Confusion Clearing

It's been a little over a week since my last post. Things have been hectic as mentioned earlier, a weekend in Vermont, a full week as a TA for the summer program they have for incoming engineering students, followed by yet another weekend away to celebrate my birthday. Only two more things to deal with before I can relax... tomorrow I need to get my license renewed, and Wednesday I am moving into my dorm for the fall. Once that is done though, it will be a lot less stressful transitioning into the fall semester so I am really grateful for the early move. Once all of that stressful stuff is done then I can go back to working on finishing up CTF, I am projecting two good weekends to work on it, excluding the weekend of the 18th, I think I will be home then.

Other then this progress report I have only one other cool story I wish to tell. For FSI... Freshman Summer Institute I came up with the idea of running some computer games for the students as a night activity to help entertain the hordes of board 18 year olds. This worked out quite well, we played Starseige: Tribes, a 9 year old FPS that runs great on machines with limited graphics hardware, and could be pasted onto each machine. Didn't hurt that its freeware now. Thats all for now, and definitely expect another dynamic test in the next two weeks or so.

Busy Weeks Coming

For those that haven't noticed I have been posting a bit less the past week or so. Things in life are picking up a bit so I will be short on time. I am heading out of town for the weekend, and upon my return I will be spending just about every waking hour working as a TA for a summer engineering program for the week. The weekend following that is my birthday, so I am heading out of town again. Sometime around there I need to take care of renewing my license, and right after I get back I need to deal with moving to my new dorm room for the fall, they're moving us earlier then I thought. Hopefully I will get a chance to finish up CTF by the next free weekend I have. I will try and squeeze in a test if I have a free afternoon. I'm hoping I will get a few posts in among all that mess, but if I don't, just know I'm not slacking.

I'm Back

The past day or so away did some good I think, got a good chance to relax without thinking about work, school, or even Dynamic (though I guess I really didn't stop thinking about dynamic.. I ended up having a good discussion on the subject with my brother. I got some reading in, played some monopoly, and even spent time outside on purpose!

I'm still looking for information on when the best day and time to hold the next Dynamic test. So far I've only have a slight indication that one individual will only be able to show up on Sunday, and someone did sign up for the tester group. Other then that its still open, so please let me know, Saturday or Sunday, what time of day? Post a comment here, post a reply on the tester group, or email my DynamicMUD gmail account.

Jury Duty and My Narrow Escape

I am quite thankful that I managed to squeeze out of Jury Duty on Tuesday. The day started slow, apparently when the Judge says "we will start tomorrow as early as possible", then that means you will arrive at 8 AM as requested, and then wait until 9:30 or later to start. Thirty minutes later it was my turn to go up, and answer the Judge's question about why I thought I should be excused. Massive amounts of work and school as well as severe financial burden isn't enough to get off I guess. So they stuck me in the Jury Box and I nearly died.

I had resigned myself to serving on the Jury for the next three weeks when soon after filling the box they removed three people. As I now understand the system: they fill the Jury box, and then the Attorneys can make challenges based on their own opinions as to whether a Juror will favor them or hurt them. I had a new restored hope at this point... so I took some advice I heard a while back... and I pretty much spent the next hour or so studying one of the two defendants. At one point the defendant even whispered something to his attorney and they asked for a short recess. I was almost certain that this was my way out of Jury duty, but when we returned that was not the case. Soon after however they did end up challenging me, and at least 75% of the Jury. I am very happy I got off, I have almost completely caught up after the whole ordeal. Now I can catch up on the remaining work I have to do, and then get back to coding Dynamic.

Jury Duty and My Misery

As I mentioned in a previous post I was supposed to go in for Jury duty today. We'll I did, and quite frankly, my civic duty makes me very angry. Everything was going fine up until noon or so. I was reading the novel I brought, enjoying the relative peace and break from all of the other hassles and responsibilities in my life. Finally at 12:15 or so the court officer brings the entire Jury pool into a court room to pick a jury for a criminal case. This itself wouldn't be too bad, but we were informed that the case would likely go on for about three weeks. This was bad enough, and I really didn't want to get on the jury. By around 3:30 PM they told us they had other engagements and that we need to come back tomorrow. Wonderful. Not only has this wasted an entire day for me, but it will ruin a second. I have a demo for work on Wednesday to do. I have a new coworker starting tomorrow I was supposed to introduce to people. I also have a bunch of other stuff to do for work tomorrow, which is rare, and I want to actually do work. I have a midterm for a summer course this week. And due to all my gallivanting around the state today I don't have time to hit the gym. I think these courts need to be more courteous and efficient. Hopefully tomorrow will go better. Until then, my life sucks.

Jury Duty on Monday

I guess standby Juror for a Monday is the same thing as a regular Juror. This unfortunately means I need to be home for Sunday night and so won't have Sunday to code. I will make an attempt to code tomorrow given that I can finish the assignments that are due for my online Music class. Hopefully I can get through some bug fixes done and get myself back into the swing of coding again.

On Sunday I am considering a blog layout change. I think I might go back and make an effort to reorganize things to use the labels that blogger now provides to allow better access to the site's content, hopefully going through all 190+ posts won't take me too long. Does anyone have any objections to a color change?

-Toraux

Tags: Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Three Finals Down Two to Go

I'm past the halfway point of finals. I feel like I can breath again, and of course thoughts of coding are again entering my head. I'm starting to think about coding again and I am formulating my plan of attach to get stuff completed. I will probably start posting a bit more too, though I doubt it will be more then a few times a week. Wednesday night I am free!

-Toraux

Tags: Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Summer Internship Secure

Well its been a long time since my last post, schools been hectic as always, and I'm pressing ever closer to the perilous finals. Thankfully things are looking up, I have a summer internship now at the ATMC (Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center). The ATMC is an incubator for high tech start up companies, and is owned and operated as a nonprofit organization by the University for that purpose. The project I will be quite interesting, apparently involving AUVs, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. Apparently these AUVs are used to do all sorts of measurements of costal waterways etc. Should be really interesting to get involved in something like this. Even more advantageous with this position is that it can basically become a Research Assistantship when I hit my masters year, almost completely killing off the cost of grad school, and might even be involved with my thesis.

The disadvantage here however is my pay as an intern is less then I would have had working directly in the commercial sector, and on top of this I will need to pay for summer housing on campus, and have a bit more of a commute to go to Karate each week. I guess you can't win them all. I will likely be making plans for my Dynamic development around the time finals end once I'm settled in with my new housing.

Back to studying, but at least thats one less thing to worry about.

-Toraux

Tags: Internship, Engineering, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Rough Week

It's been a rough week. Last weekend I was out of town to train, so I wasn't exactly internet accessible. The rest of the week has been pretty rough too, no free time to be found here. At this point I really wouldn't expect daily, and potentially not even weekly posts until I'm out for the summer. Too many projects and assignments on my back right now to really get everything done that I want to. I would definately recommend going back into the archives though, theres a lot of ideas etc in there.

Later,
-Toraux

Tags: Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Graph Algorithms

In algorithms today we started learning about graph algorithms, for example things like finding the shortest path etc. This is good news, hopefully by the end of the semester I will have enough ability in this area to make designing the AI for Dynamic MUD more efficiently. One of the biggest problems with AI in games is that it takes up a lot of memory and CPU time. Being that the game world in my case is basically a large grid of vertices connected by edges, it would be quite simple to treat the world as a graph and use these same practices to quickly find the fastest path between two points. I guess there was some value taking this class after all :)

-Toraux

Tags: Algorithms, Engineering, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Summer Outlook

It looks like this might work out for coding, likely only having to worry about taking summer courses in June. Hopefully I will be able to finish up the core of Dynamic so the next big break I get I can start moving onto more advanced features.

The job outlook for the summer is looking good as well. Already have an interview planned with HP on Wednesday, and there are a few other organizations looking to interview me as well. Hopefully this will all go well and I can get a job within a decent drive so I don't waste too much time on the road. I guess we'll see what happens when we get there.

As for this weekend, its going to be a rough one, projects, homework for multiple classes, and an exam all due on or before Tuesday of next week. Time to buckle down for another fun one.

-Toraux

Tags: Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Nothing But Rants

It has been getting really hard to write about anything except things I'm not happy about lately. School has been stressful (I haven't even been back to classes yet and I'm already about at the edge of what I can take) and anything else that can find a way to not work does. I think my video card is on it's last legs, it has progressed to artifacts whenever I boot it up, apparently just displaying the scrolling linux boot up text is too much to handle. Fortunately it seems to resolve itself by the time it finishes booting, for now. I guess when I'm pinched for time its hard to write about new ideas and features that don't exist yet. I'm going to try and change that, but I am going to warn that the general trend seems to be that I won't have time to write every day like I did about a month ago. Anyway, back to the grind.

-Toraux

Tags: Engineering, College, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Week Coming to a Close

The week is starting to come to a close. I got some very cool things done (last night I got my vga driver working on the fpga, add that to my list of 'skillz'). Unfortunately, I also did a lot of homework, and unlike any other spring break I've ever had, I don't thing I have played a single computer game. I did manage to play and beat my brother bad three times in NBA 2K7 for the playstation 2, until playing that game this week I never realized hoe deep a basketball game can be... the last one I played was NBA Jam for the Sega Genesis, though that one was a classic.

This week has also been riddles with communications problems. We switched over to comcast's digital phone service, and since about Wednesday cannot receive phone calls from anyone local. As a result that dentist office which was supposed to call this week to notify me of any cancellations didn't, and so I missed a chance for an appointment yesterday. On top of that the school email system has been down since about 2pm yesterday, hope I don't miss any important emails as a result, I'm waiting for information on at least one summer job.

Overall It was a pretty good week, then its back to the grind on Monday.

-Toraux

Tags: Digital Design, Comcast, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Halfway Through Vacation...

...and I still don't feel like I've accomplished much. Thats needless to say that most students on spring break are living it up and having fun. Instead I'm struggling to finish homework and get ready for next week's fight to stay above the rough waters of hard engineering classes. I have a handful of big projects around the corner, and I know once I finish them then the next set of projects will take their place anyway. Either way I suppose I'll survive, whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger right?

-Toraux

Tags: Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Don't Think Card Games are in my Future

As things are going now, it seems very unlikely that I will have the time to make an attempt to compete in the coding challenge. As nice as it would be to pick up $500 dollars and gain some notoriety in the community, I don't think I can spare the time. The money will come when I graduate. And graduation and job picks depend on my building my skills and getting my homework done. I think those 2 to 3 days designing and implementing a card game library could be better spent working on the next upcoming lab for Digital Design.... a VGA controller! The Keyboard to LCD lab is pretty much done, and I seriously doubt any of my classmates will pull it off, not as completely or as well as I have anyway ;). Call it an arrogant hunch.

I think ultimately I'm just going to make it my goal to get through this week sane. Sane and caught up on homework and projects. I have a brutal 2 months or so left until I'm done with the semester, and in that short amount of time I need to finish all these projects I have, especially finishing the sudoku assistant machine I'm supposed to develop as a final project for Digital Design.

If I can get through all that then maybe this summer if I can swing it I'll finish the core for Dynamic. Of course that was my goal last summer. We'll see if I can deliver this time, on top of my courses I need to take this summer, my prospective job, and all the other things that get stacked onto my todo list. If I have dynamic ready for a public release before 2010, someone owes me a million dollars. Sometimes I wonder if I had known about the workload sooner if I would have started working on the game when I did. Anyway you look at it, someday it will be done, it will be public, playable, and it will hopefully still be in time to break the mold.

-Toraux

Tags: Sudoku, Digital Design, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Distracted

Even being home it appears I've been too distracted to write any posts so far. I've spent quite a bit of time this weekend hacking away at my homework. I've been trying to work on my lab for Digital Design, which has been quite a project so far. The objective for the lab is to take input from a standard ps/2 keyboard like you have plugged into your computer, and to output what you type onto the LCD display that is on the board were using. So far getting the LCD to display what I want hasn't been too bad, but to accomplish it I've been using some vhdl for an entire microcontroller just to handle the display. On the keyboard end however, I've seen nothing but problems. There seem to be some timing issues involved, so instead of displaying just a single new character on the display it seems to rewrite all the locations with the same character. I have access to a little more information today, so hopefully I can figure this thing out.

-Toraux

Tags: VHDL, Digital Design, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Busy Before Vacation

It has been yet another busy week finishing up before vacation. I wanted to post several times this week, but sleep has taken priority just about every night. That, and I was also expecting to post about the new game production blog carnival yesterday, but it seems to have been postponed. I now have the rest of the day to go before vacation.

My plans for the next week have been mutating quite rapidly, until last night I had planned to take the weekend to go to Vermont to train, but due to the weather that will no longer be happening. I also think I may be attempting to compete in the MudMagic code challenge. The challenge is to write a framework for a publicly available mud codebase for playing card games. I was planning on spending a couple days on it if I get my homework done, and now with the two extra days it seems even more likely. Ultimately I may end up spending less time on dynamic, but the prize is nice, so it should be a fun little problem to solve.

-Toraux

Tags: Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Stress

There are a few reasons I haven't posted since Tuesday night. Wednesday the Internet went out around 5 or 6pm, and stayed out until sometime the next morning. This didn't matter much because I was up until about 2 am finishing up my linear systems homework due the next day. Last night I was up until about 1 am working on digital design homework, and for the sake of survival I decided it would be a lot better to get some sleep then start doing stuff like writing posts.

I think this might be some advice to people who are trying to decide between Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. Doing both at once has shown me that basically the Electricals have a much higher homework load for the most part. I'm still not really sure why Computer Engineers have the higher salaries, I guess it might be because less people have a knack for that kind of stuff. Either way, a dual major is a lot of work.

As a result I haven't coded nearly recent enough, its starting to get depressing. Hopefully after this weekend I'll be back caught up and can switch it around and start making some progress again.

-Toraux

Tags: College, Engineering, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Another Busy Week

It appears I have another busy week coming up. Two exams this week and a couple of big homeworks. Stress levels are high, but somehow I think I'll manage to pull through. I really just wish I could dedicate more time each week to coding, I'm dying to get this game playable. Maybe this coming weekend will be a good time to get moving forward, I guess we'll see.

I also got a letter this week inviting me into the Five year B.S. / M.S. Program. Basically its a fast track to pick up a M.S. Degree in only one additional year. I have a lot of thinking to do on this, there are many pros and cons in terms of employment, earnings, stress, and time. I have a good month or so left to decide, hopefully when it comes down to it I won't have a hard time making the decision.

The next two things on the coding todo list are an improvement to the way command codes are hardcoded to make things more flexible and clean, and then adding up and down movement and ladders. Once all that is done I'm back to where I was before I started the world rewrite, and I will at least technically be moving forward again. I also have plans for doing the items reintegration during spring break in mid-March, along with a whole lot of sending my resume out to get a summer internship.

-Toraux

Tags: Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Wasteful Homework

So as I worked through my homework today I came upon my Digital Design homework problems. This class is geared towards learning VHDL which is used for designing hardware. With the exception of one of the problems they were all time wasting assignments. When I get homework I expect it to take some thinking. I don't particularly enjoy paying for an education of simple cookie cutter assignments. And unfortunately thats what I got. I spent a good 4-5 hours this weekend on Analog Electronics homework, as opposed to maybe an hour on the Digital Design. But those 5 hours for 3 problems felt so much better then feeling like I was wasting my time. Ultimately anything that can be demonstrated in a large quantity of brainless problems can also be demonstrated with some sort of purposeful assignment. I would rather spend two to three times as much time on homework and feel like the end result was something worthwhile, then waste an hour on something a monkey could do. As far as I know engineers get paid for their ability to think and design, not their ability to go through silly exercises (though from what I hear some jobs end up like that). I don't aim to end up in a job doing silly mindless tasks, I need to think and solve problems or I'm not happy. Sorry for the rant, but I think there are people out there who agree. If a computer can do it, then why should I?

-Toraux

Tags: School, Engineering, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming