Sunday, May 10, 2009

Progress?

I've made some definite progress since May 1st!
  • I watched the entirety of Jeeves & Wooster for the first time. What a great show.
  • (Now working on the entirety of Black Adder for the first time)
  • Playing some OldSchool Civilization 4 with Aubrey during the evenings. Excellent fun.
Now that I'm coding pretty much full time, I'm finding I have a strange desire for routine. I'm not the type of guy that likes routine - far from it. I like variety and doing things at a whim. I don't like doing things for rote. But it feels like there's no structure in my life and I'm just kind of freewheeling - and it frequently ends with me just staring at blogs for hours each day.

To make matters worse, my physical condition has deteriorated rapidly in the last few months. Sitting in the same chair all day every day (Except to go to the pub) is really turning my body into a stiff-jointed blubberball. Not to say that I'm getting fat or anything - I'm still the pinacle of human development and women and men alike oggle me - I'm just losing any muscle I had and I'm farther from touching my toes than I have been in years. I haven't even gone to Aikido in ages (I sleep through the morning session and Aubrey works during the evening one).

So in an effort to be kinder to my body, and to put some structure in my life, I'm taking up a Morning Constitutional. I've always loved the term and I have a small (200ft?) mountain right across the street from me. Might as well go exploring, find all the nooks and crannies, and maybe do some ultra-lightweight bouldering. In any case, it's nice to get some fresh air.

I never thought that "walking" was a form of excercise. The body is tuned to walk well and it won't normally expend a lot of energy just moving about in this fashion. I walked to school around 1-2km every day each way as a kid, and I never thought anything of it. I hiked, I climbed, I biked, I kayaked... But last week I walked downtown and I was winded. Brought a small tear to my eye. I must fix this problem.

I'm also going to look into trying to drink 3 litres of water per day. When you mostly sit still and never leave the house I seem to have been getting by on about half a litre, and I don't particularly feel thirsty. Yesterday I choked down my first 3L alotment and it was actually a little difficult for me. Practice makes perfect!

But enough of me whining about my personal life!

But I've also made some progress on my framework. Again, nothing to really look at. I've included a few Box2D overrides (Boundary and Contact Listeners, for example) and added a "Keep camera focused on the player" mode. There's a scaling bug if you zoom in too far on the player but otherwise it works well (toggleable in case you want to visually explore of course).

I've also completely severed all ties from the display model (camera, handling, etc.) to the game world. For some stupid reason I did all the Box2D instantiation and world setup in the same class. That's quite fixed now, and it will open the door to a new cool feature I'll be blogging about in the coming week.

I spent the entire morning today focused on solving an XML importing bug, but it turns out it was just Flash caching a copy of Level3.xml it was supposed to import from my webserver. I'm very happy on one hand, as it proves once and for all that Flash will cache files such as my larger music files and sound effects. It makes me a little sad because I wasted so many hours on a simple "clear your cache" bug. I might want to look into a "clear cache" button or something somewhere. Not even sure if that's possible.

3 comments:

  1. That sounds _exactly_ like my days.

    Except without all the work.

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  2. Maybe it was a misnomer when I said "coding full time." What I meant was, "I don't have a job." I only pick up the code when I'm absolutely positively bored.

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  3. It's clear we should be doing the exact same thing only on a tropical beach.

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