http://blog.finiteimprobability.com Just programming and math, no spontaneously jumping undergarments Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:56:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I spend a lot of time hopping between computers. My Windows "gaming rig" usually also sees a fair bit of programming research. Typically I'm about halfway through an article when I end up having to go somewhere else, and I end up wanting to continue from there on my Macbook. ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/11/16/random-ideas-online-browser-sync/ After seeing this game, which seems close to a lot of the ideas I've been working on, I'm trying to get back into writing mine. Here's what I think needs to change from my previous work: Graphics I got seriously hung up over graphics. I kept flip-flopping between trying to do it in 2d and doing ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/10/03/back-on-track/ I realized that I sort of stumbled off into Lisp land without explaining why. For those who have worked with a modern Lisp environment, some of the advantages are probably obvious. For the other 98% of the programming world I probably look like a nut. Here I'd like to make ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/04/03/dear-god-why-lisp/ Considering I'm trying to spend a little more time working to keep up with bills for my wedding this summer, and still taking school, something has to give. I obviously haven't been keeping to the daily updates I wanted, and realized I just can't afford to spend two to three ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/04/01/picnic-invasion-limited-updates/ I guess I should be happy that I"m interesting enough to receive some comment spam. Anyways, I've found a relatively unobtrusive comment handling system that uses a combination of javascript and cookies to keep out the spammers. In my mind this is better than a captcha, hopefully it works out ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/03/31/comment-spam/ After getting the basic behavior of my game up and running, the first thing I tried to do was create a whole ton of objects. This was a little disheartening, as creating around four hundred moving ants pushed my macbook below 30fps. Looking at Activity Monitor told me that the ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/03/27/picnic-invasion-obtimization-explorations/ Wow, I can't believe I've let posting about this slip so far. I have been working on the game, just not as much as I would have liked. Obviously I haven't been keeping up with my nonexistant readers about it. The bits of time I could snatch to work on my ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/03/26/picnic-invasion-lost-days/ I spent a lot of time the last two days doing a very poor job of chasing bugs in my game. I've tracked them all down, discovering and resolving an issue with .jar distributions in the process, but the process highlighted how difficult handling type information between Clojure and Java ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/03/22/picnic-invasion-day-10-and-11/ Well, finals are officially over, which means I have most of a full week to dedicate to this little hobby of mine. All of the past few posts detail what I've accomplished in about two hours or so a night. Now I can spend as much time as I want ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/03/20/picnic-invasion-day-9-decision-time/ In thinking about how I want to manage my games, I've spent a bit of time mulling over the options for scene management. Specifically I want to handle collision detection efficiently, as most of my recent ideas start out with "what if we had a swarm of X". I'd also ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2008/03/19/a-dancing-quadtree-based-scene-graph/