In the time off I finished up work on adding LUA into my engine. I now do smart caching of scripts in memory. You can also load a script from the disk or an archive file. I still want to add scripts to my general resource manager so one instance of a script can be shared by multiple game objects but that will have to wait a couple of days.
In the break I started some prototyping work on new game ideas. I have some ideas around pinball and match 3 game mechanics together that I want to see in action to see if they work. Hopefully all of my engine improvements will help me do some quicker prototyping. I hope to have a basic protype together in about a month to be able to see if it's worth progressing on the idea.
I also started some work on my new sports handicapping hobby. Yes I'm serious. After doing some research it seems mathematically feasible to be able to use statistical analysis to predict the outcome of sporting events. I'm not talking super accurately but well enough to be able to achieve a 60% pick rate against a spread. This is more than enough to be profitable. After all, the spreads are set using a similar technique. I've started throwing a DB together using MySQL for all of the data and have found an online provider for NFL statistics at a reasonable price. Next steps are creating a simple simulation application and a neural net framework to start training the simulation formulas. I have no dreams that I will get anything close to 60% for a long time.
