Older blog entries for dancer (starting at number 15)

Close to screaming at people with frustration. Took a three-hour lunch. Came back chirpy, and a trifle manic (a compensatory effect, I trow). I still have the urge to lay waste to Tokyo in a baggy rubber suit, but that will be with me for some time.

Dan finally got my review done. Never had I had so many nice things said about me to me in one session. Well, there was this nurse once... but that's really not relevant to this story. What this all means in the context of renumeration is Yet To Be Revealed.

Good news: We're hiring a Martin. Which Martin? I'm not sure. I hope it was the one I interviewed. Martin starts on Wednesday, anyway. Fresh victims for the ever-growing army of the undead..

Gentlemen, we are leaving! End of next week the Dev team is moving to the new offices. Everyone else will be a week or two behind us. We'll have room to breathe again...for a little while at least. At the rate we're growing, I dunno.

Bugs, mister Rico. Zillions of 'em! Not a reference to the movie, nor quite even to the book, but to the back cover of the board-game (I think it might have been Avalon Hill. My, that was too many decades ago (two whole ones, I think)) Had Dave(2) working on bugfixes for hard to reproduce problems, while I tried to produce workarounds that would still allow critical reports to get generated. We both won, apparently. He finally found the bugs at the end of the day, and the reports (a) went out on time, and (b) contained numbers that were pleasing and (c) were accurate within observable limits. Ben finally manage to hammer the ad-hoc content system out enough to show to people. Bizarrely, I haven't seen it. I specced it, and led the project and helped out here and there, but I don't know what it looks like. A truly strange feeling.

Exult

NULL pointers, NULL pointers. Two of them appeared after Jeff made a couple changes. It has to do with getting object shapes to determine rectangular extents. Worked around it by returning zero-sized rectangles if the shape-data seems to be invalid. But what objects are doing this? We don't know. It also only happens once as we leave the splash screen so I.......waitaminute I have a glimmer. My bug-sense is tingling. I think it might be the red moongate.

Bit the bullet on our most Frequently Asked Question: What do OSI think about this? Well...what do they think? The only way to find out is to ask. But who? Lord British is the obvious choice. The only problem is that (as news has unfolded this last week) he's left OSI. Apparently OSI is very happy with their UO* line of properties, and isn't interested in developing new stuff. If Richard wants to develop new multi-million-dollar properties, it'll have to be elsewhere.

And besides, everyone always wants to talk to Lord British. So, I chose to start elsewhere: Amy Sage. I'm hoping that she can tell us who to talk to. It's not like we want development dollars (although money is always a nice thing), we just want to know what OSI think about the project. It's the right thing to do to ask, methinks.

Miscellany

Netscape 6 preview 1, looks good. It's taken everything I've thrown at it so far (which is not much, yet). Promising.

None for it hath been a weekend. It's now very early Monday morning. The sun is considering rising and I'm boiling water for coffee. All things being equal, I'll be out of here in a few minutes, and in the office ten minutes later (at this hour there's no traffic to speak of).

Genetic testing on Paul is going rather well. He's noticing side-effects from the mutant accountant DNA, but we have high-hopes that the resultant hybrid will be useful. Perhaps some sort of barrier can be erected in case the codeine wears off.

Exult

It's amazing how much progress got made since the 0.20 release. Patrol schedules are working, and I've figured out how to (sort of) get them going at the start of the game, while still having all the characters at their proper positions at game-start.

Miscellany

Spent a chunk of the weekend generally avoiding people. I think I'm up for a fair bit of social contact this week.

An interesting bug turned up at sourceforge where my tasks and monitored forums weren't being displayed properly. I filed it as a bug and took the failure of the sourceforge buglist to show me any bugs to be a bug (which it apparently was). All seems to be Maya now, as they say.

Feeling somewhat immune to April 1 japes. Worked up a few breaths of umbrage over an item, before realising the date, and shaking my head sadly.

Hmm. The MP3 appears to be a live version and not complete. Dangit.

An earlier night, 10 hours sleep, a late start, and I feel pretty durn good. Chipper, bouncy, happy. This is Not Like Me(tm). Well it is, but not lately.

This is Friday, which means company-sponsored drinks at 5pm. One of the executives are out at the bottleshop now getting the drinks and munchies.

Big, bad,bug! An important yet small application has shown an important but big bug. It has to do with...No..I'd better not talk about it. Suffice it to say that it is Serious(tm) and that it has resulted in Alarums and Excursions. Dave(2) was the unlucky perpetrator, and will live at his desk as long as necessary to find it and fix it. (Poor guy)

Miscellany

Found an MP3 of Existential Blues. I am very chuffed.

The nightly Mozilla is looking good. Sleek and sexy.

Exult news coming up, but not now.

I am distressed at the legal talk over the GPL featured over at Linux Weekly News today (mattel and cphack). Worriesome.

Give me the resources to do my job, damnit!

Okay, so I have Dave(2). He'll be up to speed in about a month, I figure, and start to be more generally useful. Besides, I have a project allocated to him for the next four weeks.

I have Igor starting in four weeks, and probably four more weeks to get up to speed.

I have a deadline in three months, four (or five or six) projects to complete by then, and no manpower!

So..C++ programmers, comfortable with linux and local to Melbourne, Australia, who aren't afraid to write high-performance internet apps to stupidly short deadlines should write to me. You can start tomorrow, but be warned. I need good people (well, I need average people, but my definition of average seems to be higher than the true average). Willing to teach, but you should be comfortable with the language.

End advertisement

How's my day going? I'm hoping that it's all an awful dream and that I'll wake up. I've made three pilgrimages to the CEO's desk and kicked it, so far today. Unfortunately he wasn't there any of those times. Too much work. Too few seconds. No manpower. And my damn pay review has been pushed back another day.

Sod writing any more for today. You won't want to read it.

Another more or less circular day. Dan managed to start doing the interview parts of the performance/pay reviews. Paul got done, then it was my turn. Dan then discovers that he's lost page 2 of 2 of my filled-out review form. Can I print him out a copy? No. I didn't keep one. Can I do another? Yes, but I don't have the MS-word file. I'm allergic to MS-word files. Can he send me another? Yes. He does, and I fill it in, print it and leave the page on his desk, since he's gone AWOL.

Dan returns sometime later. Talks to me about the navbar problem (don't ask). Nick's griped to him 'cause I haven't done anything on it. I let him wind down, and then point out that I've been working on it for the last two hours. I spend the rest of the afternoon doing builds and tests, making a bit of a mess because I've gotten annoyed for no good reason.

Eventually, all is done. Give Dan a lift home, and Margerita as well. She's leaving us the day after tomorrow, and though it's only been two months I'm going to miss having her around. Review didn't happen today. Everyone ran out of time. Tomorrow, then.

Exultification

Jeff's been hard at work on the renderer. It's been good, very-good, and slightly less good, depending on exactly which CVS update I got. I've been rehashing chunks of the audio engine, implementing repeat tracks and the like. SDL_mixer may be The Way To Go yet, or it may not be. Still making things work, and delighting in the crafting of code.

I want to abstract file-handling....The data files consist of all sorts of files (well, duh...Call me ObviousGuy), some of which represent single objects and some of which are indexed collections of objects. Problem is, there's about four distinct file-formats for collections of objects. While I have classes that deal with the couple of specific types that are specifically involved in the audio part they're specifically coupled to file-formats and I'm thinking that I've got the paradigm (and I don't use the word lightly) ass-backwards.

I should be concentrating on a generic interface that simply gets object X from file Y. I shouldn't need to have to specify what format Y is in. Further, I should be able to adapt the funky configuration format to allow an object to be overriden, and another fetched in it's place (either from another collection (possibly of a different type) or an object that is just a lone file). I should also be able to create collections in different formats from objects that are or aren't already in one.

When this becomes a more generalised game-engine (probably including an editor) or when we start thinking about Serpent's Isle or The Forge of Virtue, I feel this is going to become important. Lo, I have assigned myself another task.

Miscellany (Or, when will the old windbag shut up?)

Disappointed to see that anoncvs.gnome.org wasn't taking callers today. Wanted to check some stuff out and play...*sniff*

Got enough of XFree86 4.0 going. Guess my monitor was being modest about reporting it's refresh rates. Specifying them made things work well. Doesn't look like it's going to wedge into debian well until the maintainer gets things sorted out. I expect that will be a while, since he seems to just be getting into packaging 3.9.x. I won't hold my breath, I think.

Jeff's fixed the renderer! I'm not sure if it's perfect, but a quick look around yielded no visible problems.

I can't run Timidity and SDL at the same time. I'm going to have to hack my Timidity driver to render to sample-data on stdout, capture that via a pipe, and wedge it in when the mixer is feeding data chunks to the sound-devices...or...or...something else.

We've tagged the release, but not released it yet. Jeff's court, this one. If he wants to get 'just one more thing right' before releasing, then I can understand that.

New midi driver structure. And some real dependencies. Fluff and nonsense, you say? Bah, say I!

Miscellany

It's been a long week, and I'm more or less flopped in a heap in front of the `puter at home.

Built and attempted an install of Xfree86-4.0 on my office workstation. The rudiments appear to function, but getting it out of 640x480x?? seems to be beyond me. It doesn't want to run in anything else apparently. Why? I know not. It deletes most of the video modes as being unable to be done. Now since I run 1024x768x(16|32) normally at quite decent refresh rates under Xfree86-3.3, it's quite possible that my monitor is being modest under the DDC probe. Anyone with some tips, let me know. All that PCI and DDC probing looked very cool, and it'll probably be 6 months or more before it turns up in Debian.

We're on the verge of an interim release. 0.20 here we come.

I think we're now well beyond the point that any similar projects have achieved and powering along. While the task-list is moderately huge, the rate that Jeff and I are implementing is very good, and it amazes me how quickly we're getting this together.

I have high-hopes for this project, and I think it will meet or exceed them.

Work

Fixed a four-month outstanding bug. An arithmetical error to do with content-lengths. Seems that another section of code was adding two bytes to the content, and we couldn't see that. We should have seen it ages ago, but didn't. Fast-track testing, followed by a deployment later today. It was a late one again last night. What else do we expect these days? Crunch-mode is normal-mode. Even death-marches aren't exceptional anymore.

More of the same. I'm writing this from the perspective of the next day. A friend had a Special Occasion, which more or less demanded a Gathering With Alchohol. Consequently, I feel great today (yes, I never get hung-over), but it has muted the grubby details of the day's events. Yesterday always seems so much less important once it's no longer today.

Exultarianism

Making a little progress on patch-loading onto AWE cards. Didn't have a lot of time to spend on it (a few brief minutes), but I knocked out a prototype patch-loader in that time. We shall see - tonight probably - if that Does The Right Thing. Kudos to Takashi Iwai who gave me pointers to the information I need to make this work.

Jeff's made significant progress on the renderer. The rendering order still isn't correct, but barge objects (wagons, boats, and the like) are visible now, and there's some animated objects working. Most impressed.

We can't randomly rearrange the universe now. Exult now has the notion of weight, and you can't drag immobile objects around merrily any more.

Miscellany

Exchanged some email a few days ago with Vojtech Pavlik over the failure of the USB backport to work with my USB mouse. I think he had some Clues, but haven't heard back from him for a couple days. I'm considering emailing him again if I don't hear from him in another day or two. I'd like to be able to help isolate and fix this bug (if bug it be).

I'm in partial agreement with Kalana. Since the number of articles is rather thin at the moment and the readership is certified to be at least somewhat more rarified than what you would find elsewhere, there is an...I won't call it an intimidation factor, but there's certainly the urge not to post an article unless you actually have something to say.

Certainly, it doesn't necessarily feel right to post just news items, without having some genuinely contributory commentary or observations to add. I'm tempted to actually do that, though, to see how our readership reacts.

Exulted

Tried some strategies with the rendering pipeline. Got some information from Jeff late in the piece that caused me to discover why what I was doing wasn't right. To handle the isometric display, objects have to be rendered from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, lowest-to-highest...this, however did not work for me. Then just after I'd given up, Jeff vouchsafed to me that the 'hotspot' from whence the object's coordinates were calculated is the bottom-right of the object. AHA!

This means that to render correctly you build a list right-to-left, bottom-to-top, highest-to-lowest, and then render the list in reverse!. I'm going to try this. Actually, I think I may be able to shortcut by hacking at the sorting order of the object store. If so, it'd be about a four-line solution, rather than say, a major change to the renderer. I like that idea

Played with sourceforge's task-manager. Had fun making subprojects and tasks for the things left to do. Had rather less fun then looking at the list and realising how far we have left to go. Nevertheless, I feel that the warm fuzzy glow of accomplishment will accompany actually getting the tasks closed, and that should help keep our enthusiasm up as things wear on.

Why is the blood yellow? Jeff can't answer that one either...

Work

It's been a long day (9pm now, and I'm about to leave the office). I feel a little evil. I've put Ben and Dave(2) together to write some client code for the engine that I've had Dave(2) doing. Ben's a web-designer, and knows only enough perl to get himself into serious trouble. Dave(2) knows C and even less perl. Watching them try to find some common system to write CGI scripts in is interesting, to say the least. They're both smart, though. I have faith in their ability to get the job done.

Bucking to throw off my substandard pay. A performance review is upcoming. The very first the company has had. An awkward process for everyone. Not the least because we have no idea where we can find the time to measure something we don't know how to measure. Fun.

All in all a circular day. Things got done, but between support, diagnosing bugs, and managing, I didn't get much of the warm glow of accomplishment.

Miscellany

Yay, Mozilla. Checked out the latest build. It's getting some interesting visual flash now. Parts of it are starting to look very slick. Not-yay Mozilla. It only ran once. Deleting the profile directory didn't help. It won't run again. Might be strace time. Later.

I tried something new at work today. It's called an 8-hour day. Although the specs for it are very simple, it's doubtful that I can get it past the proof-of-concept phase. This gave me time to have a relaxing early part of the evening, and to just fiddle about for the pleasure of it, something which is all too rare.

Exultwise (Kudos to Kalana without whom, I would be recycling word-endings)

Jeff's yanked Freetype out, and is using fonts.vga from the gamefiles. This is not because we don't like freetype; I expect we'll be supporting it when we get to extending the engine, after polishing the gameplay. The game looks more authentic in it's actual font. We're not entirely sure that the sizes and such are right everywhere, but there you go. WIP.

I noticed that some of the object names displayed in black. Well, heck, then I discovered that all of them did. Then I went on a bit of an orgy, spotting for rendering bugs and oddnesses with the interface. And my did I find some.

When the Avatar goes to the Blue Boar inn in Britain he/she (supply your favourite gender term for avatars) walks under the rugs. I never realised that the Avatar was so short! Got a lot of pluck for such a little paragon, don't you think?

I can move things. Lots of things. Bwahahaha! Doors, moon-gates, steps, signs, plaques, headstones, furniture, portcullises, pieces of ship, lamposts, fountains, haystacks and fences! I R'edOTFLMAO gaily rearranging Brittania for about a half an hour. Only people, trees, brush, walls and roofs seem to be immune to my depredations.

This we have got to fix...(I mean that I can move all this stuff around. Not the immunity part). Bugs duly filed so we don't forget.

Miscellany

So, where the heck is Worldforge.org lately? Slashdotted? I fear the worst.

Oh, and speaking of ROTFLMAO...should I be doing it about this patent?

Spent some time exchanging bug/system info with the maintainter of the linux 2.2 USB backport. If you'll recall it doesn't work with my mouse and there's little clue why, except that mousedev once loaded seems to remain unused by anything. Hopefully over the next day or so we'll figure out what is wrong and that will be fixed. I would prefer to run 2.2.x on my workstation than 2.3.x at the current time.