Chronicles of Broadcom - How NOT to code
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Loading ...I have been writing a lot lately, unfortunately not in direct relation to my blog or public persona. I have been unable to code properly in the last month and it has been wearing my managers thin. We are trying to add a couple seemingly simple modules to a perl cgi application and I’m running into the age old problem of code complexity being the bane to all existence. I ranted previously about how goofy the code that the previous developer chose to use for the template engine, and I wish that were the end of the train. I have hit a weird stand point. It seems like adding anything to this is a pain. Let’s take a step through the code, together.
Posted on August 8th, 2008 by Bob in Application Development, Web Development
A long weekend
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In the next couple days i will be posting some notes on software development related to the project ive been working on at work and all the amazing Fail that i have been dealing with.
Posted on August 4th, 2008 by Bob in Application Development
Revisiting White
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I met up with a good friend of mine this previous weekend in order to discuss the prospects of getting back into the game development arena. We are long time friends, and had previously worked together on a project called White, which was a first person shooter based around logistics. It was a heart warming experience because we are, once again, on the same page.
Our plan is to start work on a game that is a space simulation that is centered on the situations going on back in the White universe. Although further information is going to be dependent on further discussions and possibly finding a couple other developers interested in the project it surely is going to be fun and educational since neither of us have actually worked on a game at this level. This is going to be my first official step into working on a full game and will, of course, be based on ogre. More information when its available.
Posted on May 5th, 2008 by Bob in Game Development, Inspiration
As expected, Work has commenced…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Work has begun mapping out the mod I plan to build with the UT3 release. So far it looks like its going to be a military simulation and revolve around reality. While I can already hear a few of my critics complaining about my choice to do so I really don’t want to trouble any of you too much. I have some very fun ideas and above all else I plan to respect the release early, release often mode of development to actually test out much of what I have been preaching to the mod communities that I have contributed to over the years.
Mutators are still in the works, allowing me to learn the engine more and more as I continue development but the overall goal is going to be this mod. Information about the mod is available here.
Thank you all, I have some reading to do so I will catch you later.
Posted on January 13th, 2008 by Bob in Game Development, Inspiration
When is it alright to burn out?
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Have you ever been working on a project and lost your drive to continue? Do you find it to be difficult to get going again? You may have experienced what many developers do - Burnout appears to be as wide spread as the number of people who breathe that have also died. Developers often struggle their applications and eventually lead to complete failures. Paul Graham wrote an essay on the topic of keeping a program in ones mind. It doesn’t seem far fetched to think that an applications complexity is going to correlate to the amount of the application that you will be able to think about and how much of your steam and investment I involved in any project that you choose to undertake.
I started work on GneuManager long ago, nearly 2 years ago now, with a goal in mind of putting together a project management application that would allow me to keep track my progress and momentum that I had with any of my projects. I need it to work for game development differently than it does web development differently that it does console or any other applications that I work on. I also oversee things that have little to show like testing and meetings that I should still account for in my application. As you can already see, this is definitely not a simple project, and as such when I first began work it was quite specialized. It didn’t do much other than track my bugs and allow clients to log in and see progress.
Burnout occurs when developers take a bite out of something that is larger than they are able to actually consume. It runs a close parallel to what many of us understand to be bad already, the event of choking. Forgetting to chew or biting off too much of a hot dog can lead to the terrible gagging that we have all experienced. The reluctance to take another bite is something that we don’t all share.
My first bite for GneuManager was to build out the user system. I ran a close editorial summary of my progress with a series of essays that I will publish at a later time, highlighting my progress and sharing my thought process of the application as things grew. Unfortunately there were things that I didn’t understand well enough. I also lost my team and these two events lead to a loss of drive.
Posted on January 5th, 2008 by Bob in Application Development, Gneu Website
How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Posted on December 13th, 2007 by Bob in Gneu Website, Misc. Video
WAW Post-Mortem
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...“It is with much regret that I have been watching from a distance as a battle has raged on; I cannot stay quiet any longer. A few days ago one of my friends brought to my attention that there was a lot of discussion going on over in the WAW forums. The team has opted to take a hiatus (meaning break - of course) from the world of HL2 modding, on the grounds that they were not enjoying it. I have no qualms with this idea, and in fact applaud them for having the balls to say such bullshit and expect many of the folks they ran over in their quest for that big fun ballroom in the sky. Seeing as no one provided any sort of post mortem, and even I skimped on the dictation from that period of nearly 6 months that I was working with them, I provide you with my side of the story. I hope It’s not taken too bad, although I really don’t care for feelings at this point.”
- Robert Chatman April 4th, 2007
Posted on December 11th, 2007 by Bob in Game Development, Random
NOOTY 3
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...About two months ago I had a meeting with Matt & Reiji to the tune of trying to decide what we are going to do with our game. Many topics were thrown about and eventually we decided on going the ogre route and building it independent, but there was something electric in the air. Something about the idea of making mods made our eyes light up, at least mine. You guys don’t really know Reiji too well, but it takes something truly special to get him to let his eyes sparkle at all. We asked ourselves… “What do we do when UT3 comes out?” There are obvious marketing and distribution benefits associated with mod development, considering that if you find that niche it draws people to your site. They see your mod or in the case for UT - Mutator - an ask the all-important question… What else have they done?
Mike Whitfield, unblogged, has taken the opportunity of this release to get the gneu movement rolling and we have an SVN Setup and rolling, I will soon compile a list of possible mutators and mods and democracy will drive our momentum, possibly. We still make final call and will probably choose whatever looks fun to us at that time.
http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/gneut3
Posted on November 20th, 2007 by Bob in Game Development, Inspiration