Well, I got all of my computers up and running and in a location that works. My laptop is a card table in the living room. My desktop is on my newly purchased Ikea desk. I also just ordered a second monitor for it to improve productivity. And my media center (awaiting a QAM tuner) is hooked up to my hdtv. So things are finally progressing in a way that me, as a programmer can appreciate. Empty boxes and freed up floor space is great and all, but my machines being in good positions is really where it’s at. July looks to be a busy month to me, hopefully next week I’ll be back working on my own projects and soon I’ll be pounding away on finishing up Skirmish. It’d be nice to get it in a state that I can put it aside, and look onto the next project.
Posted on July 4th, 2008 by tehdiplomat
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Well, here are some more related news to my site. I just finished moving all of my stuff from my old Apartment in Hoboken, a few miles inland in Jersey. It’s a bit sad since I’ve been in Hoboken for a good 7 years and will have to meet new friends here, and all those social things that I was never very good at. It’s nice to be moving on from Hoboken and we’ll see how the real world is from a living perspective that doesn’t feel like college.
For now I may leave all the references on the site to Hoboken, since that’s where ASoOJ started and it is a nice little town. I might tweak them to say something about originating or some such. Well, I as I unpack boxes and organize my living space, my main computer is on top of three boxes full of “clothes to be donated” and my keyboard rests in my lap. Not optimal programming conditions. I decided to get rid of my old desk since I didn’t like it very much, and so when I get a new one and am able to put away have the crap that’s on my floor, I may be up to proggin a bit more. Until then, expect the twice a month posting I’ve been sorta keeping up with, maybe I’ll get in enough habits to post once a week. Maybe.
Update: Oh shit I forgot to mention Diablo 3. That game will put a whole into my time-time continuum. Oh yes Blizzard, let me play it now.
Posted on June 30th, 2008 by tehdiplomat
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Well, moving is going fairly smoothly for the most part. We were planning on having a few more things moved then actually got moved, but the minivan my girlfriend’s father was driving stalled out the day we were going to move a few larger things. But we do have a lot of stuffed packed and already moved, and we have a fair amount left. I’m still hoping to be done by this coming weekend so I won’t have to worry about it, but we’ll see how the weather is.
Friday I have to be around the new place to let the FIOS guys in. Supposedly it takes 4 hours to setup everything, hopefully they don’t need me for any of that. Or at least much of that. I’ll have a laptop and a tv, but no internet/cable setup yet (obviously) so we’ll see if I can leech off anyone else.
While i know those of you here for board games on the internet don’t care about my side project, and I’m sure you won’t be affected by it in any way (except for my reduced resources) it’s nice to be able to move quickly with this project. I’m doing lots of php work which is what I plan on doing for gskirm’s multiplayer, so hopefully once my side project is done, I’d have helped out the gaming community I’m doing the project for, and gained the right skills and workings with php to efficiently do multiplayer. Well, halfway through the month isn’t a bad time to post, I’m sure I could have done it sooner, but yknow I would have said basically the same thing as I did here, except I’d be less far along with both of these things.
Oh and I think I’m giving up on most professional sports. The NBA is rigged (according to the refs) and who knows how many other ones.
Posted on June 16th, 2008 by tehdiplomat
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Well, some activities going on over here. While April and May have been good blogging months (note the 2 posts in the month, instead of the normal monthly apologetic “sorry haven’t really posted, nor worked on the game”) and I’ve actually been productive in the last week or so on the game. While I haven’t worked on any of the features that I plan on being in the 1.0 version of late, I have gotten back into looking at all the code, and refactoring a bit for different reasons.
One of my biggest problems when trying to get back into this project as it ages, is remembering what I was doing, do to my lacking documentation. It might be a bit too late for this project, but for the next one it’s definitely something that will be an early priority. The stuff that was refactored wasn’t just for clarity for my sake, it also enabled me to decouple the game code from the UI code, allowing me to more easily port the game to another maps program or something neat and new like XNA.
Hopefully I’ll be able to code for an hour each day and hammer out all of the base gameplay stuff, and then I can worry about multicomputer work.
I’m moving to a new abode during June, so I’ll probably have a productivity drop as weekends turn into, cleaning, packing, moving instead of lazing, gaming, and possibly coding. Hopefully all that goes well.
Posted on May 23rd, 2008 by tehdiplomat
Filed under: games, gskirm, life | No Comments »
Yes the RC1 was released last night/today or whenever. If you are currently on FF2, I’d recommend upgrading immeadiately. The only caveats are the normal, extensions may not work. And if you really need them you can try Nighty Tester Tools, which attempts to force through your extensions.
It has a lot of impressive improvements which I appreciate highly. It also seemed to fix a problem I was having with Gskirm where it wasn’t working FF 3 Beta 5. I couldn’t tell what the problem was, but I have a feeling it had to do with how it was loading scripts. One of my current goals for the game is to remove the dependency on a single API (in this case Google Maps) thus making it easier to port. Probably the first thing I’ll try porting it to (once I get enough of it done where I feel it would be cool to port) is XNA. When I first heard about XNA I thought it was a great idea, and I’m in a great situation to be able to try it out and see what it has to offer for board games -> video games.
Well, I’ve definitely learned things that are necessary for personal projects. Documentation, specs, and avoiding feature creep. Also to factor in dead times. I don’t know if I like the idea of having a schedule. But maybe for features that I’m currently working on, I can set a date. And just repeat that cycle every time I’m working on something. We’ll see how that works. I’ve been trying to setup some talks with one of my friends about a Game idea he had. I think that one will be fleshed out way more before it comes to the internets.
Posted on May 16th, 2008 by tehdiplomat
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So I can’t remember if I ever mentioned this, but I thought of a few things recently that I want to “add” to the game. The first of these is an alternate battle system. This system would allow for the game to blend into a “true” board game by using real dice, that you can buy in any gaming store. It may use some funky sides like d4, and d12, but so be it. More feasible than finding those d3s and d7s.
The other, if I were a true software team with a project manager and fancy specs, and fancy MS project files everywhere, they would push off for a time in between cycles. So we’ll see when I decide to do it for, butttt I’m planning for a second refactor (the first was to the improved JS prototypes), but this one would be to separate out all of the game logic and fun stuff, from the UI/Google Maps API stuff. If I could do this smoothly, I’d be able to port the game to a different form (like say maybe XNA) with more ease cause the parts would already be noticeably different. I have to check how much work that entails, but it might be something I can do that doesn’t require tons of brain cycles.
Wellll.. that’s all I have for my bimonthly post.. good enough from my point of view.
Posted on April 24th, 2008 by tehdiplomat
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Now… I also kinda enjoyed April Fool’s Day. I’ve done a handful of pranks in my time, only a few of them coming on 4/1. And every year while I’m in the height of my website maintenance I tell myself I’m going to come up with something hilarious for April 1st. Well, as you can see, nothing happened. Maybe one year when I’m more adamant about posting towards the end of March.
But the real point of this post isn’t to woe on about my lack of posting (all of my previous posts have some of that). Really it’s to complain that the internet is completely unreadable today. My RSS is filled with junk. Most of it is funny the first time, but some sites are taken over by a running gag that floods my RSS with cakes or other nonsense. Also, nothing you read can be trusted, which basically means reading the internet is useless. I feel like I’m trapped in ytmnd-land. Oh well, it appears my complaints will do no good. Next year I’ll just avoid reading the internet on this date, and on the 2nd find out what all the fools day jokes were through wikipedia or some other means. Everyone go back to their site transmogrifying and your fake game update news.
Posted on April 1st, 2008 by tehdiplomat
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Well, as an avid gamer as myself, I’ve been playing all sorts of games since the tender age of whenever I first started games. If we aren’t going to count things like Hi Ho Cheerio and Hungry Hungry Hippos. I’d say I started gaming at 4, when my father taught me how to play chess. It’s definitely the game I’ve been playing the longest, even having gone to chess school for a handful of years during that time. Games unlocked a lot of things for me. I’d probably consider the big three game influences to be Chess, Magic (yes that Magic), and D&D. And got me to explore my creativity on “okay” grounds, start reaing heavily, and solve puzzles.
While I don’t pen and paper roleplay as much as I used to, I started probably about the same time I started burning my life savings into collecting Magic cards. Ahhh the addiction levels. Anyways, I’ve been roleplaying since about 7th grade (about 12 or 13) which would be considered half my lifetime. So Gary Gygax’s death got an “oh shit” out of me when I read it at work yesterday, and I wanted to post yesterday but wasn’t sure what exactly to say. Gary and Dave got the whole ball rolling some 10 years before I was even born, and still managed to have a major influence on me. I still play in an online 1st edition campaign that I’ve been playing for what feels like forever. Even people who don’t roleplay they’ve seemed to have a major influence in. How many hours does the average person play WoW? It looks like just a fancy UI and a larger world than a single DM could handle. Even back in the day of dial-up modems, and America Online I was mudding.
So yesterday was a said day. I know Gary was semi-retired and did manage to do a lot. I just hope he didn’t have something up his sleeve that never got to see the light of day.
Oh and you can enter the obligatory failed his saving throw joke here.
Posted on March 5th, 2008 by tehdiplomat
Filed under: fantasy, games, life | No Comments »
So I haven’t been up to too much on the creating games front, but I have been doing a few things on my other lists of stuff that I try to get done. I’ve got a few books off my “reading” list, which is nice because most of them are 800 page fantasy novels. Yes yesI know it isn’t even March yet, but Hoboken always has it’s St Patrick’s Day parade in Hoboken two weeks before NYC has its, so that’s this coming Saturday. I’m not expecting too much besides Corn Beef, Cabbage and Car Bombs. (Oh and potatoes but that would have ruined the alliteration)
St Patrick’s Day always has a special place in my heart, not only from my Irish heritage but because of everything occurring around it. This year I’ll be a turning ripe old 25 just before Saint Patrick will be reminisced for slaying all the snakes. Turning a quarter century is kinda weird, considering 5 years ago I wouldn’t have expected myself to be doing the things I am, but I was figuring on being somewhere close. Well… I dont know what else I was planning for this post, and i figured I hadn’t posted in a while so you deserved something. ::shrugs:: Back to watch the end of the Oscar’s
Posted on February 24th, 2008 by tehdiplomat
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So before the Super Bowl occurs in.. oh 5 hours, I’d like to put a prediction up here.
I will be cheering for the Giants cause I really don’t want the Pats going 19-0. But the prediction is unfortunately gonna lean the other way. 30-28 Pats.
Here’s to a good game, some good friends, and the hopefully the Golden Boy losing.
Posted on February 3rd, 2008 by tehdiplomat
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