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.

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

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

Classes Keeping Me Busy

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

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

School is Chaos

Well, finally got a chance to sit down again and write an update. I made an attempt last night to continue forward with coding, and about 15 minutes in my lab partner comes by to compare homework answers for linear systems. Of course I got a couple wrong so I went to rework them... didn't really have them finished by one so I just kind of said sleep was more important. It really seems like theres too much going on sometimes, always more I want to get done then I can etc. At least I have a three day weekend. I plan on hopefully having some time to set aside for finishing some of my coding tasks, likely on Monday. I think Saturday and Sunday will pretty much be homework catchup, and study days for my first exam next week.

On top of all this other stuff, whenever I teach I end up loosing about six hours. About 2.5 hours of driving, 1.5 hours of teaching, about another half hour of wasted time in there, and I don't usually have a spare moment until close to midnight. When I get back I usually need to drive around the entire campus trying to find a parking space, and then I have to take my tour of the dorm to see my girlfriend, and my lab partner to check in, and compare notes for due assignments respectively. What I would really suggest if you have a desire to go into engineering for a major.... don't. I know that won't stop the people that really want it (like me), but if your not in it 100% your wasting your own time, and the time of the people who do care. TopBlogSites is still giving me crap, no real update on that besides I wish they would tell me what was going on.

I guess I'm done ranting tonight, guess I'll finish eating, and hit my bed, I'm exhausted.

Toraux

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

Fighting the Overwhelming Nature of School

And the school work continues to pile on. Professors keep stacking more on, its the pile the gets larger with time rather then smaller. Or I guess we could say school is the unstable system defined as H[n]=n^2 where n is time. Yes that's right, I've seen so much of this stuff its meandering into the few normal, non school moments I have.

On a brighter note however, I made some time to code tonight. I decided to ultimately skip making the attempt at writing some sort of code to verify room colors don't overlap and room type numbers are always legal. It's on my list todo, so that means I'll get to it later, possibly this weekend. Instead I am coding up some gates. Unlike doors, they are intended to be controlled remotely with a lever of some sort. Both the gate and the lever room types have been implemented, but I'm currently stuck with the linking part. I think I'll need to write a new command and a few functions to store link info. Shouldn't be too hard to do, but I don't really have the time to complete it tonight, maybe tomorrow if I can get through my work ok.

I also would like to throw out a link for everyone: http://www.gameproducer.net I found this site today while searching for guides and information on choosing good names for games (yes, DynamicMUD is not the final intended name for the game, you can all relax). The site appears to have a whole lot of other cool information on independant game developing. I even found another ad system that can be used in conjunction with google adsense that seems to be pretty convincing. Unfortunately however this blog doesn't have the traffic to actually try it out yet. But feel free to go: Here to check that one out. I will likely post something more in depth about that one sometime tomorrow.

The one last thing I got done today was check out some info for hosting. I think I might attempt running a copy of dynamic up on the free host I have a deal with. Maybe I'll make it available for testing in the near future, make sure to keep checking back for more info on that.

Later,
Toraux

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

Back at School

Well I'm back at school, just about to finish my first week back. Classes so far seem ok, though a few conditions are less then desirable. I won't go into detail but I'll just say there are some people in these classes that shouldn't be in engineering... or college... or life. Looks like I might even learn some stuff that could help me in algorithms this semester. On the other end of the home front is my Karate class which was cancelled. Apparently the gym doesn't want to pay us with our current low attendance, so I need to deal with that now too. Great timing as always.

On the coding end of things I just started moving forward again after a little hiatus. The indoor outdoor code which was giving me trouble before is starting to work itself out. I was hoping to work on it tonight, but I ran out of time. I don't really have much else to say, but I'll try to most more often given I can find the time to code.

Until then.
-Toraux

Damn School Work

Hey all, didn't get any coding done tonight, homework really pushed me into a corner tonight, and I have an exam tomorrow too so I've been busy. Hopefully tomorrow night will go better and I can finish implementing the announcement system.
Now that the help system is working I think I will be taking on someone to write help files and other for player documentation to get that stuff handled and at the same time out of my hands so I can concentrate on developing the code. I will post an official job description later this week, but the job pretty much seems like it's assigned. If anyone else is interested in it get in touch and we can see if I'm ready for more then one person in this capacity.

On a similar note I will be looking for some sort of free online data storage place that allows shared access to facilitate the movement of these data files and possibly other data files as well. Comments on any of these subjects are encouraged.

Until tomorrow then, I think I will sleep. Later all.
-Toraux