Why am I coding?

Every once in a while, I stop and think, "wow, I've spent a lot of time coding." And for what? How many side projects have I buried in my repository? I code for work and play, and it can be taxing.

Right now, I'm juggling three new technologies, and love experience. But what else could I have done during this time?

• Raise my bench max to 300 lbs?
• Write a novelette?
• Work on my public speaking?
• Work on something that I can actually show?!

My previous side projects haven't been seen by many. This lack of exposure is a big reason why I've moved to web development. I am tired of doing a substantial amount of work, that's never to be seen. I feel as if I was stranded on an island of creativity, and just kept pushing bottles of ideas into a swallowing sea of bits.

Ok, I've taken the analogy too far. But I hope this time, more people get to see my work. I have to learn a lot of things; gone are my graphics libraries and shader skillz, but so what? They probably weren't that good anyways.

Secession

Today's bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers and Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch defined a new Black Monday in what could be a new Great Depression. This event is sure to make future iterations of Globalization when the Economy portion of the game is released, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. For now, let's keep our eyes on the November 30th Alpha which will have the turn-based combat. This first chapter of Globalization will be titled Secession:

Set in 2020, the Republicans have just won their 6th straight presidential election, only to be rewarded with a country torn asunder. The previous decade saw numerous clashes between the two political parties, and spawned thoughts of secession in the halls of democratic strongholds. Throughout the years, media slammed small town conservatives, bible beaters denounced godless liberals, and now, politics wasn't just a stance, it was a way of life.

During the chaos, another ideology bubbled into significance in the northwest. The Green Party Libertarians rose to take the mantle of the west, rejecting the status quo of America's two party System, and jumped into the increasingly hostile fray.

The Republican's November victory was the last election to be held across the Union. Seeking independence from the larger Republican electoral block, the other parties seceded immediately and drafted their own policies. This did not calm the tension, and the new borders became the new frontier.

Thus was born the War of the Primaries, a sempiternal struggle that broke the union, shook the balance of power, and emboldened America's enemies.

Welcome. Choose your party ...

That's all I've got. I chose to have a 3 party campaign to add complexity to diplomacy, and to prevent any one party from becoming too powerful. All party systems seem to evolve into a virtual two-party system, where alliances are formed between the weaker factions to secure victory. Hopefully, the three party campaign will emulate that idea; when there's an imbalance in power, the weaker parties will pair up against the superpower.


With regards to the actual game. I've focused on tool development, with the world editor about 40% complete, and a lot of database work finished. I am looking forward to the ability to manipulate the story and the world in real time. It allows for some interesting dynamics that simply cannot be matched by a fixed plot stamped onto a disc.

In another note, I've read Vargo's posts and can't help but notice his writing superiority. I hope to improve my writing, but I have a ways to go before I can match his eloquence. I DO wonder how many rewrites he goes through for one post ...

My hiatus

I know you've all been wondering why I haven't updated in a while. There are two reasons: 1) I haven't had a Mac available for iPhone development since August 28th or so, and 2) I'm on vacation right now in Disney World, returning September 10th.

I'm having an awesome time but it'll be really nice to be home and back to my geeky endeavors.

My insane ramblings about how the Internet keeps me sane

Some people who work on their computer all day dread the thought of using a computer for a moment longer when they get home.  For me that's like saying that I've been breathing all day at the office, so I'd rather not breathe when I get home.  To clarify the analogy, I never think about "breathing" as my primary activity.  I'm always doing something else.  Nobody ever calls you boring or uncultured because you breathe all day long.  Sitting at the computer, for better or worse, is like breathing to me.  There are so many different things that I can do on the computer that to clump it all together as "sitting at the computer" is an unfair, hasty, ignorant categorization.  Don't get me wrong, you could easily chastise me for not getting enough exercise, and for having what is almost certainly an addiction and I'd gladly concede, but that's not my point. 

What I do on my computer at home is generally quite different from what I do at work.  For example, after a long, busy day full of hectic events that may be largely computer-centric, I find it therapeutic to sit at yet another computer and blog about whatever it is that's been stuck on my mind.  Hey, it worked for Doogie Howser, and who am I to argue with him or his overly simplistic word processor?

Computers can also simultaneously be the source of my stress and stress relief.  An Internet connection keeps you connected to the rest of the world despite the fact that you may be crammed in an office for long hours working on a nerve-wracking project.  (This doesn't reflect my current situation, thankfully, but it certainly has in the past.)  It reminds me of one of my elementary schools, built near a small, somewhat active retail center.  This school stood out from my others in the fact that it wasn't buried in the woods, or deeply entrenched in a residential area devoid of life from 8-5.  The classroom window wasn't just a window outside; it was a window to the rest of the world.  Peering through it reminded me that there were still people out there going about their lives, doing interesting things (since anything was interesting compared to being confined to a classroom all day, every day).  It didn't matter as much that I was stuck in school because I knew that there was still an exciting world out there, and I would eventually be part of it -- and for now, living vicariously through them would suffice. 

The Internet is that window for me.  Whether through RSS feeds, message boards, or chat windows, regardless of how enclosed I feel at work, I am always just a click away from sanity.

Render Target!

Progress is creeping forward in my Silverlight game. I've heard from 2 other people interested in helping out with the project and have start to refactor heavily as a result.

There are many complications involved when your dev team grows bigger than 1, especially with members new to the technology. As a result, I've gone so far as to throw up a render target (quality is questionable) which you can see to the left, and a bunch of probably unseen UML diagrams which help me lay out my thoughts as much as it helps the other devs figure out what I'm trying to do.

So far, this project has incorporated a lot of the latest and greatest .NET 3.5 has to offer, such as: WCF Services, LINQ, LINQ2SQL, and XAML with Silverlight/WPF (for tools).

It's been great learning all this tech, and I hope it'll result in a great game. It might be a sip of the Kool-Aid , but hearing about Mike's forays into the IPhone SDK, and having a few stints into the LAMP stack, the Microsoft dev environment seems to be unmatched. With some experience and a decent code library, one could create a ridiculously powerful application in a ridiculously short amount of time.

Microsoft development, I will never forsake you

Warning: The following post was originally posted to a development blog of mine, and is thus heavy on the programming jargon and ranting.  Feel free to ignore for your sanity's sake.

For the past few weeks I've found myself jumping from one shiny project to the next.  I was enticed into trying game development using Silverlight, which I still regard as an exciting technology with lots of potential, but my heart just isn't in it.  If I targetted that platform, I'd be doing so out of pragmatism instead of passion; that is, I know there's a potential market there, but I wouldn't enjoy the work.

My latest flavor-of-the-month project has been game development with the iPhone SDK, whose Kool-Aid I drank in one giant gulp.  The iPhone is amazing.  The interface is slick and intuitive; the app store is exciting and full of great (and not-so-great) apps with a promising revenue model for independent developers, and the development platform is... utter shit.  Without breaking the NDA (I hope), let me just say that just about everything about the iPhone development story is inferior to what Microsoft has to offer.  I don't claim to be an expert after only about a week of experience (albeit with many hours put in), but here are some gripes so far:

1. First, there's the fact that you have to use MacOS to develop for the iPhone.  In my case, I'm borrowing my girlfriend's MacBook.  I would very much prefer to utilize my dual widescreen LCD monitors, but I realize that this complaint is circumstantial.  I'm sure that a savvy Mac user could navigate the MacOS with ease, but it's a struggle for me.  It would be nice if there were a Windows option somehow.

2. Second, I have to use XCode, Apple's free IDE.  I will be fair; for a free IDE, it's packed with decent features, and I can't really compare it to Visual Studio Express (another free IDE) given that the latter benefits from the features of the full versions of Visual Studio.  But it's still a giant step backwards.  The syntax highlighting is overly subtle, the code completion guesses at what you're trying to type but doesn't pop up a list of options (at least not automatically).  I've yet to see a list of method overloads appear; you're at the mercy of your memory and the greatly-inferior-to-MSDN documentation, which lists all of an object's methods/properties in one long list.  There doesn't appear to be any sort of refactoring capability, though I can probably blame the language (which I'll get to soon enough).  The solution explorer equivalent is strikingly un-Apple-like, showing redundant information while lacking important information at a glance.  I've run into bugs in which error and warning markers in the code don't disappear even after you fix the errors. (I even deleted the offending code entirely and rebuilt with no luck). 

3. Objective-C.  Oh my god.  Could Apple have picked a more obscure language?  Why not just stick to C or C++?  The syntax in objective C is unnecessarily arbitrary, with objects calling methods (or more specifically, "sending messages to call a method") of the syntax:

[object methodName]

(including the brackets.)  You can even (and are encouraged to) nest these calls, for optimal confusion:

[object1 methodName:[object2 getSomething:[object3:getSomethingElse]]]

My favorite (sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious) detail about methods is the parameter passing.  You see, a method signature is defined not by its return type, name, and parameters, but rather just its return type and parameters.  Read that again: Return type and parameters.  Something missing?  That's right, there's NO METHOD NAME.  Or more specifically, the method name IS the parameter list!  So, a hypothetical method to open a file read-only might be:

[FileObject openFile:@"myfile.txt" readOnly:YES]

Or an even better example:

[MySpatialObject setPositionX:100 andY:120]

That's right, I can't have a method called "SetPosition".  Instead, the method is technically called: "setPositionX:andY".  Of course nobody would use the word "and" in a real-world parameter name, right?  GUESS AGAIN, it's encouraged!  Method names are supposed to read like prose.  I am a strong advocate of longer method/parameter names for the sake of readability and avoiding obscurity, but there are much better solutions to this problem than this.

And just as an extra kick in the nads, the standard coding conventions fly in the face of everything that modern, civilized software developers have evolved toward (e.g. curly braces on separate lines for the love of God, curly braces surrounding one-line if statements, non-cryptic class/variable names, etc.)

Oh, did I mention that this language isn't strongly typed?  Enjoy.

4. Interface Builder.  Fine, this relates to XCode, but it's bad enough to deserve its own category.  This is the GUI tool that creates...well, GUIs.  Hell, even Apple devs don't seem to like it.  It's again another ironic example of Apple's dev tools flying in the face of Apple's typical design philosophies.  This tool is completely unintuitive to use as opposed to Visual Studio's designers, involving all sorts of GUI elements that can be connected with lines as a way to graphically "wire up" events and relationships.  So much of what you'd expect (i.e. you click on a control in the visual designer and immediately see a context menu with this control's attributes and event wiring) just doesn't exist.  You have to dig through options to even see these things, and even when you find them, their function is not obvious.  Can the people who designed the iPhone interface please help out designing this tool as well?

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There is much more to write about the iPhone dev woes but I'll save that for another post.  In general, if you want to know what the iPhone dev environment is like, use an iPhone for a week.  Then use a Windows Mobile phone the next week.  The extra pain you'll feel the second week is analogous to the pain you'll feel switching from the standard Visual Studio/C# environment to the iPhone's.  But at least in Windows Mobile's defense, it does have extra features it's trying to pack in.

 

After working on iPhone development/learning for a few hours today, I worked a bit on my XNA Game Studio project.  It was an almost orgasmic experience.  It felt like the feeling you get right after stepping off a treadmill after a long run.  Suddenly you feel like superman, almost gliding along the floor effortlessly when you walk.

Negative Friends

Here's a post from a former blog of mine that I felt was appropriate to post here:

Over the past year or so, I've noticed that there are certain friends and acquaintances in my life who frequently get on my nerves. That's okay, since friends can't always be expected to get along all the time. But at some point, I've noticed, it becomes so bad that I find myself less happy on average with them in my life than I'd be without them. Do you have friends like this?

In my view, a friend is supposed to be more than a warm body that shares an interest with you. A friend is supposed to be somewhat tolerant and non-judgmental. They're someone you can talk to and confide in. Looking over the friends I have now, I can only point out a few who exhibit these qualities.

Most of my friends are largely ego-driven. Some are always looking to one-up a story, put someone down (including me) in order to make themselves feel better about themselves, etc. I can't relate to this. One common example that's especially bothersome is this: When a friend of mine tells me an idea they have, my first instinct is to support them. With my friends, most of them have the first instinct to slam the idea down. Where does this come from? How does anyone become that way?

All of this is leading to my main point, which is that it seems that many if not most of my friends are a net negative force on my happiness. While this is sad, I think it's at least good to identify this, because from here I can actually address the issue; cutting ties with negative friends and surrounding myself with positive ones.


Do you have friends like this in your life? Have you done anything about it?