Golden Anvil

Back at the end of January I mentioned that I was starting work on programming a new game called One Small Step. Well, at last I have some screen shots to show off. Those will be down at the bottom. It's actually taken a huge amount of work to get to this point, and I thought I share some of the details with you (hopefully without boring anyone too much). This might get a little long.

Some of the difficulty has been in determining the equations used to calculate the exact position of a body in orbit at a given point in time. I actually ended up purchasing two text books to help me deal with this issue (although I expect the books to help solve other problems for this and future programs as well).

I receive a monthly roleplaying magazine called Pyramid released as PDF by Steve Jackson games, the ones who publish my roleplaying game of choice (GURPS). They articles are usually not dependant on any particular roleplaying system although they sometimes include stats appropriate for GURPS. This month's issue was themed around post-apocalyptic adventuring. You know, after the nuclear bomb kind of stuff, or zombie survival. That kind of thing.

In general, it was a fairly good issue, but there was one article that just got my creative juices flowing. The article present a number of equations that would be useful in doing statistical modeling of populations. It talked about birth and death rates, reproductive rates, age distributions, growth limits, short and long term effects of things like wars, etc. It also provided links to online resources for furthering your own research.

I'm sure Hameed can empathize with me on this, and most likely others as well...

Today was one of those days at work where I felt like I was going backwards. I was working at trying to implement something in the program I'm writing that changes the underlying structure of how some data is accessed. I had just about got everything working finally, when today I ran into the issue of trying to get the data saved. Unfortunately, at this point a nasty design issue raised it's head, and I realized that in order to solve it I'd have to rip out some of the features that I thought would have been nice, but which I didn't think we'd technically need.

Ok, so I ripped out the features, and got saving implemented, and was moving on to the next piece of the problem when I suddenly realized why we needed  those features in the first place. Unfortunately, I need the features, but they can't be successfully implemented because of a basic assumption of the overall system design.

Copying a meme started by Optiker, I poked around a little to see  what was the oldest thing I have still sitting around that wasn't just sitting in a box somewhere.

I think I've got five categories of such things.

1) Games (roleplaying and such mostly): I've got Car Wars stuff here that dates back to early highschool. Now technically, I haven't played it in a while, but I really want to. Doesn't that count for something? I also have some Lost Worlds stuff that dates back to highschool. I've played that more recently, but it's still been a while. I'm sure I've got a couple other games that date back to at least late highschool.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm working on writing a program that will generate families for use in roleplaying games. Well, things are coming along rather nicely. Today I got a good chunk of the visualization routines in place. That means I can now view my output as something other than raw XML. There are still some issues that I need to take care of. Some things aren't aligning properly, I'd like to display more information about the dates when things happened, and for now, family members who died without children are not displayed (in order to save display space), but I'd like to show all those compacted into a single box so that their presence isn't lost.

One way or another, it's still good progress. Probably it's well enough along that I start doing more work on improving the simulation engine (adding details, making it customizable, tracking major events, etc). When it's done, I should be able to make builds available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. We'll see.

Well, with the new year firmly arrived, it's time to get back in the habit of writing blog entries. My objective is to have 2-3 posts per week. We'll see how long that keeps up.

It's been a nice vacation, and I'm not particularly looking forward to going back to work. Mostly I've had the chance to read, watch some movies, and play some games.

Still, I've found some time to begin preparations for a roleplaying game I've been planning to play with Sareth. It'll be a mixed political/action game where Sareth plays a prince who is trying to recover his birthright. I'll be using the Reign system, which I recently discovered. This system has rather interesting rules to handle characters who lead or are part of a large organization.

Happy 4th (to those of you who actually live in the U.S. (although I'm pretty sure that's all of my vast readership (but still, as I've already read once so far, non-Americans can get pretty tired of "people" assuming that everyone on the internet lives in the U.S.))).

Guess what? It's a new month. That means a new project! Actually, I hate to say this, but last month I got tired of doing last month's project, so I started this month's project early. It turns out that I was interested in doing the layout for the Fangor book, but not as interested in doing the actual writing. Ah well. At least now I'm "legal" on my project. Anyway, I've already put in an estimated 26 hours on this project. Pretty good for *cough* only having worked a few days on it.

Well, for the first time in a long time (at least so it seems) I've had a weekend to just relax. I got a chance to play some Quake 4, do a little flying, do some reading, watch some Batman, watch some NASCAR, do some programming work, sleep. It was awfully nice to feel like I could catch up on a variety of hobbies without having to go short on sleep.

I placed my order today on amazon.com for all of the Greek books for the people who will be in the Greek small group that I'm leading. It looks like there will be nine of us (counting me of course). That's about a $350 order. Fortunately, it goes on my credit card, which counts towards our "cash back" bonus, and won't have to be paid off for a month or so (I should be able to collect all the money within two weeks). Anyway, I'm really looking forward to that starting up.

...is that I end up rambling about a variety of topics instead of staying focused. Ah well. Such is life. Want to know what I've been up to lately?

You must, otherwise you wouldn't be reading...

Let's see, my free time this week (you know, the time when I should have been writing nice posts for you guys) was pretty much spent playing Microsoft Flight Simulator. This game (yeah, yeah, the hard core fans would probably shoot me for using that term) has actually been entertaining me even beyond my expectations. I've had fun flying around all sorts of places I'm familiar with. I've enjoyed going through the tutorials and flight instructions, and I'm just now starting into some of the various missions.

Wow, 9 days since my last post! Some of that is excused because I was off on vacation (although I technically had internet access there, even if it was slow). Then I had the excuse of having to catch up with things after getting back from vacation. My only excuse after that can only be that we had a deadline at work on Friday, and we've got another this coming Wednesday. So, I've come home after some long days kind of tired out.