Recent blog entries for chakie

Ugh, Sourceforge has again done something to the CVS servers that breaks normal use. All I get when trying to access my repository is a message:

Cannot access /cvsroot/civil/CVSROOT
No such file or directory

Nice. So what to do now? The CVS server has changed as I got a warning about a changed ssh key.

Is there any other place where one can host a FOSS game?

Seems like Advogato nowadays is mostly a place for GNOME developers, which is a bit of a shame. I don't care too much for GNOME so it was more fun to read diaries when people here were working on more varying projects.

Unfortunately I don't even work on anything that I think people would find interesting, so I can't even try to bring some other content in. :) Nobody here seems interested in games...

Finally got more time to work on Civil again. We've now completed and moved into our new house so evenings are again more or less free for fun stuff.

I now seem to have most of the engine working and units can move again. Networking stuff works again and a fair deal of features have actually been added on top of just the converted things. For those who wonder what I ramble about, Civil was turnbased but is being converted to realtime. As it simulates events on a fairly strategic level time is progressing faster than normal so that the players don't get bored silly.

Still much to do, but it's fun to see this little beast progress. It makes me happy to see years of effort finally become something. :)

More work on Civil. Parts of the realtime engine are now up and running, and I can't see any ajor problems on the horizon right now. Of course problems will creep up but, especially related to network latency, but that's a later problem. Progress is fairly good and developing is fun again.

I feel a little bit bad about the lack of direction for the project last six months, but hopefullt that will change.

Seems I will be laid off in a few weeks along with most others in our branch. It's a shame, we were working on some pretty cool Linux DVB hardware. Linux seems to be big within Nokia right now, so I should be able to find something else, the question is just where those positions are.

Oh, well...

Been a bit bad at keeping my diary up to date. Christmas was busy and I've been busy at work too. I kinda like it here, no complaints. Keeps me busy with pretty fun work, all Linux related development.

Much more work done on Civil, and many simplifications done. I guess I'll have to start readding some complexity back once I get deeper into the realtime aspects of the game, but that's a later problem. For now simple is good. I don't actually think we'll ever run into too hard problems with realtime stuff, as Civil isn't a fast paced FPS or RTS. It is more like a slow RTS where nothing happens faster than once a second, as the game scale is quite strategic. We could for instance make one game world second correspond to 5-10 seconds or the real world, or maybe even make it adjustable so that the players can get faster action when there isn't too much action.

I'm so tired. Got up far too early this morning after a night where I slept badly. Well, in one hour I can go home and take a nap. Aaah... :)

Progress on Civil is good and I've done some real nice stuff. I managed to pretty easily simplify a lot of stuff that was just too complicated, thus throwing out hundreds of lines of old code. It's sometimes good to get back to old code after being away for a while, as it makes it easier to spot those things that are just more or less braindead.

All the setup stuff and scenario loading seems to work ok now, tonight I'll start on making the server keep time and actually run the main game loop. This is where I expect some more code to be written and some problems to creep up. I think the server will get a separate thread that manages the incoming data in order to make the main loop as simple as possible. Only time will tell how well it all works out in the end.

Lots of Civil hacking. I'm actually getting somewhere, and hundreds of lines of old and obsolete code is getting mercilessly slaughtered. Much fun is being had. ;)

I also tried to get GStreamer to compile. Well, it compiled ok and also installed ok. I didn't bother reading any docs at all, so I didn't find anything evident that would actually show it stream some G:s. There was a gst-player package, so I tried that too. It didn't compile at all. Complains about some undefined functions that just don't seem to be available in either GStreamer or the player itself. The link line that barfed out seemed to link in hundreds of Gnome libraries and it looked just too messy, so I didn't bother trying to find out what it actually does, why it does it and what can be done to not do it.

So much for that testing then... All libraries should IMHO always have a simple "Hello world" application that shows in some trivial way that the lib is actually working so that one doesn't have to try to install all kinds of different extra stuff just to see the lib doing something.

Archit: I think most people that want to follow IRC discussions do it live on IRC... :)

Been doing some more Civil stuff. It's real fun to work on it again, although I don't have that much time to spend on it. Fortunately Python is a fast language to develop in.