- If you haven't already, check out the Pragmatic Programming Language for the Future discussion going on in the Software Engineering forum. There's some absolutely excellent feedback coming together from this thing, and I think that with some real effort, we might actually have a winner on our hands here. I firmly believe that someone can produce The Next Killer Language if they pay attention to real life issues while doing so, and it's frankly kind of cool to be a part of an attempt at such a project. Hop on board, even if you have no particular interest in programming language theory... customer feedback is good, too [smile]
- Household cleaning chores suck. That is all.
- I'm developing some kind of perverse addiction to bulleted lists lately. Meheh. Bulleted.
- If you haven't already, go read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Read it now. It's a fascinating read, even if some of the concepts presented are a bit debatable, and it'll make you think about all manner of things. It isn't so much profound or deep in and of itself, but it's a very effective mental stimulus. It's definitely a "brain-must-be-on" work, which I almost always enjoy.
- My knees hurt. Anyone know any good physical therapy exercises for strengthening knees? Especially stuff that's good for building up durability for someone planning on taking a lot of repeated impacts on the knees in the near future? (Yeah, yeah, yeah, wrong forum, I know.)
Game Related Stuff
The design phase of the cutscene system is finally drawing to a close. We're having a meeting sometime in the next few days to try and sort out the last few areas of functionality that I can't really specify, since the art team (and not me) is the final user of the system, so they're the ones who know what it needs to do. It's annoyingly difficult to schedule meetings with a team that's six (currently seven, thanks to DST) hours apart, but that's life.
Once the feature requirements are set out, it's go time. I'll be planning up a complete roadmap for implementation, which I will start drafting tomorrow, leaving holes for the last few design areas that aren't locked in yet. That involves a comprehensive code architecture plan (how code will be structured to solve the requirements) as well as a preliminary division of labor (who gets to write what pieces of code). This kind of architectural engineering is one of my favorite parts of software development, so I'm really looking forward to it.
After the architecture is done (shouldn't take more than a few days all told) it's time to start writing code. I predict a few weeks to get a rough version going, enough to get a visible demo of the functionality and what the system is capable of. There's a chance we might try to demo some of this functionality (privately) at E3, so I have sort of a deadline to work under. Should be fun, though, and working under pressure always does good things for my motivation.
In the interests of keeping a relatively sane schedule, I'm off to read more Zen until I fall asleep.
