roncli.com blog

I've come to realize that, even after ending Six Minutes To Release's raiding run, I still only have one night a week to myself. That night is tonight. Every other night, I've got something going on:

Monday - Mastering and editing of the Six Gaming Podcast
Tuesday & Thursday - World of Warcraft raiding with remaining Six Minutes To Release members
Friday - Wife night :)
Saturday - Six Gaming Podcast live stream
Sunday - Ron's Bronze Plays League of Legends gaming on Twitch

It's a pretty busy schedule, but I look forward to a lot of these things throughout the week as well. Things feel pretty balanced right now. I still long for 40 hours days, though.

Descent: Underground

This past week, though, things got a bit crazy, because I found out that one of my favorite games of all time is being rebooted.

Descent's fast-paced, six-degrees-of-freedom combat made addicts of us all! Descent's frenetic and pulse-pounding action were light-years ahead of its 1995 release date. Like us, many of you still share war stories of your epic network battles. You remember your heroic shots, your death-defying maneuvers, and matches ending with a narrow escape as the tunnel collapsed behind you.

Sadly, as consoles took over and PC games were pushed aside by publishers, great games like Descent were left to languish in obscurity. A whole generation of gamers grew up without Descent's heart-pounding, non-stop action, robbed of the true 6DoF space adventure that is their birthright!

The Drought Ends TODAY!

This is a quote from the Kickstarter for Descendent Studios' Descent: Underground. This is a brand new Descent title, setup as a prequel to the original Descent series.

On one hand, I can't contain my excitement. I backed this project early and big once I learned of the direction that former CIG developer Eric "Wingman" Peterson was taking it. To have another Descent game being made from a set of dedicated developers who are listening to the community to make the game the best Descent game ever made is like a dream come true.

On the other hand, the Descent community has had its share of disappointments.

The official Descent 4 game was cancelled. Numerous projects have been started to try to mimic the Descent experience. Many of them have been cancelled, and those that did make it to production had no community support and were simply not Descenty enough for the community to back. And others who have tried to bring Descent back have been issued cease & desist legal documents by Interplay.

So why now? More importantly, why Descendent Studios, a team that never found the Descent community until after they launched their Kickstarter? While I have faith in their ability to deliver on their project, my faith with Interplay is not there. I really have to question Interplay's motives. Do they plan on this being some kind of cash grab? Are they thinking of screwing over Descendent much the same way PTMC's Dravis screwed over the Material Defender at the start of Descent II? That would be ironic.

Six Gaming Podcast

So the podcast happened this past week, with Episode 5 and its highlights now available on YouTube.

I'll be blunt, it's not our best showing. News seemed to be disjointed, the hosts were distracted with Twitch chat trolls, and the Round Table section was rather, well, bland. Hopefully next week, we'll be a little more exciting. SGP always seems to be better with more hosts.

Ron's Bronze Plays

This week I played with Colzaratha's smurf. It didn't seem to help a whole lot.

The first game, he played Ahri while I played Morgana. He did not have a good game. Every lane lost, and we slowly bled out. The second game was much of the same. I was again on Morgana against a Graves/Annie combo in the bottom lane that our ADC fed substantially.

We got our first win in game 3 when I played Janna. I had some strong Janna play this weekend, and got some crucial knockups to force the win. I tried to make it two straight on Janna, but despite more strong play, the rest of the team didn't have it in them.

In the final game, Colz and I switched roles, with me going mid Lux and him on Morgana. I went off for a 12/2/21 carry, and Colz and I ended in style. Result of the 5 games was an increase in 11 LP to Bronze IV and 88 LP.

Website Update

Last night, I was able to finalize the data I'm putting in the game box on the website. My article about the sorry state of gaming APIs really came to mind. While the Blizzard API has come a long way and the League of Legends API is pretty good, the Steam API still sucks (it's still missing an achievement feed), and an official XBox API isn't even a thing yet.

Really. It's 2015 people. Let my data go! Let my data be free!

Anyway, I still have to code out detailed pages for my WoW feed, get profile pages for my Diablo 3 characters, display detailed history of my ranked play in League of Legends, and at least show off the games I am playing on Steam, even if getting the achievements I have for them is rather archaic.

But honestly, this is the home stretch. After that is the life section, which really is just going to require me to set featured pages.

After that, I have a lot of content to update, which includes transferring my music collection to SoundCloud, updating all the tags on my Blogger and Tumblr sites, and recreate many of the pages from the existing site on the new one. That's not really a lot of stuff. Hopefully coding can be completed this weekend, and I can start on the content next week. I'm still committed to finishing by the end of the month.

Labels: Blogger, Coding, Descent: Underground, Diablo III, Gaming, League of Legends, Music, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, SoundCloud, Steam, Tumblr, Twitch, World of Warcraft, XBox

Monday, March 09, 2015

A Recommitment
Posted: 4:02:00 PM 0 comments

I recently went back in time to the beginning of this blog and revisited the things that interested me back then. I found that I did a heck of a lot more blogging then than I do today, largely because I made a commitment to keep people updated as to what I was doing.

I started this blog when I was working on OSMusic.Net back in the day. I had a lot of free time, largely because I had no idea what kind of focus (and design, for that matter) I needed to get the site to take off. I ended up doing things in my free time that didn't help the site along. Such as blogging.

Blogging became a regular part of my life in mid-2005, and it was fun. I wasn't involved in much back then, as TiS 1 had died and TiS 2 hadn't been thought of yet. I started blogging about on-again-off-again gaming, then about the struggle I had with maintaining all of my side projects, then focus shifted to stresses at work, until finally things got so hectic I pretty much just fell off the face of the Internet, only blogging on major events such as hurricanes or job changes. I've tried to kickstart things over the years, but nothing has stuck.

But with the revamped roncli.com website on the horizon (I'm looking to finish coding and content by the end of the month), I strongly feel that a recommitment of sorts is required to keep content on the site fresh, and to enable easier Nightstalker-stalking, so to speak.

So, here's the deal. I do a lot of things during the week that I've taken for granted. The Six Gaming Podcast, World of Warcraft raids, League of Legends streaming (specifically Ron's Bronze Plays on Sundays), and other random streaming events.

I also still code a hell of a lot. Previously, I'd blog frequently about my findings with certain things, which would result in code snippets that show you how to read an NWS weather feed, or double buffer a list view. I still want to do stuff like this, especially since I'm playing with cutting-edge libraries such as rendr.

I just haven't given myself enough time to do any of this. But with me no longer running raids for Six Minutes To Release, that time now exists.

Therefore, here's my commitment. On days when I do something noteworthy, I will blog about it. You won't see me talk about every WoW raid, or every line of code I write, but it'll be frequent enough to give everyone an idea as to what's going on in my world.

Labels: Blog, Gaming, League of Legends, Life, Rendr, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Year In Review: 2014
Posted: 3:37:00 AM 0 comments

In many ways, 2014 was a big year for me. There were a lot of big changes made right at the beginning of the year, with some exciting plans starting to form up.

Where to begin?

Music

I will always remember the end of 2013 as being a kind of inspirational epiphany for me. In the span of 4 short months I wrote 4 songs complete beginning to end, managed to record 2 of them as stripped down versions, and penned the final lyrics of a few more that had been floating around.

The only major song that has come out of 2014 is a dance-ish piece I call "Bullseye", which is designed to be more about the music than about the lyrics. Even the lyrics that are sung focus more on the melody, making strong use of some of my unique vocal inflections. There is only a single verse and chorus, but the usage of such are designed to give the song added texture, not added meaning.

The main problem here is that a grand total of zero songs were released in 2014. After having such a strong finish to 2013, I expected things to carry over into the new year. Looking back, much of the music that came out of 2013 was due to having a lot of extra time on my hands while in San Francisco. I was able to put notes to Reason because I had little else to do, and with commute times being upwards of an hour some days, it was not uncommon for me to do some writing in my head, and then later pen it down into lyrics or Reason. I haven't had nearly the luxury this year since I've not been in San Francisco at all, and opportunities to write have been few and far in between. I've got this awesome guitar I want to play around with, and just haven't had the inspiration to do anything with it.

I've always toyed with the idea of setting aside just one night and dedicate myself to nothing but my music, but right now I take care of Six Minutes To Release five nights a week, spend Fridays with Kathy, and do the Six Gaming Podcast on Saturdays. Music has been playing second fiddle to pretty much everything else these days. I don't like it, but I know that I will never lose the drive for my music. It will come back some day.

Coding

After leaving Sift in February, I took a month off and then joined HCC Insurance Holdings as a .NET programmer. So far, I've been doing a lot of VB.Net in WinForms, but this last month has seen me start to work on an ASP.NET project again. It's in C# with a Bootstrap framework, and communicates with a lot of different moving parts within the company, so it'll be an exciting project to start 2015 with.

Personally, well, I'm always full of coding projects. My big project this past year has been the remake of roncli.com. This project is designed to stretch my understanding of the node.js stack, as I'm taking advantage of projects such as Bootstrap, Rendr, and Express, and have been working with APIs from Twitter, Google Blogger, and Tumblr, with many more in the works.

roncli.com as a domain turns 15 years old this February. The current design is its second, but is one that it has had for most of its lifespan. I've grown to absolutely HATE it. I've tried a number of times to remake it but nothing ever stuck... until now. Currently, I'm nearly done with integrating the blog into the site. It is going to be a pretty big hub of all things roncli, so I don't expect it to be complete any time soon, but I have made steady progress on it since May with no signs of slowing down. The fact that I'm learning the innards of these node.js projects is arguably more valuable than the site itself.

Gaming

2014 brought about a gaming renaissance of sorts. Sure, I'm still playing World of Warcraft, but I've expanded my horizons into games such as Diablo III, League of Legends, and countless other indie games that have been slowly filling up my Steam library. I've not exactly shaken off the "hardcore casual mobile gamer" title, either, as I still am very much into gaming on my iPhone.

What brought this on was the fact that while I was with Sift, I really did not have any time to myself. Gaming became a luxury to me, something that I couldn't spend a lot of time on. Once I left Sift and realized that evenings do exist, I had a lot of free time. I began streaming to Twitch regularly, and this past July took the reins of the Six Gaming Podcast while cohost Jacob "Showsan" Showalter is deployed in the military.

Between all this and the increase in popularity of streamers and professional gamers, gaming itself has taken on a new meaning for me, and is something I feel I could take advantage of given the right environment. After I am done with roncli.com, I want to build something gamer-centric around the whole "Six Gaming" concept we've got going on, so I don't expect much to change when it comes to my gaming, at least in the early part of this next year.

Life

This year I celebrated my 5 year anniversary of marriage to my lovely wife, Kathy. The fact that I've survived this long without her trying to cash in on the life insurance policy speaks volumes. And the fact that she has supported me through so many things, both good and bad, really makes me blessed.

Leaving Sift was a hard decision. I felt I held on a lot longer than I should have. In some ways, I did. Perhaps I could have made a more positive impact by leaving sooner. Or maybe I didn't hold on long enough, as it seems as though some of the things that caused me to leave have passed. Whatever, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm not going to dwell on the could-haves. I did what I did.

And what I did was start a new job. It's quite a switch going from the rushed startup environment to the slow-paced, meticulously-planned environment of a publicly traded company. At the same time, however, many of the habits I learned while at the startup I've been able to apply to the new job, and the transition couldn't have gone better.

But there is still that bit of emptiness, that missing sense of adventure.

I only managed to take 3 trips this year. The first was our 5 year anniversary trip on a cruise around southeast Alaska in June. Then came BlizzCon in Anaheim in November. Finally, I just returned from Christmas break in Buffalo, where the temperature averaged a balmy 45 degrees, much warmer than usual.

I'm hoping to get back to the Bay Area soon. I made a lot of connections out there, some friendly, some professional, and some both! I am still very much fascinated with how differently things work out there. It was very exciting to be a part of the culture, and I look forward to my next visit out there, whenever that may be.

A Look Ahead

It's hard to predict what's going to happen in the next year, but I'm going to state my goals here. No, they're not New Year's resolutions, but rather things I want to get done and say that I've accomplished.

Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper"
Finish the updated roncli.com site
Grow Six Gaming into a bigger and more general gaming community
Get back to the Bay Area at least once

Some strong goals. Now, to work on fulfilling them!

Labels: Alaska, BlizzCon, Buffalo, Bullseye, Coding, Diablo III, Gaming, HCC, iPhone, League of Legends, Life, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, Steam, World of Warcraft, Year in Review

Friday, February 03, 2012

The sorry state of gaming APIs
Posted: 6:15:00 PM 1 comments

While going through a redesign of my homepage, I went through the process of trying to figure out what I'd like to include in the "Gaming" section of the site. Given that my game of choice right now is World of Warcraft and my gaming platform of choice is Steam, I figured adding feeds for both would be easy, especially considering that I already have a World of Warcraft API of my own.

Well, maybe not.

For the front page of my site, I'd like to include the three latest activities in WoW. You can see a list of such activities exists on WoW's community site. You would think that something like this would be easily reproducible, either via an RSS feed or using an API. Indeed, if you search for this page on Google, it will count the number of items for you, indicating that it must be a feed of some kind. But try plugging that URL into an RSS reader and you get the official World of Warcraft blog.

Worse, the Blizzard Community API offers no such method to obtain such information. In order to get the information, you'd have to scrape it from the screen, which is a violation of Blizzard's API policy. Even worse, this data used to be available from the old WoW Armory, something I had in LibWowArmory while it was still in beta.

How am I supposed to present this data on my website if Blizzard doesn't allow me to get it from the one and only source that exists?

Don't get me wrong, there are a number of awesome things that you can do with the current community API that you couldn't do before, including obtaining statistics about auctions, get information about character and guild achievements, and much, much more. I do some of this already with Cheevos FTW!.

But a character feed should be mind-numbingly simple. And by that, I mean it should take a skilled developer at most a day's worth of work to get this programmed, tested, and deployed, especially within a system as well-developed as the API currently is. What is so wrong with the development process for the Blizzard API that this doesn't exist yet?

Character feeds aren't the only thing Blizzard hasn't reproduced that can no longer be accessed. Calendars for players and guilds and guild bank logs used to be obtainable using authentication on the Armory, even if you had an authenticator. I had it working 100% in LibWowAPI and was ready to do some amazing things with that data for my guild. Now I can't, and that's truly a shame.

Steam is another platform I'd love to be able to use to show off my gaming adventures. Steam, too, has an API that you can use to obtain information from them. So, let's get a list of my most recent achievements across all of my games.

Turns out I can't. The only place a player's achievements are listed is through links on their games list. Sure, you can add an ?xml=1 to the URL to get some XML data from each page, but there's the kicker... "each page". There is no single location that Steam lists all of a single player's achievements across all games, thus forcing me to go game by game to get the XML I need to generate my list. I have 29 games on Steam. This means I have to send 29 HTTP requests just to get my latest Steam achievements. That is ridiculous, and would slow down my web site considerably to try and load this on demand.

Being a programmer by trade, I know that what I want is possible to do. If I were creating a game, I know this would be a key feature that I'd make sure was just as polished as the product itself. It baffles me that two of the largest gaming companies in the world are missing this. We're in a day and age on the Internet where gaming data that allows players to make awesome community content should be expected, and not just a bonus perk of playing the game. While I think that both Valve and Blizzard recognize this and are taking steps in the right direction to create such APIs, they both have a long way to go to make a complete API that is simple to use and contains features that developers actually will want to have.

Labels: APIs, Cheevos FTW!, Coding, Editorials, Gaming, Six Minutes To Release, Steam, World of Warcraft

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

roncli.com server down
Posted: 6:09:00 PM 0 comments

The server hosting roncli.com, Six Minutes To Release, and my various other projects is currently offline after a failure to boot back up after a round of Windows updates. I am currently running some scans on it to determine the cause.

Labels: roncli.com, Servers, Six Minutes To Release

Friday, July 09, 2010

Revisiting LibWowArmory
Posted: 4:03:00 PM 0 comments

The biggest thing I dislike about the World of Warcraft Armory is the fact that it throttles requests to 120 a minute. Of course, I understand why it does this, as it must prevent getting hit with so many requests so fast that it essentially gets DOS'd. This means, instead of bitching about the limit, instead I need to find an elegant solution to avoid hitting the Armory more than 120 times per minute with LibWowArmory.

There are several problems that I must tackle in order to implement this. Firstly, LibWowArmory is a library, which means I can have multiple calls to the Armory coming from multiple places. For instance, my web server calls the Armory from both the website and a nightly maintenance application. I need to find a way to centralize management of the number of calls the application is taking per minute.

Second, I can't block a webpage when a call to the Armory is queued, but I can block the maintenance program. I need to develop a queuing mechanism for both scenarios. Something elegant and AJAXish for webpages, and something else for client apps.

The need for this has come up because I'm on the verge of adding GearScores to the Six Minutes To Release website, and the average character GearScore creates over 15 calls to the Armory, one for the character and one for each item. Requests absolutely have to be throttled, or I'm going to run over the 120 requests per minute fast.

I'm hoping to get this done this weekend so that I can release it along with some bug fixes that were introduced with the Visual Studio 2010 conversion. Eventually, the library will go to .NET 4.0 as well, but I'm not going to do that until all of my libraries, websites, and applications are on the same page.

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

Friday, June 18, 2010

Late night coding, how I miss thee
Posted: 3:06:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Muse - Uprising (Album Version) (5:06)

(Wow, haven't used that line in a while.)

"Get some sleep," said Kathy as she left for work earlier this evening.

Yeah, right. When I get on a roll, it takes a lot more than a recommendation of sleep get me to hop off.

Tonight I was determined to get back into the Six Minutes To Release project and fix it up so that it works with my changes to the LibWowArmory project. Well, that I did, and then some.

The website doesn't compile just yet, but all of the associated libraries do. Also, everything is updated for Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net Framework 3.5 except for one project, which I will tackle tomorrow. The reason the website doesn't compile is because I decided tonight to get rid of the Ajax Control Toolkit in favor of JQuery UI controls.

The reason for this is because the Ajax Control Toolkit has some kind of minification MSBuildTask. That's great for people who don't already use minification, but I've gone so far as to code my own minification (plus combination, compression, and caching) library. It annoys me that I have to install something extra just to get code to run. So, Ajax Control Toolkit is out.

The only controls I was using was a calendar and dialog popup, both of which is provided in the stock jQuery UI release. I've been wanting to get away from Microsoft's Ajax for the jQuery (even Microsoft uses jQuery) because of the ease of use of jQuery and simplistic and low bandwidth Ajax calls compared to Microsoft's chunky code. This is certainly a good first step towards that.

Yup, I'm in full code monkey mode, and far be it for sleep to interrupt me for any longer than it has to.

Labels: Coding, Gaming, jQuery UI, LibWowArmory, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Friday, March 05, 2010

SVN turns 1000
Posted: 5:22:00 PM 0 comments

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, February 18, 2010

Cleaning Up Code
Posted: 5:54:00 PM 0 comments

I took some time today to update some libraries in my source code, which is affecting a bunch of my projects. Cent, which runs off of CrystalSpace, is getting a makeover of sorts, as I am switching it over from the traditional CrystalSpace build process of linked libs and using DLLs instead. The process is quite nontrivial, as I am finding that I have to modify the Visual Studio solutions a bit to get things working as I need them to.

The biggest issue I'm coming across is trying to get the plugins into the same directory as Cent.exe so that I don't have to carry around a CSPath environment variable. I thought just adding it as a reference would copy it over, but it's not. I'm sure I can resolve this, but I just ran out of time today.

The other fun makeover I'll need to do involves Constellation, my Planarity clone. It runs off SDL, which, along with a slew of other libraries, are in a bunch of directories outside of my SVN directory. I'm going to try to get those all together and get a functional build of both Cent and Constellation before I continue working on any of the code in there.

Once I'm done, it's back to Six Minutes. I have a LOT of cool stuff planned over there, and a lot of coding to do to get it done. With some extra spare time the last week or so, I'm trying to knock out things that I've been wanting to do for a while but just haven't had the chance. We'll see how far this goes.

Labels: Coding, Constellation, Crystal Space, Gaming, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Saturday, October 24, 2009

XAML again?
Posted: 4:46:00 PM 0 comments

Back in January of last year, I started work on the Six Minutes To Release website using Silverlight. It... didn't go so well. People couldn't use it on Macs, and there were other fugly things about it I didn't like. I ended up abandoning the project and coding it in straight ASP.Net.

Turns out that the XAML experience I got from working on it the first time through the SMTR website came in handy. The Rawr project is using Silverlight for its next major release, Rawr 3. Having taken on the protection paladin module, I was able to write a needed piece for that module to work in Rawr 3 in about 3 days on and off. Of course, the stumbling of not having touched it in nearly 2 years took me some time to get past, but once I did it was smooth sailing.

There's a few things I don't like about it, though. Rawr is going to release a Silverlight web release and a WPF application release. The problem with the two releases is that the XAML used in each is not necessarily compatible with each other in all cases. This results in being unable to use certain features, such as StringFormatting. We also have to use a cheap preprocessing approach to be able to compile the same XAML file in both places.

Is it me, or could Microsoft have done a better job of streamlining the two versions? Why even have two versions of XAML? It seems like a lot of extra work for similar functionality that could be done all in one place.

In any case, I've put a lot on my plate, and I've devoted this weekend to getting it out. Up next, SMTR's new raid performance reporting, which is almost done. Should be fun.

Labels: Coding, Gaming, Rawr, Silverlight, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft, WPF, XAML

Sunday, October 11, 2009

LibWowHeroes 3.2.2
Posted: 4:25:00 AM 0 comments

It appears I'm amassing a nice amount of .Net libraries for World of Warcraft. My latest offering is for WoW Heroes, and is a .Net library for accessing their XML files. It's called, predictably, LibWowHeroes. Yeah, sorry for not being original, but at least you know what to expect!

Unlike my other libraries, this is a full release. With it you can query WoW Heroes for a guild and return lots of WoW Heroes-specific data from it. Unfortunately, I don't have manual character updates working yet, but that will be something I will work on soon. And WoW Heroes data will be coming to Six Minutes To Release very soon.

Labels: Coding, LibWowHeroes, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Friday, October 02, 2009

An Experiment
Posted: 5:53:00 PM 0 comments

Six Minutes To Release seems to be my favorite testing grounds for experimental code lately. Fortunately, the RSS experiment was a success.

This one involves moving the ViewState off of the HTML page and on to the database. Some of the ViewStates were getting huge, even when I'd try to manage the size of the ViewState. So I decided to take that out of the HTML to slim some pages down. So far it seems to be working, but it hasn't been up for too long.

This caused me to rethink my ASP.Net model, and I ended up putting data that I usually store in a separate class, such as login information, into the class that inherits System.Web.UI.Page. Makes it much cleaner in my opinion, as I don't have to store references to Response, Request, and Server.

So we'll see how this goes. This is all based on an idea I got for Gate, and if it goes well I'll end up using it in Gate as well. Should be fun.

Labels: Coding, Gate, Six Minutes To Release, ViewState

Friday, September 04, 2009

As if I don't have enough to do
Posted: 2:04:00 PM 0 comments

In addition to working on my personal projects (including the Six Minutes To Release website and the associated libraries), leading a 7-day a week WoW raiding guild, and somehow still finding time to sleep, I've decided to participate in the open source development of Rawr, an equipment planner and optimizer for World of Warcraft.

Primarily, I'll be working on the protection paladin module, as the primary handler of that module has stopped working on it. Already I've fixed some bugs from the latest version, and the module should be usable again in the next release. I really don't plan on adding a whole lot, there's already a lot of good stuff in there. My goal is to make sure that there's as little down time as possible between patches so that protection paladins can stay up to date with the kind of gear that they need.

Labels: Coding, Gaming, Rawr, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Fastest. Project. Evar.
Posted: 12:56:00 AM 0 comments

I've decided that I'm going to write a website that combines my three main personal sites: Projects, roncli.com, and this blog.

One of the biggest features of this site is the ability to easily add an RSS feed to a webpage without having to write separate pages or nasty ASP.Net http handlers. Basically what I wanted was to have URL's that look like "...page.aspx" load the usual aspx, but "...page.aspx?feed=rss" load the RSS feed instead of the normal page.

This idea led me to the ASP.Net RSS Toolkit, a very easy to use toolkit with some nice features. Including the ability to quickly make RSS feeds. That, combined with a 34-line class (counting 6 blank lines) that inherits from System.Web.Ui.Page, overrides OnPreInit, and forces inheriting classes to override a GetFeed function, and I'm ready to create feeds not only in RSS, but also Atom, OPML, and RDF as well.

Wow. The demo app was more challenging to write than this gem.

I want to give it a test run, probably on some Six Minutes To Release pages, and see if it's stable. However, shortly thereafter I will probably release this to CodePlex so that other people can get their hands on it. I am rapidly becoming addicted to RSS feeds since my iPhone reads em pretty good using Byline. I have feeds from all over the Internet, and it's nice to be able to have one central place to find out what's going on in my own little corner of the world.

Labels: ASP.Net RSS Toolkit, Blog, Byline, Coding, Gaming, Projects, roncli.com, Six Minutes To Release

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, February 10, 2009

The Finished Product
Posted: 10:58:00 AM 0 comments

It's hard to finish something a year after you intended to be finished with it. It makes you feel like you've got nothing done over that period of time. But with as little as I've been able to work on projects in my free time, the Six Minutes To Release website is finally in a somewhat finished state.

The last week has seen me make various bug fixes and LINQ optimizations to allow the site to run faster, but nothing new has gone in, and I think it'll stay that way for a while. The Equipment Planner's been a big hit with the guild members so far, and I've always thought in the back of my mind about taking that a step further and spinning it off into its own website. Indeed, it may be something I eventually do, but for now I think I'm content with admiring the finished product, and perhaps work on something else for a while.

The biggest thing for me is that I've finished a project. For those that have been following this blog, you may know that it is difficult for me to finish things I start, but I managed to see this one through despite the long time from development to final release. Sure, I'll add things here and there, but the original plans I made were followed. That's a boost to my confidence, and hopefully something I can draw off of for wherever my next project lands.

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

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

LibWowArmory 0.1
Posted: 5:25:00 PM 0 comments

I totally forgot to post this. Not so long ago, I released LibWowArmory on CodePlex. It's a .NET library for interfacing with the World of Warcraft Armory.

It's not complete, but I have it looking up important stuff, like items and characters. You can also extensively search as if you were searching from the Armory itself. Well, you are searching from the Armory itself, really, using the same queries available on their website.

I want to add lots of stuff to this, such as Achievements and Arena Teams, but right now this will do, because that's all I need for the Six Minutes website. I'm hoping at some point I'll be able to revisit this library and complete it, because it's pretty nice to be able to just call this stuff from code and not have to worry about the implementation of HTTP.

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

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

LibBeImba 0.1 beta released
Posted: 4:18:00 PM 0 comments

With everything nearly back to normal in Houston, I'm back to working on my guild's website.

In the course of doing so, I recently added the ability to pull scores from the BeImba website for use on my website. The admin over there just recently opened up a SOAP API, which took me a matter of an hour or so to create something to interface with it.

Well, I took things a step further. I took out the portion of the code from the website and made it its own project called LibBeImba. After playing around and tweaking things, I got to the point where I thought the library should be available to the public.

The result? A CodePlex project for LibBeImba. It was pretty straightforward for me to create the project, upload the source via SVN, and create its first release.

Currently, I use it to capture all of my level 70 guild members' scores once a day and store the information in a database. Then the website can query that information and display it in any number of ways. I hope to get a graph up on individual users' pages, but that might be a while before I can get around to that.

In any case, if you're a .NET coder interested in getting BeImba scores for your World of Warcraft guild, this is the library you need. Check it out.

Labels: Coding, Gaming, LibBeImba, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Monday, July 28, 2008

The Joys of Being a Guild Master
Posted: 2:18:00 PM 0 comments

As many of you have either been told or otherwise found out, I run a guild in World of Warcraft on Korialstrasz called Six Minutes To Release, a play on the message you receive when you die (6 minutes until release). Solitha helps me run it, and I think that together we do a pretty decent job of it. That's not to say that it doesn't come without it's stresses.

Internet drama is something you can't get away from, no matter how hard you try. Minimizing the effects of it has proven to be an interesting challenge this far. Whether it be two people fighting over something not related to the game, that one player everyone seems to hate, or the player that you wonder when they're going to go emo on you and suddenly bail out of the guild someday.

Then there's making sure everyone is happy with their raiding schedule, which in and of itself is a fun challenge. The people playing alts because we don't have two of three people of a particular class on want to play their mains, so it's hard to balance people's wants with the guild needs. Then what do you do when you're short a few players? PuGing is a great source of finding raiders, but out goal is to be able to run the raids within our guild, and when you're as far out as we are from doing so, finding regular PuGers that know what they are doing can me impossible.

And of course there's running the raids themselves. Our guild had been easily clearing Karazhan for months, and it seems that these last few weeks we've just been unable to focus enough to get full clears. It's difficult to see where things are going wrong sometimes, and that makes running raids particularly frustrating.

The rewarding part is seeing our guild grow, working together better, and starting to see some real progress, both among the players and the guild as a whole.

Black Temple before the patch seems pretty unreasonable at this point, but I think that once we get into 25-man content, we'll start rolling pretty good.

Posted with LifeCast

Labels: Gaming, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Monday, July 21, 2008

Ajax Security & User Friendliness
Posted: 6:25:00 PM 0 comments

Currently, I am going through the Six Minutes To Release website and making all sorts of updates and changes to the input interface. Basically, I've decided that UpdatePanels are far too slow for my needs on pages where user interaction is heavy, and I decided to instead go with implementing the ICallbackEventHandler.

I think I discussed Ajax security a while back and came to the conclusion then that it wasn't ready for prime time. Since then, I've been doing a lot of reading up on the subject, and have found that ICallbackEventHandler provides a way to keep page state through your Ajax calls, thus resulting in the important things that I have stored on the server controlable by me, such as whether or not the user is logged in and so on. The added bonus is that I can update the page through JavaScript and THEN send the data to the server to update the database. The result is an instant update as soon as you click on something, and it's very nice.

Now, in reality, things aren't instant, but the user doesn't have to know that. This is also only really useful for non-critical functions... I wouldn't trust any account information with this method. However, signing up for raids, having a raid leader change a raider's raiding status, things that aren't going to make or break the site... these are acceptable to me to use this "instant update" method.

And the main reason I did this was to improve the slow method of using UpdatePanel. I like UpdatePanel for one-time deals, like submitting a form, but when you're using the page's controls over and over again, UpdatePanel is too slow for my taste, and Solitha found that the page kind of sucks to have to wait to update something, wait a second or two, update again, wait, update, and so on. User friendliness is something I know I need to work on with my web sites, and using Six Minutes To Release as a learning ground for this is going to help me in that department a lot. I look forward to being able to use stuff like this.

Labels: AJAX, Coding, ICallbackEventHandler, Six Minutes To Release, UpdatePanel