Ok, I'm officially scheduling the test for 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on Sunday September 2nd. Most of CTF should be functional by then, Territory is mostly in... basically if you are close to your flag you'll be in your own territory, close to an enemies you are in theirs. Where the regions overlap is contested territory. I hope to tie being able to tag into this so you can only use tagging defensively. We'll see how that goes. See everyone Sunday!
I've been cranking along and have CTF mostly complete. So far I have flag items which can be aligned with a faction, as well as flag rooms that are also aligned with a faction. If the proper flag is in a flag room then that flag will appear on the map, and be visible on survey. If you drop an opposing team's flag in your flag room it disappears and your team scores. Currently I'm working on adding the territory system which will allow me to limit tagging to be only valid in friendly territory.. so basically tagging to stop people will be a defensive tool like in the Capture the Flag I so fondly remember as a child. There are a few other tweaks left like adding some jail code and hopefully an automated CTF running system, then I will be complete.
I'm looking to schedule the next test this coming weekend, preferably Sunday or Monday. We will run with whatever level of completion I have on CTF and see how it works and make sure I haven't broken anything. Go hit up the Tester Group and give me some feedback.
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.
As I mentioned on Wednesday, I worked on the accessibility issues that were found during the last test. There were three main issues at hand:
A method of disabling the map.
The map provides nothing but unpronounceable spam for a user who is playing using a reader program. I added a new config command, so by typing config map n the map can be disabled.
A method of disabling the prompt.
Like the map, the prompt must get annoying for a player using a screen reader. This was another direct request, and so I did my best to satisfy it. Config prompt n will disable the map.
Provide the information on the map in a verbal form.
This issue wasnt exactly a direct request, it was more or less implied. Previous to today a player with a screen reader had absolutely no information about their surroundings. By enabling the auto survey using config survey y, a player now sees a listing of the 'regions' surrounding them, and the direction they are in. This allows a player to have a better grasp of where they are without the map, and also shows them the players in the area, much like the highlight we have on the map.
The second method of providing this information was using an auto exits config option. This displays the names of the rooms immediately north, south, east, and west. This gives the player even more information about where they directly are.
These features appear to be working correctly, the only thing that remains to be done is testing them with actual an actual screen reader, and see if this provides enough information. Ultimately I think this is worlds better then we were at before, but I think there will always be a few features that will be impossible to convert, and a player with use of a map will likely always have at least a slight natural advantage.
I've managed to get items integrated with relatively little work. As a result I can move forward this week with some more new stuff. First on my priority list is fixing the bugs that were found during last week's test. Most of these are minor and quick fixes so hopefully shortly into this coming weekend I will be able to move on into the accessibility issues that were made quite obvious during the test.
The problem that needs to be solved here now is finding a way to represent large amounts of data that is intended to be visual in a way that could be easily consumed by a user using a reader program. I have a few ideas, the simplest of them is implementing an exits display, listing the 'rooms' that surround your current room like most mud's already have as a normal feature. The harder problem is representing the 100 or so rooms that might be within a 5 room radius of the player. Does anyone have any ideas?
This is a good opportunity to explain what is in the plan book for the next few weeks. This Saturday we are running our second test of the summer. This coming weekend and next week my current plan for coding is to work on integrating items with the persistence system that the game world and being are all tied into. This will allow for a great expansion of potential options for players during testing. The first few off the top of my head are capture the flag, find and retrieve, and keep away type games.
I am going home for part of the weekend to drop off my car for some work so hopefully I will be able to accomplish all of my goals for the weekend. If I can pull this off, then my plan for the following weekend will be to implement a capture the flag game by integrating tag and items. This also might be pushing my luck because of a wedding that weekend. And of course the weekend following that I will be out of town for karate. My plans for the remainder of the summer involve lots of testing and polishing of the core code. Hopefully by early net year I will be ready to start expanding on the core.
It's been a few days since I last posted, mostly because I've been caught up with a few things, and quite frankly couldn't find anything I really wanted to sit down and write. I still have more then a week before I will be able to sit down to code a bug project so I've been slowly working at some functionality for dynamic to make it more stable, and I have some more things planned to help with debugging. The most notable change I did this week is to write some code to cleanly shutdown instead of crash. As long as the game doesn't hit an infinite loop then there is no reason why the game wont shutdown cleanly, saving all player and world data. This was implemented using a java shutdown hook. The hook allows you to create a thread that will be started when the application is terminated. For more details check out the Java Runtime Class.
The next major debugging tool I plan on writing wont happen until sometime after my next two 'weekend projects'. I am considering writing some code that would dump the state of every variable in the game when it exits prematurely (crashes). This would give me a snapshot of everything at the moment of the crash, and would be very beneficial for spotting the causes of bugs. Most importantly it will help me diagnose issues that occur when I am not around to see them, which will become an increasingly important issue as dynamic gets to the point of release.
A productive weekend so far, and I still have some time yet tonight. I managed to fix a bunch of bugs, correct some flaws in how some core modules operated, and added some useful staff functionality. And for the first time in a while it feels like the end of my short term todo list might be reachable. Things are going so well that the next weekend I have to code should hopefully be spent entirely on integrating items fully with the persistance model I have. The weekend following that and I will have Capture The Flag coded! Should be a great method of testing when that is done, given enough players show up. Speaking of testing, expect the next one sometime during the weekend after next, as next weekend I am heading out of town.
Slowly but surely the system behind Dynamic is growing, here are some stats. Dynamic is now up to 23335 raw lines of code. Of these lines, 12574 are actual executable lines of code (non comments and whitespace). This code is organized into 10 packages, 124 classes, and 1137 functions. Since moving to subversion I have commited 70 revisions. So far so good, i'm still hoping for version 0.1 by summer's end.
Like I mentioned earlier this week, I took advantage of having the entire day off yesterday to get ahead on coding. I fixed a handful of bugs, made improvements to several commands, and added a new command to make my life a little easier when running tests. I feel like I accomplished a lot.
When I look at my todo list, I see another story. I know I finished three of my 'todo groups', which was a significant portion of work, but when I look at whats left I now see four 'todo groups' to get to the same level of completeness I had intended before starting yesterday. A whole day and to reach the same milestone I was aiming for last week I need to finish a little more then I had before. This seems to be the trend, I've been shooting for this same objective since early last week, and despite expending a lot of effort I get farther away. Hopefully this weekend will be different, but you never can tell. Does this happen for anyone else?
I'm making sure to take advantage of this week's day off for the 4th to get ahead on coding. On Wednesday I intend to get caught up on all of the bugs that were found this past weekend during the test. This coming weekend will then let me get ahead. The main tasks that will be accomplished this weekend will mainly be working on some cleanup and minor internal improvements for the most part. I also am aiming to make some improvements to the line of sight system, in particular things like stairs and ladders. This has been an issue in the past, one of the problems I have yet to be able to solve is how to determine if a ladder is indoors or outdoors based on it's surroundings. Hopefully between now and this weekend I'll think of a solution to this. I guess that's all for now, I should have a progress report by this weekend.
I'm not done, but it feels good to make progress. I knocked the first and third items off my todo list for the weekend. The new config file system I added makes running the game up on slayn's server much easier then before. When I initially went to test my code on the server I had to manually find and replace all references to database and usernames for accessing MySQL. Being that I don't have full control over the usernames and the database name I need some way to change this easily. Now I should be able to upload code almost as fast as it gets written.
The improvements on the helps system are great too. The new command I added to the game: helpsearch, allows a player to search through all the helpfiles loaded in the game for a search string. There have been plenty of times in the past when I really wanted to find something in a help file, but could not remember what the help file was called. This should solve that problem nicely.
Next to do for this weekend is the improvements to the caching system. Once that system will run at a minimum of cpu usage then I can comfortably run the game without fears of being shutdown by the usage police. That means hopefully the next test should be here soon!
I seem to have a bit of a better grip on things now that I'm a few weeks into the summer. I should be able to pick up where I left off coding either this weekend or next weekend. I am a standby juror for Monday, so in the event that I get lucky and don't need to go I will begin this weekend. In the event that I do need to go I don't plan on beginning until the following weekend.
My first plans with coding involve a few minor refactors and clean up steps that I have been planning for months now. Once those are complete I intend on moving to improving the cache module. The goal is to decrease the amount of cpu usage that dynamic needs when idling. Hopefully this will allow me to run Dynamic continuously at least for the staff, and make running tests more probable this summer. I am hoping to put together some sort of capture the flag game together working off of the tag test module I currently have. This would take advantage of the newer world stuff since January and make for what I feel would be an interesting test experience. Hopefully this week will go smoothly.
-Toraux
Between yesterday and today I made an attempt to port my code over so that I could run it up on the server space that slayn.net has been so helpful to provide. In the process I had to generate a java jar file to upload so that dynamic could be a standalone program and run independent of eclipse. My first few attempts failed, primarily due to dynamic's need for the MySQL java classes that I have installed, and I have been unable to successfully set up my java classpath.
I ended up finding a cool plugin for eclipse that generates jars and packages in the prereq java classes it needs. The tool seems to work great so far and has been very helpful. You can get the Fat Jar Eclipse Plug-In at http://fjep.sourceforge.net/ Hopefully this might help other java developers too.
-Toraux
So on Friday I was preparing to head to the campus store on my lunch break to go purchase the materials I will need for my two online courses this summer. I looked at the email confirming my registration to make sure I had the right course numbers and books I would need. And then I realized that it wasn't June and July that they started, but May and June. My music course apparently started last Tuesday, and my ethics course starts today. Fortunately none of the music stuff is due immediately so I haven't actually missed out on anything. What this does mean on the other hand is that instead of doing some coding, then breaking for school for a month or so, then coding again in August I will be more immediately getting into the school stuff now, and start work on Dynamic a little later in the summer. This shouldn't actually be a problem and might work out better then the situation I had thought I would be in. Possibly in a week or two during the weekend I will start easing myself into some of the simpler Dynamic tasks so that when these courses end I will be ready for the larger tasks.
-Toraux
A lot has happened since my last post. I moved in Monday, it took a grueling 6 hours to move both myself and my girlfriend into our apartments for the summer. The living situation is nice but of course roommates are a drag. So far time has been hard to find. Two days of work so far has shown me that at best I have two hours on Monday, the same for Wednesday, and then the weekend should be fine... when I don't go home. This might improve once I get used to going to work and all that stuff again.
Work so far has been pretty slow, it definitely looks like it will take a while to truly get into the groove and have a real project to do. I can't wait for real work, the cubical fabric pattern is pretty uninteresting to stare at after the first few hours.
I am currently aiming to get myself back into coding dynamic next week sometime, I want to slowly ease my way back in. I definitely don't think I will have too much time to spend on coding during the week, and during my summer courses I can pretty much count on having no time during the week.
Finally, I wouldn't expect more then one or two posts a week. Time is too valuable and short in supply to spend too great a portion of it writing about what I am doing in the rest of it. Hopefully I will have a Dynamic update soon.
Later,
-Toraux
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
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
Its been a few days since my last post so I think its worth just posting for the sake of posting. I'm really starting to think development might be at a standstill for a while, but then again I'm way ahead on homework for this week so maybe the end of the week will be good. Last weekend I had a big group project for linear systems to do, and ultimately I spent an extra few hours in the lab fixing some moron's mistakes. Then the past few days I had to put in an extra few hours to finish a Digital Design lab. It works now though, so ultimately it was worth it.
I'm still finding myself considering this whole masters thing. I'm leaning toward it, but part of me just wants to get out of here and start developing dynamic more quickly, and make money. I might end up with more free time as grad student however, if only because I will only have 9 credits per semester tops. I guess we'll see where I end up with that.
I'm planning on staying at school this weekend, so hopefully I will have some improvements to dynamic to post here by the end of the weekend.
-Toraux
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
I finished coding gates today. Really thinking about it I should have been able to get more done. I'm thinking about moving on to the next thing on my list tonight, but its hard getting motivated, mostly because I'm not sure on the best way to do it. Back to gates. So gates open and close at the pull of a lever. These levers can be anywhere, and each one can store a single gate to control. Possibly in the future each lever might be able to control multiple gates, but this seems to be enough for the moment. The ideal use of this system is in castles for example, where defenders can open and close the gates from inside, making an assault more difficult. This should add another whole dimension to attack and defend type situations where a faction wants to take a strategic point from another.
The next task to complete is an improvement on how my immortal edit room, and other internals handle selecting and creating new rooms. Basically right now I have several hardcoded select statements, and every time I want to add a room type I need to tweak this list. I would prefer to be able to code it in one place and let the code handle differentiating between the different types. I'll likely use the java.reflexive packages that I used for the commands performance monitoring command. Hopefully it won't be too hard and I can get through this tomorrow maybe. I also have plans to do ladders and the up and down directional commands this week.
I spent a lot of the rest of my time today working on an article I plan on posting tomorrow or Tuesday on the free model of online game publishing. I plan on submitting it to the GameProducer.net Carnival of Game Production. Its definitely one of the longer pieces of writing I've ever written outside of school essays and research papers, hopefully it will be enjoyable to read.
Until tomorrow,
-Toraux
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