distributedlife

I started this blog on the 9^th of January 2008 and made 151 posts. I’m not sure if this is more or less than I intended as I never really made plans for the number of posts I would make. I had a roll going there at one point and posted nearly every day for a month or two. Other months like December the posts are scarce. My posting frequency was mostly related to the compile time of whatever project I was working on. My C++ framework has a 15 minute build time while web dev has none.

I plan to keep blogging this year. What I’ll blog about, I’ll talk about in a separate post that is focused on 2009.

All in all I’m happy with improvements I have made to my writing style. I’ve got a long way to go but they only way to get better is keep practicing.

No Horizons

This year we put No Horizons on hiatus. I’ve not updated the website but I doubt anyone is really looking at it at the moment. We did it because we threw out my graphics engine and bought a third-party one. This was a pretty difficult decision for me to make as I had spent the best part of two years on that engine and it was a very fast engine. The problem was that it was ugly as sin. The new engine is much prettier. Some architectural changes need to take place to integrate the new engine and the existing code; but more on that later.

We will update the site soon just to give a status update and when we get up to putting the existing artwork into the new engine we will put up some much prettier screenshots.

No Horizons is not on hold indefinitely. James and I still think it is the game we have always wanted. We just don’t want the game we’ve always wanted to be flawed or incomplete.

Firestorm

Because of the differences in file formats accepted by the two engines we knew that there was going to be a long period of mucking around working out what we would need to do to our existing assets to get them to work in the new engine. We also needed to work out the issues of the new engine, especially around network architecture. This was going to be important when integrating with the No Horizons engine (we only threw out the graphics part).

We needed to cover the end to end usage scenarios for the art assets.  So we thought it best if we worked on a smaller game. A game that could be done in a shorter time period and one that had fewer assets but still had the same time of assets as No Horizons. So, we started Firestorm. There is no website for this yet but there will be one when it’s ready.

We have most of the big ticket models done for Firestorm and animation has started on a few. Once we have a site and some nice screenshots we will put them for you to see.

GamingKudos

In the middle of the year we started GamingKudos our achievement system / gaming social network. Steam and Xbox Live spring to mind but ours is different to the existing market. Playstation and Nintendo also have their own achievement systems. This is also part of the problem. GamingKudos looks to solve the problem from the perspective of gamers.

For obvious reasons the differences between the existing setups and our own are confidential. The final drafts for the UI have been completed and we are waiting for the design crew Voodoo to provide us with the final copies.

The backend for GamingKudos is an API that we intend to license to game developers for an achievement system solution. It provides all the reliability and security that is mandated by such a system without the issue of having to develop one. This is going to be increasingly relevant during these recessionary times and for is always relevant for Indie developers.

Auspex

We also started a game development tool called Auspex. Auspex helps game designers balance their games by helping them understand how their games are played. The Auspex engine and infrastructure is complete. I just need to finish coding the website. It should be out soon. You can read that as second priority. I won’t set a date because that would be silly.

Auspex is targeted at Indie developers as well. Most big shops have tools similar to Auspex, maybe not as extensive but sufficient for their purposes. Indie developers don’t often have the resources to create the game and the tools as well. Something we are accutely aware of. Auspex is here to solve that problem at the price appropriate for Indie developers.

SocialTacit

Our third web oriented project is SocialTacit, a knowledge gathering tool that we initially created for our own purposes. It’s something I had wanted for a long time in the testing world and will be free to most. We see three potential versions; a web version that is free for public use; an enterprise version and an open-source version for non-commercial but private use.

In the past month its usage scenarios changed dramatically and what we have now is something a bit different in the space of content management, knowledge gathering tools. It’s very cool.

The first version is a public alpha so it’s not polished (read: ugly as programmer art could be) and any feedback will be welcome. Once we get a good system down and people are happy with the direction we will take it, I’ll hire our favourite design team to come up with a UI that won’t blind you.

Hardlywood and On the Cusp

James and I also work on a separate little venture as a side project; writing a comic and designing t-shirts. We stopped the t-shirt aspect of it quick smart because the quality wasn’t good enough. Good quality printing comes from a print in advance, sell later business model rather than our print on demand model. The former works well if you have an existing customer base. We didn’t.

The comic we kept going and we managed 100 comics over the course of the year. It was a learning experience as I’ve never written a comic strip before. Some of them are quite strong, others are less so but that is always going to be the case. You can’t have summer without winter.

Testing Work

I had a good year testing. I’ve learnt a few tricks. I continue to work on my Action-Target-Scenario method for writing test cases. It is still working well. At some point during the second half of the year, in QualityCenter over 7,000 test cases were attributed to my projects and something like 5,000 test cases were attributed to all other projects. This isn’t a race, my method always means you have more test cases but you spend significantly less time writing them. In just the past week I’ve written 800 test cases.

The less time I spend writing test cases the more time I can spend doing what is most important, testing.

Salsa

During the last quarter of the year I started learning Salsa. It has been excellent fun and I intended to go back next year to keep learning. Salsa has been something I have always wanted to learn but never found the time to do. A friend told me when the school he attends had classes and there was a match with my schedule. I hadn’t planned on it but three months later, I am loving it.

Spanish

Once again I tried to learn Spanish. I gave it three separate attempts this year and while I managed to get to chapter five on my audio book and my pronunciation of the first four is pretty good I kept on getting distracted by other junk.

Reading

I started reading again this year. I’ve always been reading some form of reference or technical manual but not novels and not for fun. I’ve taken up the same habits that my mother has; a book in each room. Sometimes there is more in than one in a room. Each book has a different level of progression. I have close to ten books on the go.

I’m not really sure how reading ten books at once impacts my comprehension of each book. I suspect the reason why each one makes it only so far before being distracted by a shiny new book is that they are not very good or, not very good at getting to the interesting part.

Podcasts

I started listening to podcasts last year. I managed to get through several hundred IT Conversations, most of the Stack Overflow shows, eighty odd Software Engineering Radio shows and perhaps sixty A Way with Words.

Podcasts are great and once you get the hang of listening to them in the background you can listen to them and code, test or write tedious amounts of documentation. I learnt a surprising amount listening to podcasts. More than I expected to.

Music Listening

An interesting side note is that I have been using last.fm to track my music listening. I started it on the 31^st of May 2008 and racked up about 7,800 songs in that time. If we assume that I have a consistent listening pattern that’s about 13,000 songs.

Now this only records music listened to at home. I listen to music all day long at work, on the way to work and when I’m going to sleep. I spend on average an hour a day in the car which equates to 15; 4-minute songs or 5,500 in a year. At work I work 48; 40-hour weeks a year. That comes out at 28,000 but I’m not listening to music all the time. I have meetings, I talk to people, etc. So it’s probably somewhere between 15,000-20,000 songs.

Let’s say I listen to about 35,000 songs per year. The question I need to find the answer to is how do I listen to more varied music rather than more music? Beth Orton got over 1000 plays at home since June last year. I like Beth Orton, obviously, but I only have four of her albums. That is a lot of repeats.

Mah Back!

2008 saw me make significant improvements in the quality of my back. As I write this I’ve had a couple of really good days and they hint that the end may be in sight. My back truly was chronic where I didn’t really have the ability to sit for more than half an hour before becoming sore and needing to wander about and stretch.

Standing and lying down are fine, just not suited to IT.

Phew

So that was my year. I may have missed a few things. I will have to check my diary at some point to see what I did over the year. I’ll update this post if I remember anything of note.

All in all, 2008 was a tumultuous year of changing directions and starts. It wasn’t a bad year by any standard. I had a pretty good time for most of it.

What did you do in 2008?