A lazy day, for a change
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life, cities-in-the-sky
Great, I've got a completely free weekend with my girlfriend away, perfect chance to get some work done on CITS... but I'm not in the mood, so I've only done some minor tidying work (programmers like me love making code pretty) and finished up some bits to do with people falling off the island that I should have done before (they get 'tidied up' like the buildings do now). The rest of the day was taken up cleaning my bike, sorting out insurance, calling estate agents and other boring but necessary things like that. Tomorrow will be better, I promise!
Now I'm relaxing with a bottle of Tanglefoot, listening to some Frank Zappa (I'm trying new musics... can be quite good if you listen to the right albums. Lumpy Gravy, Hot Rats and Apostrophe are my favourites so far), and probably playing some more GTA4 and Trackmania.
Note: Trackmania is great with retro red-and-blue 3D glasses. Cheers Joe :)
Cuboid fear
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life, cities-in-the-sky
The little cuboid people now have something to fear. If they get hit by a building, they fall off the island to their doom. By "doom" I mean "negative infinity in the Y axis", and by "fall" I mean "get launched upwards for comedy effect".
In other news I've been out and about in Loughborough looking for a new place to live. Seems like a lovely place, if you ignore the North and the South and the East of it.
People are a lot like cuboids
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky
Well would you look at that. The island seems to have become inhabited by tiny cuboid people, who stick rigidly to its surface and vibrate rapidly for locomotion. What a crazy world we live in.
Next up is better physics integration for people, more interesting behaviour/AI, and a bit more of a gameplay tie-in.
Professional Crastination
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under life
Well, I just made myself laugh. I went to see the new Indiana Jones film with my girlfriend today (it was pretty good). We had to get there very early since Odeon's online booking system broke whilst I was using it (refusing to load any pages at all just after I'd tapped in my credit card details, my favourite kind of broken), so we didn't have seats reserved.
So we were sat there watching the ads and one came on for the new Mini Clubman - a little 'short' entitled procrastination. It was this charming hand-drawn animation about a guy wanting to get his 'things' done, but who keeps finding other things to do. It ends up with him noticing his chair is squeaky, and going to buy some oil to stop it squeaking and distracting him from doing his things.
I hadn't thought about it much until a few minutes ago, when I caught myself kneeling by my upside-down deskchair with a can of WD40. I guess it's made even more ironic by the fact that I'm now writing a blog post about it.
Anyway, progress has been roughly zero these past few weeks ...
Cities in the Sky *is* a game
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky
It's not just an experiment in software engineering, I promise. I've done the last of what I needed to do now - finished up unit test integration with a couple of extensions to UnitTest++, re-wrote the build script to allow debug and release builds to be called in the same ant invocation (which has unfortunately shown me just how ugly XML can get when used for conditional logic...), and a load of other minor tweaks and fiddles to get things running as smooth or smoother than they were before in terms of day-to-day development.
I also spent a good long while upgrading this website's Wordpress installation and playing around with the wp-cache plugin, as I've noticed it takes a stupidly long time to load most of the time. This broke everything though so I've now uninstalled it. Perhaps I'll just change hosts once my two year stint with StreamlineNet is up. It took a fair while to do all this since at the same time I was trying to get a local mirror of the site set up on my file server, to allow me to cock around with a local copy and upload changes ...
Tools count as progress too
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky
Okay, so I lied. I haven't actually done any more on the game, I've worked on the build tools and server some more instead. I do have a reason though: the in-house tools we use at work are terrible, and I like to think that if I put together my own stuff in a spiffy enough way we can swap over to doing things my way instead!
Since I'm feeling guilty about not having any new screenshots, here's one of my Trac roadmap page, showing a lovely progress bar for each version of the game. I shan't show you the tickets page lest I give away too many tasty secrets!
Here's a slightly more tasty shot showing my Pulse project overview.
This makes me happy. Things to note are that there are lots of green bars (I like green bars), and that the recent builds (tied to checkins, or versions) have numbers of tests next to them, which will be increasing rapidly! You can also spy a couple of commit messages at the bottom, indicating that I have indeed been farting around with build-related stuff recently. There are a few nice graphs showing changing ...
Thank you, Internet
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky, internet
Wow, what a great week it's been for my website! On the 28th of March I had a whopping 7 unique visitors according to good ol' Google Analytics. Let's have a look at what people searched for to get here:
- "Cities in the Sky". Well, that's reassuring.
- "Creating clouds with libnoise". I only wrote about it once, but still, topical.
- "Is there a motorway in the sky?". That's a bit of a tenuous link. I suppose it's possible to add motorways into CITS though.
- "Crap cities". Thanks google, I'm honoured that you associate CITS with 'crap cities'.
- "big hairy cits". I think we all know what this guy was really searching for. You need to get a girlfriend, or a less disgusting fetish.
The ironic thing is that by posting these search terms on my site I'm only making it more likely that people will arrive here by searching for them. Hooray for positive feedback.
In other news, I haven't had much time to work on CITS, but I now have Pulse set up and merrily building anything I commit, and I have to say that I'm really quite impressed. I ...
Good news for geeks that like sky cities
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under cities-in-the-sky
So, I've done a lot of things since I last wrote here. Here's a waffly overview:
I'm refactoring like a beast (a beast that's good at refactoring), and the code is now looking rather spiffy. It builds super-fast too. Though I haven't that much time available to work on the game, my time at work is helping me spot all sorts of new opportunities to clean things up, and increasing my C++ experience massively. I'm now at a point where I'm actually giving advice to others, and people come to me for my opinions and advice on coding matters. Yay!
A few months back (I probably should have blogged this) I added in a few new input methods just for fun, since tapping an arrow key once per square was getting tedious. It's now continuous over a grid, which is nice. I tried continuous over a grid where the island spins with the left/right movement of the cursor too, but that just felt weird. I'd like to go back to that some time soon since it means you can use a much lower camera angle and expose more of the ...
Day 1 of real life! - Tuesday 21st August
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under travel
We got up at 2pm and I finally had a cup of tea. We filled Ben's mum in on our trip, then I came home to surprise my Mum.
All in all we had an amazing time. A trip of a lifetime. We had highs and lows, most of which were on the last day! It was a wonderful adventure which shall not be forgotten. I am looking forward to the slide show to tell everyone what happened.
This is the end of our holiday journal! Au revoir, Auf wiedersehen, Ciao and Goodbye!!
Day 30 - Monday 20th August
Posted by Ben Hymers | Filed under travel
Well, our holiday has not ended on a high I am afraid to say! We lounged around in bed until 9:30ish as it was still raining and we knew we didn't have all that far to travel. After getting up and packing our soggy tent away, we were off, only to stop 100m down the main road for Ben to put his rain covers on.
The journey this morning was wet, cold and slow as we were driving cautiously on the slippery roads. We stopped for lunch at a Champion, the inside of which was colder than being outside as they had their air conditioning on full blast!
After eating out sandwiches and some yummy caramel slice things we were on our way again. But not for long; Ben pulled over as his steering felt funny, and we found out he had a flat back tyre! We panicked a bit, not knowing what to do in the middle of nowhere in the drizzle. Then Ben remembered that my Dad kept an emergency tyre kit thingy under sit seat. This pumped foam into the tyre which re-inflated it and glued the hole shut. He definitely had a hole in ...
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