roncli.com blog

Today, I made my 1,000th commit to my SVN server. It wasn't much of a change, reversing a commit that turned debugging on for one of my websites, but it's a milestone nonetheless.

Building up to this, I did a lot of work with the applications and libraries that currently exist on the SVN. Here's a brief summary of what I've done recently:

LibWowArmory got an ItemTooltip class added to it, only a demo application remains before I release version 0.3.

Constellation and Cent both got their libraries in the /lib directory of the SVN, allowing me to develop these applications anywhere, not just at home.

Six Minutes To Release had a ton of work done on it, including the addition of LibMinifier, my JavaScript and CSS minification/combination/compression library. I also replaced WZ Tooltip with jQuery Tooltip, continuing my move towards jQuery on the Six Minutes website.

For now, I will continue to focus on the Six Minutes website, as there are a lot of guild issues that require me to do a lot of coding. After that, however, Gate will be the focus, as I want to get a copy of that up and running before Google shuts down Blogger FTP on May 1st. Granted, I have a backup plan if I don't succeed in that goal, but I'm hoping I can get something quick done by then.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Constellation, Gaming, LibWowArmory, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Married Life
Posted: 3:01:00 AM 1 comments

Ah, the married life.

Um, it seems to be the same as unmarried life.

Anyway, it's been far too long since I've posted here. First of all, you'll notice a new picture! This is from my wedding, and probably will be the one I use online going forward, as opposed to that silly surprise smile face from 2001. I'll likely still use my side Vegas photo occasionally, but this is going to be my common photo for the time being.

I'm still heavily addicted to World of Warcraft. Six Minutes to Release is still going strong, and I have done a lot with it since my last update. Right now I'm working on updating the broken LibWowArmory to work with all of Blizzard's latest Armory changes. Woo, this post is already linkerific.

Cent has resurfaced as a project when I discovered C++/CLI. Basically, all the calls to Crystal Space are done in C++/CLI while I do the actual game logic in Visual Basic.Net. It's not been without its difficulties, though. For instance, passing a System.String from VB.Net into C++/CLI for use as a char* parameter without causing a memory leak was interesting. I finally came up with this function:

const char* Marshalling::StringToConstCharPointer(String^ strIn) {
    marshal_context^ context = gcnew marshal_context();
    return context->marshal_as(strIn);
}

So far, I've gotten a blank screen with an FPS counter in the upper right touching 2,400 fps. I'm currently working on the static loader module that loads the images, music, and other various files needed by Crystal Space. Then I get to start working on the menu, which will be designed a heck of a lot smarter than the old one was. That is, no more 10,000 line classes.

The only thing I have yet to figure out is the new event system of Crystal Space, which is probably just for lack of trying. Right now I cannot handle keyboard, mouse, or joystick input without breaking the frame processor. If I try to handle all events, the frame event doesn't fire. If I comment out the part that handles all events, the frame event works fine. I'm sure I'll figure it out with time.

My music has, unfortunately, been put on hold. I just don't have the time nor the proper equipment to do anything with it. I've probably written half a dozen songs in my head in that time, but the overall motivation to actually do something with it is mostly gone. Hopefully next year I can get something from Open Labs and get myself out of this funk.

And finally as a footnote, I am quite into Kado Kado, a competitive mini game website. I am doing really well in Iron Chouquette, Ellon in the Dark, Opalus Factory, and for some reason Cooking Lili. I absolutely hate Cooking Lili. But I'm good at it. Bleh. But seriously, many of the games are fun, and they're coming out with more all the time. You can play five times per day for free, or if you become heavily addicted like me, you can buy the ability to play more.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Cooking Lili, Crystal Space, Ellon in the Dark, Gaming, Iron Chouquette, Kado Kado, LibWowArmory, Life, Opalus Factory, Six Minutes To Release, Wedding, World of Warcraft

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Revisiting C++
Posted: 11:45:00 AM 0 comments

I've been playing around with Cent again, and realizing just how awfully coded much of it is. One class is over 5,000 lines of code, ugh. And this is just the game settings!

So I've been spending my time separating out the objects and stringing them together in a more logical fashion. I've literally ripped the insides out of the project and rewired them back together. So far it's been worth it, the code is simpler for me to follow, and with static classes, I've no longer been passing common information from one class to the next endlessly.

The end result, of course, is to make further development easier, and get into the main part of the game, the 3D fun.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Gaming

Thursday, March 01, 2007

.Net Fun
Posted: 4:54:00 PM 0 comments

Well, it's been 90 days at the new job, and I must say I've learned a lot about what .Net can do. Now, I've been playing around with .Net for a while, but what they do here at work has me excited about .Net again. The ability to work with a class that is based on a row in a database is something that I just was never able to figure out on my own. I'm so used to datasets and queries, this new way of working with data almost makes coding fun.

I haven't been doing too much coding in my spare time, though, as I really haven't had any motivation to get stuff done. I want to get back into Cent again, as I really think that has some potential, especially with CrystalSpace becoming a fully mature 3D engine. I also have my various web projects that have been on hold for many months, and OSMusic.Net is really something I don't want to end up ignoring.

But the problem for me is that I haven't really seen the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. A finished product (or in OSMusic.Net's case, vastly improved product) isn't materializing in my head, so I feel no immediate reason to work on it. I haven't really coded much in my free time since the third quarter of last year, it's something that I hope doesn't get away from me for much longer.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Crystal Space, Gaming, OSMusic.Net

Monday, July 31, 2006

Another Lull
Posted: 2:11:00 AM 0 comments

Well, my decision to stop doing projects has lasted for almost a month now. I have absolutely no energy to get back into it again.

I have played with Cent a bit, but for the most part gaming has taken up my free time. I like when I can relax.

I'm sure I'll get back to working on the projects again sometime. But for now, I'm doing okay.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Gaming, Projects

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Next phase of Cent is close
Posted: 3:10:00 AM 0 comments

I have nearly finished the controller setup in Cent, fixing everything that I've found broke along the way. There's still some weird happenings, including a problem with joystick buttons not firing correctly, but that's something that the API needs to sort out, and the CrystalSpace people have been alerted to the problem.

On my end, though, creating a controller setup is finally complete. I want to do a better job with the controller profile selection screen than I had originally planned on, so I'm going to take some time tomorrow to do that. Hopefully, by day's end, I'll be as far as filling out the macro section, which also needs an overhaul. I've decided to allow for twelve macros each (text and audio), but the page only allowed for eight, so that's a redesign right there. Shouldn't be too bad, though.

Once I'm done with that, I can start working on the actual game engine, and hopefully get a chance to do some flying around. Before you know it, I'm going to need 3D models... Yikes.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Gaming

Friday, July 14, 2006

Cent Satisfaction
Posted: 12:47:00 AM 0 comments

I decided over the past weekend that I was getting burnt out, so I decided to push back any work on projects until either Sunday or Monday. That means I get to work on what I want to in the meantime.

So, my project of choice has been Cent. Since it has been so long since I worked in CrystalSpace, I had to redo the event handlers and sound system so that they conformed to the new APIs. After that, I decided to play around a bit and add a preloader, because I absolutely hated the skipping I'd get between game states. The preloader turned out nice, though there was a lot of C++ frustration along the way. I ended up having to completely change the way I handle headers, taking any out of the .h files and putting them all into .cpp files. I also found that because I was referencing enums from one class in another and vice versa, I actually had to move one out so that it would compile right. It seemed really bad at first, as I was getting hundreds of errors, but after a bit of looking around I finally got it working right.

If I decide to continue working on Cent into the weekend, I'll actually be ready to hit new development, which will mean fixing the bits of the control screens I left out, and finishing up the settings editor. Where do I go from there? I'm not sure just yet, and I may have to sit down and actually chart the progress of the application from here on out, which should be interesting.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Crystal Space, Gaming

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Projects!
Posted: 1:59:00 AM 0 comments

I decided to jump into Microsoft Project to organize my list of projects. My god, do I have a lot of projects. Not counting weekly tasks, I have 27 projects. Twenty-seven. When am I going to find time to do them all?

I suppose that's what Project is for, finding the time to do them all. It's not very encouraging at first glance, but when I glaze over the details, things do move along, if slowly. I doubt I'll ever complete all 27 projects, though, as certain projects, such as the D3TL 2003 upgrade (yes, I know it's 2006), D3DSN, and MediaSmarts probably isn't going to happen. They are the absolute lowest on my priority list right now, although I will at the very least review where these projects stand before June is out.

My goal is to get PwnedCars done before my vacation in June - by the way, I'm leaving for Melbourne, Australia on June 17th - and get some significant progress done on the new roncli Productions website. After that, I've got some long-term projects, including Cent, which I've mentioned here before. Since I've actually had to use C++ at work, I'm a bit more comfortable with the language, and hope that can help me get more done on Cent.

Here's a large (but incomplete, I must have some secrets!) selection of the 27 projects I have, for your interest:

modplug.roncli.com - Where ModPlug used to be hosted before the first crash, this box now holds some websites for MisterX (Kim), and its future is unknown at the moment. It probably will turn into a hosting box for the next modplug.com, but that's up to Kim & LPChip. (By the way, modplug.roncli.com technically isn't an address, it's just my designation for the computer itself.)

reborn.roncli.com - Reborn is my router, running FreeBSD 6.1 just like the ModPlug box. It's also my network's backup server with 300 GB of storage space. It backs up everything, including my MAME collection, OSMusic.Net, and all of the photo's Kathy's got stored on her computer.

successor.roncli.com - This is my main computer, and the reason it's a project is because I want to reinstall Windows. Yeah. That's going to be a fun day or three.

www.roncli.com - This is the Windows server where all my ASP websites live. The only thing I need to do is figure out how to backup the databases so that Backup can pick them up and put them onto Reborn.

Outpost Music - My music group that I haven't really done much with in a year and a half. Well, it's high time I got the forums working. I'll likely work on that after vacation.

The Nightstalker - Not to be confused with http://www.roncli.com, http://tns.roncli.com is solely devoted to my music. However, there's only 2 songs listed there right now. Considering I've released over 50, that's got to change.

Chess - Not sure what to call this yet, but I'm really interested in making a site with Java that will allow people to solve chess puzzles, play games, chat, and more. Definitely a long termer.

Cent - I really haven't come out and said what this is, but it's my dabbling into CrystalSpace to see if I can write a legitimate 3D first person shooter. It uses Crystal Space as its rendering engine, so once I understand it - and I understand a lot of it right now - writing the necessary code should just be a matter of time. How far I go with it depends on how well it runs.

Solar - Solar is a TCP/IP Text Processing Engine. I can hear it now. Huh? Basically, it is a telnet server that allows multiple connections, allowing them to interact. It would be great groundwork for a MUD-type application, but I really haven't had any plans to do anything with it. Putting it in as a project at least gives me an opportunity to improve it.

ChessCli - This is definitely being called ChessCli, and is my attempt at creating a WinBoard chess engine.

Outpost IRC Bot - Not sure if I even want to continue this project, but it was designed to be a cutthroat one hour compo manager. I had a lot of ideas for this about 4 years ago. Whether I can recall them, well, who knows.

roncli.com Logs - I'd really like to expand http://logs.roncli.com, as I'm recording a lot more information than I'm displaying. I'd also like to work on the performance and get this thing smoking along.

Torrent Keeper - Frustrated with the lack of true multithreading BitTorrent applications, I started Torrent Keeper about a year ago. It hasn't gone anywhere, but I figure this will likely follow Backup and Due Process as one of the first few roncli Productions offerings.

Word Field - A silly idea of mine that I'd like to follow through on eventually. Combine word scramble, mine sweeper, and some aspects of Press Your Luck, and you've got a good idea what this game will be like.

D3TL 2003 - As mentioned above, I started to do an upgrade of D3TL in 2003. The database was really badly designed, even though it was much better than just updating a Flash file every now and again. Problem is, I don't play Descent anymore, and given that there hasn't been a real game played in months, I might be better off saving an idea like this for Cent if I ever finish it.

D3DSN - This is the Descent 3 Dedicated Server Network. Yes, it's still up. No one uses it though, because the software's buggy. When I went from Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET, I really messed up with some timing issues. What I really need to do is add true threading to that application, but the last time I tried to test it with Esa, I ended up giving up because he wasn't seeing the new web services for some reason or another. Again, if I ever pick this up, it will probably be for Cent instead.

IsItUp - Recall September of last year when I high-tailed up to Lubbock, TX, to escape Hurrican Rita. While I was up there, I was interested in whether or not my servers were up. So, I wrote IsItUp, an insanely simple app. I might expand it a bit, but probably will end up being released as freeware.

Numbers - Some people write "Hello World". I write Numbers. I've written this game in many languages, including TI99-4 Basic, Macintosh QuickBasic (OS 7.0 days!), C128 Basic (dual screen!), and finally Visual Basic 6.0. It's a rather addicting game, and over the years I've added some features to it that make it even more challenging. I want to do something with it, I just don't know what yet.

roncli.com Blog - Yes, the very same one you are reading! I'd like to add some things to the blog, maybe my BOINC stats, maybe my Google Calendar agenda, perhaps some other widgets that will make the site more interactive.

Labels: Blog, Cent, Chess, ChessCli, Coding, D3DSN, D3TL, Descent 3, IRC, IsItUp, Logs, ModPlug, Numbers, Outpost Music, Projects, roncli.com, Solar, The Nightstalker, Torrent Keeper, Word Field

Friday, November 04, 2005

Another Late Night
Posted: 3:16:00 AM 0 comments

Seems sleep avoids me like the plague. Thank goodness I have a job that'll put up with me going in late, or even working from home for a bit. It's been three months, and I am really enjoying the work and the people I work with. The paperwork's a pain to keep up with, though... hopefully we can figure out how to make that go away.

I decided to take a look back over the last year or so and see what I've accomplished. Well, a whole lot of nothing.

Musically, only one song was completed, "Everytime", that was actually "completed" back in October of 2004, but I just didn't have the will to sit down and put it together. Once I finally did, it came out okay. I think I could've done better, though, but I still haven't learned enough about post production to do it.

But that's about it. I've started so many songs AGAIN that I can't keep track of them all. New music is in my head that I can't get out because I just don't have the will to open up Reason or ModPlug and write it. The only stuff I end up doing sounds like... well, "Everytime".

I have planned for a while to pretty much destroy roncli.com and make it better. However, I haven't had a good spark of imagination as far as what to actually fill the void with.

OSMusic.Net has all but died, despite my occasional bursts of work to try and get something going again. The previous ASP.Net project I mentioned may help with this, but then again, that all depends on whether or not a certain someone's decided to lose concentration and wander off to another idea. (I know you're listening Saurin!)

My work with Google Desktop has been fairly extensive lately, and I've mostly figured out how to get it to work in VB.Net. Despite the minor problem I had with it the other night that forced me to reinstall the program, it's been a great addition to my desktop, worthy of the space it takes up. And to a desktop space junkie who got himself a 22" monitor just so he could see it all, that's saying something. It'll be a while, though, before I'm able to put anything together, as it's either work with an incomplete VB.Net API that I haven't quite figured out yet, slowly learn C#, or use scripting which doesn't support everything I'd like to use.

Cent has been my oddball project. I've learned a great deal about C++ and can actually do stuff without having to look it up anymore. I've also got a handy dandy C++ book that I still need to finish up to help me along, should I need it. The program itself is working out good. I get stuck sometimes, but once I past those points the application works oh so wonderful. I haven't gotten into any 3D Crystal Space programming yet, but I understand the basic concepts and have read a lot about creating content for it. It shouldn't be a stretch to see this project through to completion, it's just going to take a hell of a lot of time to do.

Other things grab my attention every now and again, but usually not for too long. I haven't really been able to concentrate on any one thing, so it's good in a way to have so many projects to keep me going from day to day. Eventually, something will be completed, I hope, and I'll have something to show for all this time I've been seemingly accomplishing nothing.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Everytime, Gaming, Google Desktop, Music, OSMusic.Net

Monday, October 31, 2005

Little bit of Cent progress
Posted: 10:14:00 PM 0 comments

Been hacking away at the control dialogs for Cent and nearly have them done. It's a pretty slick system, you can configure each control to have up to three different controls, and you can bind them to an axis to save time in creating controls. All I have left to do is finish off the control velocities and allow a one-way axis (like a foot pedal) to be entered.

The thing is, these procedures are becoming huge because of this. Two classes related to this are nearly 8,000 lines of code, most of it dedicated to the custom controls. It's worth it though, this section of the code is going to be pretty sweet.

I figure at this pace, I'll be out of the controls section by the end of the month and into working on something really cool - the game itself.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Gaming

Monday, September 19, 2005

Weekend Update
Posted: 1:58:00 AM 0 comments

Not too much going on lately, just been enjoying work and playing games and stuff at home. I did manage to find time to add nearly 3,000 lines of repetative code to Cent, a part of the program I hadn't been looking forward to writing. The good news is that I have most of the logic wrapped up in my head, whereas before I hadn't a clue how to start. This means that it is likely I will be picking up the programming again, and may have more to report soon, and maybe even some new screenshots. Don't get too excited, I'm not ready to start with the 3D portion of the game yet. My goal is to get a solid foundation in the settings screen so that I can concentrate solely on the 3D portion of the game.

Of course, this application may be entirely unnecessary, it looks like Core Decision is starting to kick into high gear. Their goal is for October of 2006... given the amount of time I've worked on Cent, my offering may come much later. They're also quite a bit ahead of me in terms of development, which is no surprise. The advantage I have is that Cent is based off of Crystal Space, so I don't have to worry about coding the engine, I just have to make it work. Having played around with it plenty, I have no doubt I can do that much.

In other news... well, I really can't give away what I'm doing next weekend just yet. With my luck, I'd post it, and then the subject of next weekend's events logs on to read the blog for the first time and... well, that's about all I have to say about that.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Core Decision, Crystal Space, Gaming

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Controls and Controllers
Posted: 4:12:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: Gopher - 3: Meeting - The Gathering of Arms (6:39)

Since I seem to be in full blog mode today, I figured I'd offer an update on Cent. Things have been moving pretty smoothly, and I have moved on to working with user controls. This may seem easy for most games, for instance most games these days are just point & click with the mouse.

Not Cent.

Cent has 69 different controls that can be defined for game movement, communication, and control of other parts of the game, with more possibly to be added in the future. This means that each of the 69 controls needs its own piece of data to indicate whether the control is triggered from a keyboard, mouse, or joystick. Many of the controls have advanced features where you can bind an axis, so that changes made to one control are made to the other automatically. You can also set the values of things such as keyboard ramping, mouse sensitivity, and joystick sensitivity, displayed in a neat looking little graph. Of course, you can assign backup controls, so that you may use up to three keys to do the same thing. This is on top of the custom-made screens, buttons, graphs, and meters, done in a completely un-IDE-like bit of C++ code. A lot of it is functionalized, but this is still massive. So much for this being a small project.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Gaming

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Cent Update
Posted: 9:56:00 AM 0 comments

Worked a bit on Cent again today. I got the program to load images used as a player's avatar in the game. That includes building the file search box from scratch, accounting for the scrollbar, directories vs. files, and checking to make sure a file selected was valid.

Something's a bit screwy with it, however. If I load a GIF that's got a transparency, and then save the resulting file as a PNG, it doesn't save the transparency at all. I'm not terribly concerned about this, but it appears CrystalSpace's GIF loader is a bit funny.

Aside from that though, that means one of the 5 pages of settings is complete, and arguably the most difficult of them. It's slow, but it's progress.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Crystal Space, Gaming

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Back to Cent
Posted: 6:45:00 PM 0 comments

I decided to work a bit on Cent again. It's amazing that with all the time I took off, I was able to look at the code and not go, "Huh?" Perhaps more amazing was the fact that I upgraded to the latest Crystal Space CVS, compiled it, and made it through all the errors in my code that occurred due to the change in the way the event handler works. All without asking for help. There's hope for me yet.

Anyway, did more file I/O stuff, corrected some pretty bad errors, learned the difference between memcpy and strncpy, and actually made pilot functionality working well now. You can add and remove pilots, and the system will save them, knowing which one was your last pilot selected so it'll use it when it's game time. Which is still far off. But I figure if I can put a solid config in first, I'll be able to focus on the details of the game later.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Crystal Space, Gaming

Sunday, March 27, 2005

More on Textboxes
Posted: 11:25:00 AM 0 comments

I went ahead and played some more with Textboxes, and they really weren't too hard to figure out. About the toughest time I had is what to do with Backspace & Delete. But it handles most things right now, with the rest of the required features soon on its way. Once I get through making textboxes working right, the rest of the settings page is going to seem like a breeze.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Crystal Space, Gaming

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Making Textboxes Ain't Easy
Posted: 7:52:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: Peter Enroth - Tarmdansen (3:00)

In Cent there is going to be several places where you can type in text. Naturally, I want to have a decent GUI and give the user a textbox within which they may place their text. In VB, or anything else that's got a form designer for that matter, this is a snap. Just drag and drop a textbox onto your form and you've got yourself a nice textbox.

However, I'm not using a form designer. Instead, I'm coding every aspect of the display, which means I can't just drag and drop things. For images, buttons, and text this isn't too bad. However, the fun began when I wanted a textbox a user can edit.

Now, Crystal Space has some sort of Windowing System. I didn't look too much into it, but from what I gather it's quite complicated. So I figured I'd do my own controls. How hard can it be anyway?

Textboxes hurt. Think of all the things you take for granted. When you click inside a textbox, what actually happens? You've gotta figure out where in the textbox the user clicked. But that's not enough! You have to calculate what character is at the point the user clicked, find out if it's closer that character's left side or right side, and move the cursor there. To do this, you must know how wide each character is and exactly where on the screen it is positioned.

And what if the text is too wide for the field? AARGH!!! As you can see, this gets really ugly really quick. Thank goodness for reusable code.

In any case, so far I've got my text box properly clickable so that the cursor appears in the right place. I just have to add in the eye candy (I-beam mouse when you're over the textbox, and a flashing cursor), and the ability to actually... you know... type characters into the box.

Moving? Yes. Slowly? Definitely.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Crystal Space, Gaming

Friday, March 18, 2005

Slow Going
Posted: 2:16:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: troupe - rfc1459 (3:19)

I've been working on the routines to load, save, and manipulate the pilot and controller profiles in preparation of getting the settings section of Cent fully functional. So far it's been like most programming tasks - long, drawn out, and quite repetative.

So needless to say, it's been slow going, but the good news is that it's at least been going. It's still going to be a while before I have a nice 3D shot up here, but my mantra of "functionality before beauty" and the knowledge that I'm doing things the right way the first time (hopefully!) keeps me motivated.

I've actually thought about taking a break to start designing some maps for the game, but my mild unfamiliarity with Blender combined with the fact that there is no good Crystal Space exporter from within Blender (at least not using the latest buggy Python version anyway, that's another story in and of itself) kinda makes me wanna pass for now and focus on the programming aspect.

Plus there's still OSMusic stuff to work on, which I haven't touched in quite some time. So many projects, so little time. Who's bright idea was it to only put 24 hours in a day anyway? It needs at least 40.

Labels: Blender, Cent, Coding, Crystal Space, Gaming, OSMusic.Net

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Cent Settings Screenshot
Posted: 11:47:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: AmBeam - Heartland (9:34)

Just posting a screenshot of the settings page for Cent.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Gaming, Screenshot

Saturday, March 05, 2005

Crystal Space
Posted: 10:47:00 AM 0 comments

What have I been working on?

This is my pet project lately, working with Crystal Space to make an application. What sort of application? Well, it's not very far along yet, so giving out any details would be unfair.

But the interesting thing about this is that I understand the engine, and even with my limited knowledge of C++, I can do some pretty neat things. How far will this go? Only time will tell.

Labels: Cent, Coding, Crystal Space, Gaming, Screenshot