contest in Albany was all about?) Odds and betting topics, as with everything else in the game, are defined in an XML file, so enterprising modders can add their own gambling addictions to the game.
Membrane Massacre
I'm planning on getting back to porting MM; the first order of business is figuring out how to make the fmod binaries universal and upgrading the MM target to Xcode 2.4 so I can build the whole wad as a universal binary.
The second order of business is distributing for testing. Let me know if you've got a Mac (PowerPC or Intel), what version of the OS, and what kind of hardware you're running, and I'll arrange for the test version to make its way to you.
A Linux version is also (presumably) on the way; if you can port an Allegro app to Linux, feel free to let HopeDagger know so he can give you the source to port. I'd do it myself but I haven't been in Linux in months. Making cross platform code is the only way to overthrow the cruel yoke of our Windows masters and allow the streets to finally run red with rivers of their blood! Come to me, my brothers!
Space Giraffe
I also understand that very few of the people posting on my journal have even downloaded the Space Giraffe demo, let alone posted on the leaderboard. If you've played it, and posted on the leaderboard, give me your damn Xbox Live tags so I can add you to my friends list and stomp your score into the ground.
If you don't have a 360, buy one. They just cut prices on them and added an HDMI port.
Here is a screenshot of the current space station main menu. I'm working right now on having the image background load from the space station's descriptor file, so not much to look at yet.
I've had Beyond The Sea stuck in my head for at least the entire week. Please send me a power drill.
Surprisingly, I actually got a bit of work done last night between all the Bioshock and sleeping. I'm surprised too.
I'm starting to work up at least a mock interface for the space station stuff; pretty soon* you'll actually be able to buy/sell stuff. But what's more important is that you picky bastards will have screenshots again. And you might even have a functioning radar once I figure all that math out.
Mmm, pie.
Memo to electronics engineers: Your electricity is too fuzzy and analogue. It's 1 or 0. Pick a side: we're at war.
As if my unproductivity weren't bad enough, Space Giraffe got released this mornin'. It's pretty awesome, go try it out. Play the tutorial level first, get the hang of scoring well, and then I'll see you on the leaderboards.
Energy is no longer taken from your pool to recharge your shield when it is already full,
Achievements are now handed out at 100 kills (Dead-Eye)
Particle systems are properly deleted
Really not that much else. The dentistry yesterday took a good whack out of my day, and the subsequent drinking, Bioshock demo playing and eating after the fluoride treatment wore off took up the rest of it.
I also finished the third season of Rescue Me and felt too depressed to do much of anything except stare blankly at the wall. That show is an astounding downer.
Back to the salt mines tomorrow: I'm almost done my first big project at work. It's going to be a major subsystem of a commercial release. Considering I'm not even out of school yet, it's pretty amazing that I've developed something that appears as the second bullet point on the ad copy. My co-workers all seem to like what I've got going, so I'm going to keep onto the internship and start working on more interesting content. More on this later as NDAs permit.
Bioshock fanboys: The PC demo is up on Fileplanet tomorrow, but apparently you can get it now from the Fileplanet site (I can't remember the exact directions, but you can find them all over).
So I got particle systems working; they emit from a common point with a given spread and are affected by a "gravity" vector you define. I'm using it for explosions and "omg I was hit" sparks when your ship gets hit.
This is probably all I am going to get done this morning, since I am now going to the dentist to have mah teefs looked at. This should be all kinds of fun.
Sorry for not having much this week, guys. Most of my time this week has been pining for Bioshock after playing the demo, writing up all of the various documentation the university has managed to misplace regarding my internship program, and being point lead on the project for this week.
How bad is my university? Well, they spent several millions of dollars of my tuition money on moving to Peoplesoft from a home-grown admissions, registration and control system, which doesn't quite work all the time and is rather defective on almost all browsers. It also drops credit card registrations and thus triggers fraud alerts on students' Visas when they try to pay their tuition, causing the university to go after them and for them to fall out of mandatory but overcrowded courses and graduate late.
But this is just the background story for what is wrong with it.
See, Peoplesoft has this cool feature where profs can put up "assignments" with their "due dates". Still with me? I know this is cutting edge stuff. Anyway, instead of using the Peoplesoft system, the Computer Science internship staff enter all the due dates into Peoplesoft as April 1, 1969, and then put up the actual due dates in 500 kilobyte Word documents consisting of one line buffered by pretty logos on the header and footer.
This means that when I want to open a due date to see when my paper is due, I have to download the document, wait ten minutes for Word to spin up, read one line of text, and make an entry in iCal. If they knew how to use the due dates system, it would automatically appear on the front page of my Peoplesoft account in a nice calendar.
It's monstrously disappointing, because I tend to believe in the Squarepusher slogan that software can save us. Software can also destroy and doom us. Software can make unreasonable bureaucracy spin out of control and become something more horrible every day, pressing upon everyone involved. SAP does this. Peoplesoft does this. These are terrible monstrous applications developed by a revolving-door squad of lowest-common-denominator programmers who are buoyed by cynical sales managers who care only about the next big sale, and nothing at all about the quality of the product. And my university bought it hook, line and sinker.
Academia truly is where people who can't cut it end up. This school is one clusterfuck after another.
Progress
The good news is I should be back on track next week, but the bad news is that my pre-order of Bioshock comes in on Tuesday. With a little Big Daddy action figure. Ryan is going to take his out of the package, knock it over and go "Please wake up, Mr. Bubbles" in a tiny scared voice, much to the chagrin of his significant other.
On the plus plus side, I'm still working on Novarunner and Afterglow. Right now Afterglow's work is still in the theoretical stage, where I'm figuring out how to cull and quickly collide a 3D arbitrary-polygon top-down map. It's harder than you'd think! But it will end up being awesome.
Novarunner is getting more solid every day. I've been working on homing bullets because I don't have the time to embark on the universe-editor project, but it really makes the game cool. Of course, the game blows up on a NotImplementedException when I actually hit something, but the love is there.
However, I do like B movies, and Grindhouse is a B-movie. Here's a related comic:
Can I mix up a lot of topics in a single journal entry or what? A cookie to anyone who actually followed the entire rant up above. Papa needs his medicine.
I haven't been doing much of anything these last few hours. I must profusely apologize for my unproductivity.
I did a bit of work on the next-gen game engine, though: set up a nice Xcode project, dropped it into subversion, added a bunch of nice gimmicks to it. One of the things I'm sort of confused about is writing pluggable renderers; a long-term goal of mine for this engine is to add DX9 support for my games course next year. But I don't know nearly enough about DX9 at the moment to figure out a good interface for the renderer, so right now I'm focusing on GL2.
Nice thing is: VBOs, culling, render queues, it's gonna be tight as a drum and crank out monstrous framerates.
Sad thing is: Still based on PI so a lot of the 2D stuff needs speed improvements. However, I've got an SVN symlink going so any improvements to the PI component of the engine get pumped back into PI itself, which is awesome.
So that's high-level stuff. I'll fill you in more once my cocktail napkin scrawlings and "I wants" start to translate into C++.
I think I may have already posted this, but here it is again. NOTE: The Metaphorical Journeys of Happenstance do not support piracy in any way, shape or form. If you pirate my stuff I'll find you. And I'll probably sell your family to pirates. ZOMG NEED MORE SEEDS FOR FAMILY DOG.
Not a lot of stuff that's visible; more like internal incremental improvements. But they're important improvements.
Novarunner
Yesterday, I implemented weapon switching. It switches when the player strikes the key for it, as well as when you run out of ammo on a gun and try to fire it. This was relatively easy to do, although you can't really see the effects yet as the two guns mounted on my test ship are identical.
What's more important is that I took a long and hard look at my Inventory system and noticed that I'd be doing a lot of wholesale transfers of entire sets of cargo. Therefore, writing something to handle item cloning, item disposal and inventory serialization was a good idea.
So I wrote an Inventory class with a copy constructor that did cloning. Easy enough, right? Well, not really. Turns out the Apple CPlusTest seems to have a bug in it, and the test script for Inventory dies (without any indication of where it died, which required binary assertions and printf debugging... whoo) trying to execute a virtual method (in my case, Weapon::clone, which comes from the pure virtual method CargoItem::clone). I have no idea why this is, but suspect I've either made a stupid mistake or CPlusTest is trying to call the pure virtual method instead of the derived method. I'm leaning pretty heavily towards the latter, but aren't going to discount the former. If anyone wants to help out, I can bark the code up here and you can see if I'm doing something insane.
Edit Ok, jpetrie affirms me that the code is not defective. It's probably a fault in CPlusTest.
For the next project I'm certainly moving to Tut or CppUnit. The lack of debugging facility in CPlusTest test scripts is a glaring oversight. Using unit tests on this project has already saved me a ton of time from typos and the like, so I recommend it to anyone to use to test their controller objects properly.
Other than that, the inventory seems to work quite well and has trimmed hundreds of lines off of my serialization and transfer code. I liked it so much I added a rule to my coding standards that I should always use custom collections for stuff that needs to be copied.
Posted - 8/30/2007 3:50:46 PM
Posted - 8/30/2007 12:03:33 AM
Posted - 8/28/2007 11:54:08 PM
Posted - 8/28/2007 12:03:48 AM
Posted - 8/27/2007 9:39:37 PM
Posted - 8/23/2007 12:56:12 AM
Posted - 8/21/2007 8:47:37 PM
Posted - 8/19/2007 11:47:33 PM
Posted - 8/18/2007 12:03:12 PM
Posted - 8/14/2007 12:48:17 AM
