While the editor bug is still there and taking a long time to find, at least I am making some progress in the game. I have been working on the art tiles. The new tiles are the 45 degree isometric perspective. While many of the tiles have already been replaced, some have not. Also, some of the old perspective tiles when converted to the new perspective do not look good, although they did not look good in the old perspective either.
Our lead programmer says that seeing the new tiles gives him motivation to sit down and find the bugs.
I went back to an old message forum to read my ancient post about recruiting Wograld developers. No one there was interested. Not only that, but someone commented that only insane masochist programmers would want to work on the project. That is the wrong idea. After all, masochism is one of the nine stupidities. So it seems that all over our developers already have the qualities nessessary to complete the fool quests in Wograld.
1) Indescretion. - this blog is prof of that.
2) Lust - I'm lusting after Wograld, I want it so bad.
3) Foolhardiness - Well, if this project kills me, my only hope is some other foolhardy adventurers follow in my footsteps.
4) Paranoia - lead programmer though someone was entering his house, but it is just the furnace.
5) Masochism - Wograld developers have already been labeled as Masochistic. Why else would we spend so much time on it.
6) Vengence - this is revenge for all those times that rpgs like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft did not live up to my standards.
7)Thievery - We copied the code from crossfire, not exactly thievery,
8) Humilation - We have humilated ourselves over and over trying to promote this pre-alpha project.
9) Skepticism - hmm, I don't believe in C programers, oh wait...
Monday, January 24, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Squashed Bugs or Sqaushed Egos?
Every so often it gets tempting to start doing something else instead of the difficult Wograld project. Even to this day, I do not consider myself a very good programmer. Sure, I did some C programming, and I have written some text based programs, that were mostly made of other programs stuck together with the variables renamed. Unfortunately, when it comes to basic things like understanding how C reads and writes to files, as well as how to use the x11 libraries in the code, I still lack understanding. Instead, I have been relying heavily on my lead programmer, a man with an ego problem (his problem being a lack of ego rather than, like most programmers, having a giant ego) to fix the bugs.
He has been stuck for a long time on the editor bug.
The editor crashes when you use it and try to scroll down. Also, some of the tiles do not appear like they should, instead they blank out the other tiles when they try to appear on the screen. Instead of having my describe it to you, you should actually just download the latest cvs release, as well as the old crossfire maps, and test it out to see what I mean.
I would like to put the bug out there for others to solve, but I worry it will hurt his poor ego. I'm sure he does not want to read this blog where I talk about him and his problems with self esteem.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Nanowrimo
The whole of November was taken up by me writing a novel. www.nanowrimo.org The C++ group I was involved with got to chapter 7. After that, we kind of stopped. Something about chapter 7 in that book just got very hard all of a sudden, even though we seemed to be making progress prior to that. Well actually, each chapter just got harder and harder.
One nice thing about novel writing is you do not have to worry about having a project to large to do by yourself at all. I find that I can write a whole novels myself without any help from anyone else. I won the nano write, but I still have not finished the story, being as I got over the 50k needed to win, but my plot is not really more than halfway done. The story is about a web developer who has no social life, so she joins a cult.
I could talk more about my plotting problems here, but I think I will leave that for somewhere else, as I know not all game developers like books in the horror genre. My husband loves to read horror novels, but he would not like to see the horror stuff happen irl. So then I asked him. If you don't like it for real, then why do you read so much of it? He likes a lot of Stephan king, except for the dark tower series. I hope I did not fill up my book with too many descriptions of her dreams and nightmares. When I do the editing, my critics might insist I take that part out.
One nice thing about novel writing is you do not have to worry about having a project to large to do by yourself at all. I find that I can write a whole novels myself without any help from anyone else. I won the nano write, but I still have not finished the story, being as I got over the 50k needed to win, but my plot is not really more than halfway done. The story is about a web developer who has no social life, so she joins a cult.
I could talk more about my plotting problems here, but I think I will leave that for somewhere else, as I know not all game developers like books in the horror genre. My husband loves to read horror novels, but he would not like to see the horror stuff happen irl. So then I asked him. If you don't like it for real, then why do you read so much of it? He likes a lot of Stephan king, except for the dark tower series. I hope I did not fill up my book with too many descriptions of her dreams and nightmares. When I do the editing, my critics might insist I take that part out.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Learning C++
I decided to take some time away from just working on the project to learn C++. If you have been reading my prior posts, you know how much I hate Dependency hunt. Dependency hunt, for those newbies who do not know, is when you run all over to try to install library dependencies that are needed for some user applications in GNU/linux.
I am on the 7th week of it now. We are on chapter 5, having started on chapter 0. After chapter 2, it got hard, so people wanted a week to catch up. I just read chapter 5 today, but have not tried to do any of the exercises yet. I really have no idea how to do them. I will probably go around playing with the code and changing various things before I understand what is going. I still don't understand some things about chapter 4 (or even 3 for that matter) But I want to move forward and learn new things. If I know enough C++, theoretically, I could fork every project that requires SDL and other stupid C++ libraries so they have no dependencies and people can just compile them from source without errors. I could do this by renaming files in the C++ SDL libraries and in the code so that I could find the right version of SDL to make it work. Then I could include this in the code, making it part of the code body rather than a separate dependency that breaks everything else if you decide to upgrade it.
I know for a fact that later versions of SDL are buggy and incompatible with some code. I do not think you should rely on consistency in libraries done by some one who probably doesn't even know, nor care about your project.
I am on the 7th week of it now. We are on chapter 5, having started on chapter 0. After chapter 2, it got hard, so people wanted a week to catch up. I just read chapter 5 today, but have not tried to do any of the exercises yet. I really have no idea how to do them. I will probably go around playing with the code and changing various things before I understand what is going. I still don't understand some things about chapter 4 (or even 3 for that matter) But I want to move forward and learn new things. If I know enough C++, theoretically, I could fork every project that requires SDL and other stupid C++ libraries so they have no dependencies and people can just compile them from source without errors. I could do this by renaming files in the C++ SDL libraries and in the code so that I could find the right version of SDL to make it work. Then I could include this in the code, making it part of the code body rather than a separate dependency that breaks everything else if you decide to upgrade it.
I know for a fact that later versions of SDL are buggy and incompatible with some code. I do not think you should rely on consistency in libraries done by some one who probably doesn't even know, nor care about your project.
Friday, July 16, 2010
I love BOTS
I found this bot blog. Apparently artifical inteligence hasn't gotten much smarter. It is goofy how my post about food on a CVS book ends up pasted to something about CVS coupon books and gets labeled as ontario antique book dealer. When I read it I really LOLed. Then I showed it to some other wograld developers. Do people really make money from sites like that?
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Bug and Features tracker on Sourceforge
I added some tasks to the bug and features tracker on sourceforge. I will add more as I assign tasks to people. I also added the ability to post commits to the cvs list, but I have not tested out its usage yet. It is supposed to mail the mailing list subscribers every time a commit is made to the project just like I have seen on other projects. I do not know why it took me so long to get to that or realize how it worked, but it did.
Also, another project admin felt that she could improve the website so that is being worked on now as well.
Also, another project admin felt that she could improve the website so that is being worked on now as well.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Broken Computers = Lack of Progress
Partly it is my fault, I did something stupid. I turned on the computer during a lightning storm. I was playing this stupid game called tribalwars www.tribalwars.net in order to forget about the unhappy project team I have that fights each other instead of working on the project. The dumb thing about it is you have to log in at certain times to coordinate attacks on the targets, otherwise they can defend against each attack by stacking the village with troops and then moving the troops around. It is played in real time and some people seem to play it 24/7, but I think that is just more than one person playing the same account.
So that is when the lighting storm hit. Usually, I would have just logged in the laptop that is sort of resistant to power surges, but I did not. The power turned off and on at least once. At first I thought the computer was ok, but then my mouse locked up in the middle of making a tribal wars move. So then I rebooted it. It turned out the mouse and keyboard would not work at all, so I rebooted it again. Then it would turn on, that is the fans and mother board lights, but I would never get to the POST screen before you get to the grub menu. No beeps, although the cd light would turn on. I tried removing the battery. I considered flashing the bios, but I am not sure that would work. It is too much of a pain because you need a floppy disk a=d a way to format it in dos, so I would need a dos system. The only one I can think of is mom's old laptop that is connected to the internet.
I spent most of the month of June trying to figure out what was wrong with it, trying to fix the computer, and then ordering a new one. I thought maybe I could just use that old pentium3. It turns out the ide harddisk on it is dead, and the scsi does not have enough space to install an os made after like 1995 or so. Then I tried to back up the contents of the hard disk on the broke system to some dvds (the hard disk from the system is ok and has all its contents). It would not copy some of the files because of permissions. (I had a triple boot system, and only ubuntu boots because of the hardware drivers, I plugged the old disk into another old system that over heats when you use it too much) I have not tried it again recently after I looked up how to use chown. The new computer I ordered is supposed to be good, but I have not gotten it yet. They admitted they are taking longer than they should with it (although being a custom system I shouldn't expect it rush rush) It isn't all that high end. I got a desktop because it can have a faster processor than a laptop.
So that is when the lighting storm hit. Usually, I would have just logged in the laptop that is sort of resistant to power surges, but I did not. The power turned off and on at least once. At first I thought the computer was ok, but then my mouse locked up in the middle of making a tribal wars move. So then I rebooted it. It turned out the mouse and keyboard would not work at all, so I rebooted it again. Then it would turn on, that is the fans and mother board lights, but I would never get to the POST screen before you get to the grub menu. No beeps, although the cd light would turn on. I tried removing the battery. I considered flashing the bios, but I am not sure that would work. It is too much of a pain because you need a floppy disk a=d a way to format it in dos, so I would need a dos system. The only one I can think of is mom's old laptop that is connected to the internet.
I spent most of the month of June trying to figure out what was wrong with it, trying to fix the computer, and then ordering a new one. I thought maybe I could just use that old pentium3. It turns out the ide harddisk on it is dead, and the scsi does not have enough space to install an os made after like 1995 or so. Then I tried to back up the contents of the hard disk on the broke system to some dvds (the hard disk from the system is ok and has all its contents). It would not copy some of the files because of permissions. (I had a triple boot system, and only ubuntu boots because of the hardware drivers, I plugged the old disk into another old system that over heats when you use it too much) I have not tried it again recently after I looked up how to use chown. The new computer I ordered is supposed to be good, but I have not gotten it yet. They admitted they are taking longer than they should with it (although being a custom system I shouldn't expect it rush rush) It isn't all that high end. I got a desktop because it can have a faster processor than a laptop.
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