Older blog entries for dancer (starting at number 29)

We've made it onto Sourceforge's 'Most Active' list on their front page! Wow! This is attracting a fair bit of attention from users and we're getting lots of "This is way cool" and "Thankyou" emails. Very pleasing to the liver.

I reckon we've got about 70 percent of the game mechanics implemented. Combat's being worked on, as is the spell system, pathfinding now more or less works. Scrolling is being reworked to make it more like the original. In fact, we're half adding stuff at the moment, and half fine-tuning to make what we've implemented match more closely with the original.

Work

Spent about three hours this-morning dealing with a panic bug in production. Ick. Didn't have time for a coffee until it was over. Much running around and screaming. Seems to be a subtle bug in one of the daemons. Ultimately, restarting that daemon on the two (of 30) afflicted boxen worked...though the bug appeared to be in a completely different (non-restartable) process for quite a while, until a process of elimination tracked it down.

Everyone I know who's tried it thinks it rocks. I tried it. It rocks.

Exult

Load/Save games working. Spell-book/magic system underway. Map display done. Pathfinding all over the place.

We've come a hell of a long way. I'm constantly surprised by how far, but I expect you've all guessed that by now.

We discovered that the audio was done by the Miles Sound System (v2.14). Tried to get information, and failed. Then the author released that version to the public. Been looking at the code. Horrors. Lots of assembler, some binary-only drivers and DOS code with far pointers. I've just looked through the code, but it looks like being a long road.

Still, we have something to work from, and something is often better than nothing.

Long delays. Mostly because there are all sorts of things that I really don't want to say in a public, or semi-public forum. Hence a delay while I saved some stuff up.

Work

Acceptable enough to keep me there, for now. If I can avoid enough interruptions to actually do the work, anyway. If I can't, well, it's all a bit of a waste of time, then, yes?

Making good on my promises to Dan and the Matts about reducing hours worked. Got it down to about 45 or so per week, which will probably have to do.

Exult

And now we are six, with conversions for the Mac underway, and a preliminarly exploration of BeOS requirements. Been churning through the code, being Pedantic-Guy(tm), adding consts and virtual keywords, and compiling with loads of warnings.

While it shouldn't really be important, we're advancing steadily towards Sourceforge's top-projects list, being the 45th this week, and 65th of 'all time'. Like I said, it shouldn't matter. But it does a bit. In that it is pleasing to the soul.

I wasn't even aware that g++ had -Weffc++ ... delightful!

More and more of the plot-critical things are being implemented. We're getting close to doing vehicles (wagons/ships) which were on the timetable for a while back, but they got pushed out by other things.

The pathfinders work very well most of the time now, and we can plug in pathfinding algorithms willy-nilly whenever we want to, with relative ease. It's even tempting to make them dynamic shared objects, but I can't find any good excuse for it. :) OO (when used properly (which is rarer than you might think, out in the industry) can be an unalloyed joy.

Next, some kind of integrated debugger for usecode. Hmmm.

Life

Pneumonia and general illness. Pills, potions, powders. Cold weather.

Bonus points: Friends in the USA sent us two "Fog" snow-weight coats quite some time ago. I now have a good excuse to wear mine.

Well, we're in the new office. Some personality clashes have made me thoroughly miserable, but they have really been going for some months now. It's not directly related to the move.

The coffee machine is plumbed in now, which makes everyone a lot happier. Though I am an instant-coffee drinker, the machine does save me the effort of boiling water, so that's a help.

People have complained to me a fair bit about the new office, and honestly, I didn't like the place much the first day. It grows on you, though. My team is together, and producing and extremely happy with the work they're doing and with how I'm managing them. This is a Good Thing(tm).

The major gripe people have with the office-space is the psychological change. The biggest two complaints are that people feel less accessible (even if that is not actually the case) and that they feel very second-class and insignificant in the new space. I don't have any good solutions to that. I can sort of see why they feel that way, though.

My modem line (from home to the office) has been giving consistant troubles since we moved. I've changed modems at both ends, as a test. No help. The line stalls/retrains and drops out every few minutes. Sometimes more frequently than that. Since it's a permanent link, the connection costs must be really mounting up. Damnit. I don't have a good solution to this :(

Exult

Release 0.26 is in the works. Any time now. Went through rationalising the calling structure for intrinsics. Going to do a little more of that soon. A reference to a structure will be much cheaper than passing the half-dozen arguments around all the time. As it is, though, the new model cleans up some ugly macros, restores syntax-highlighting to the file, and makes it go faster. I'm sure I can do better than that.

Walked through the headers where the game-object inheritance tree lives. Assorted classes with virtual methods, either without virtual destructors or without explicit destructors period. Added some virtual keywords, and inserted some empty destructors. While I was doing that I noticed some instance data (pointers). I don't know the class semantics of this section of the code well enough to know if that data is released before the object is destructed. Referred that to Jeff, and will take a further look at it myself.

We're moving offices today(friday), and over the weekend. All is Chaos, much as can be expected.

Alas, I am also overcome with a nasty sinus infection (the gift that keeps on giving). I feel terrible. All my stuff is now in boxes. Home I go. Network access will be spotty over the weekend. Must try some Life(tm) to make up for it.

I've been within six inches of resigning four times in the last three weeks or so. So far this year has been great for company revenue and company growth, and horrific for job-satisfaction and sanity.

Things seem to be on the improve. Well, we'll see, won't we?

I have misgivings about the office move. Nebulous, inarticulate things. The last one was supposed to have gone smoothly, and was far from that. This one is supposed to also. Yeah, right.

Going to try to get an early night, and get out of here by 6 or 7pm.

Diplomacy

Not playing it, but can't say I'm totally enamoured with the idea of the board being laid out on the desk six inches behind my chair. Might fetch a sharp object and start a transfer-of-stress program, next time there's a big strategic meeting at my elbow.

Exult

That at least is going well. I've not had time to make any real contributions this last week, but I'm hoping to spend some time on it.

No comment.

Mind you, it's wednesday. Easter ate up friday to monday, and ANZAC day ate up tuesday. One of those delightful little lunar coincidences.

Igor starts at the office today. I expect him to suffer through the usual two days of induction process and workstation/network woes before I actually get to start him on anything serious

That said, Marty and Dave(2) are both starting to pick up steam. Pleased with them.

Exult

We've just released 0.25, and are starting to get positive feedback. I've already almost lost track of the amount of Nifty Stuff(tm) that we've put in the development branch since we branched the tree. Said branch was to allow Willem to tweak the source a little further for Windows issues while we moved ahead. We're doing a merge back with the trunk in the next 24 hours, and who knows? We may be ready to do another release. Or, we can hold off and sprinkle more nifty stuff in!

Feeback of the day: The new version works and it simply kicks ass! Someone should give u guys a huge pile of money for your efforts ;) Thanks!

Well...okay. I'm waiting for mine. I think it'd look just dandy next to the bookcase.

Well, we're still here. It's Easter, and that plus Anzac day amounts to 5 full days off. I think I'll spend that in sleep and couch-potato mode. That'll prevent me spilling the blood of the innocent, and making primitive cave paintings with it.

Jenn's not so well at the moment. She'll need looking after. Hoping to get some hefty Exult work done over easter:

Exult

Willem's been quiet. We're not sure of the status of the windows port yet. We're delaying a new release (0.25?) until we know for sure.

Monsters. Our devel branch is acquiring monsters, and pathfinding, and better character animation, and more usecode, and every thing we can stuff into it.

Looking at ant-pathing and A-star algorithms at the moment. Both of which appear to work the way I had though a pathfinder might work when I started thinking about pathfinders. So..I was obviously on the right track.

We don't have any sort of a combat system, let alone an implementation of the one that the original had. We're planning on starting with a simple one: You click on the monster and it dies.

We'll then do the thing with the loot, experience points, and distribute some random damage to players based on armour and such. That will give us chunks of the underlying mechanics that we can clean up before we implement the full combat mode.

Today we have to do without Dan. We also have to do without Tiff. Both are key figures around the office. Both are off to be married (to each-other, as it happens). Both are gone for six weeks.

Somehow we will have to make do without them.

No, we're not moved into the new offices. We took a peek seven days ago. It was a playground of dangling wire, fresh paint, no carpets and no walls. It looked much smaller than it had before. Scarily smaller. Some fitters were venturing to start laying some carpets, and I am told that some progress has been made, but we're not moved yet.

Weekendish

It felt like a busy weekend. It's going to be a busier week. I've got after-work bookings for every night this week. I can't stay till 10:30pm every night. Will this cause major sociopolitical ramifications? Will it significantly affect the speed of light?

Going to try to write about more useful material later in the week.