Brainfold

Oops, looks like Real Life ate me for July. I haven’t even worked on the university project much, but I’ll have to get it ready before September. Some good news regarding my studies though: I’m very likely to finish all my remaining courses during the next academic year. After that, I’m planning to move back to the capital, Helsinki, to write my Master’s thesis at some company. If everything goes according to the plan, I’ll finish my degree late next year, yay! Of course, things rarely go exactly like planned…

Hopefully I’ll get more game development done in the Autumn, since it looks like I’ll still be quite busy during August.

Today I adapted the nice setuptools-based plugin module from Spineless to more easily support different physics toolkits in my code, and played around a bit trying to write a Box2D plugin. Frankly, I don’t like the Box2D API design at all, and I like the pyBox2D API even less, as it’s a direct port of the C++ API and doesn’t even try to be Pythonic. Eww. Seems I’ll have to try fake sweeping collision detection and other tweaks to pymunk next to fix the collision problems I wrote about.

In other news, starting tomorrow I’ll try to finish two university courses that are really long overdue and that I want out of the way before September. I have one short paper to write and one coding project to do, so game development progress will probably be a bit slower again for a while. But every finished course takes me closer to graduation (which I’m planning to do next year), so yay for that!

Tags: Artillery Brawl, Box2d, graduation, physics, plugins, pymunk, setuptools

So I’m learning Flash now. It actually seems quite interesting, though I’m not a big fan of the scripting language (I’m using version 3.0 of ActionScript). But why did they have to make every window of the IDE have the same style, ie. dockable tool windows? Also, since they are not standard windows, the scroll wheel and some standard hotkeys don’t seem to work… *sigh* It’s impossible to use the built-in help this way, so I’ll rather use the online help with my browser. I’m just doing a small project for a university course though, and I’m not planning to do anything gamedev related after that. Still, nice to get some new experiences development-wise.

I’m going out of town this weekend, and next week I’ll probably have to concentrate on the Flash project, but after that I’ll try to get back to game development since I shouldn’t have any courses left for this Spring. So, until then!

Tags: Flash, Studies

As promised, I actually did some game development this week for a change. First I upgraded to Pyglet 1.1 (beta 1) and pymunk 0.7.1. After that, I finally implemented a better camera for the artillery game. It’s really nice now, smooth scrolling and zooming with constraints so you can’t move or zoom “beyond” the playing area. Unfortunately, none of the improvements can be seen in static screenshots. Next thing I’ll probably add is some kind of a background so it’s not so easy to get lost while moving around. After that, I need better controls. I should also try and take advantage of Pyglet 1.1’s new features.

But unfortunately, now I have to concentrate on Prolog programming to get rid of a university course. I have the exam for Logic programming next week, and I have to do a couple of bigger excercises before that. But after that, probably more game programming, so stay tuned!

Tags: Artillery Brawl, Pyglet, pymunk

Woken up by Stephen’s prod, I thought I’d update on my status for a change. This is the busiest week I’ve had with studies in a long time, but next week I’ll hopefully have two less courses to worry about. At the moment I’m working on my neural calculation excercises with Python and database programming project work with Java (eww). E estou estudande um pouco de Portuguêse. Then it’s just a couple of exams and a Flash project work before my studies for this Spring will be done.

I promise I’ll do at least something with game development again next week!

Again, all my programming effort has been spent on the visualization prototype for my university course. On the positive side, I have lots of ideas on how to go on when I have time to continue my hobby projects. Working on the prototype has been a bit of a pain, as programming user interfaces and visualizations is all about the details, and there are loads of details in every graphical application. We’re quite tight on the schedule too, but thankfully the prototype doesn’t have to be fully functioning, it just has to demonstrate the idea.

I have mixed feelings about working with C#. On the other hand, the GUI facilities of .Net are the best I’ve ever worked with, but on the other hand, I’m often missing Python when it would make a solution much more straightforward than C#. And why the heck does the size of container have to be either Count or Length, depending on the container? I know, I know, choosing IronPython could potentially combine the benefits of both, but I don’t really have time to find out if that’s the case.

Anyway, here’s a picture of the prototype, now showing article topics. They’re generated from article keywords by a simple and crappy clustering algorithm because I didn’t have time to implement a better one, and laid out crudely, but that’s a start. The square icons are articles, and their colors match topic colors. Additionally, article icons should appear inside topic areas, but they don’t yet. I really hope I have the time to improve topic display by the end of the project.

Tags: C#, information visualization, screenshots

First, an update on the last post: I sent mail to the developer of generateDS, and he has located the problem and is looking into it. That was quick, nice. As for parsing C, I took a look at a couple of tools, including GCC-XML, but I couldn’t find anything I could readily use. So I’m still counting on Pyparsing or PLY to do the job. I realized Pyglet is using PLY, maybe I’ll look into that for insight.

The last few days I’ve been spending my programming effort on a university project. I’m on a course called “Information visualization project work”, where we’re supposed to design and implement a prototype of an information visualization (infovis) application. I already took the infovis introduction course and the topic seems quite interesting, especially since it’s related to user interfaces which I’m very interested in. Infovis is visualization of abstract data, as opposed to scientific visualization, which is about visualizing concrete data such as air flow over a wing, or the structural integrity of a bridge. Common applications include maps (although the underlying map might visualize concrete landscape, it’s almost always overlaid with abstract data such as routes) stock rates and weather charts.

We had three topics to choose from, and our group chose visualization of research article citations. Since there don’t seem to be any suitable visualization libraries for Python, and I don’t really like the GUI libraries for Python either, and I hate Java, and I don’t know Flash, we chose to do the prototype in C#. It’s much nicer to work with than Java, and I’m at least somewhat familiar with both the language and the .NET API. Granted, I could have tried to use IronPython, but I have no experience at all in it, so I decided not to take the risk of trying to learn it for this short project. We’re using a visualization library called Piccolo, which at least initially seems quite nice. It’s almost trivial to set up too, though the API and especially documentation is a bit confusing. Unfortunately the free version isn’t really maintained or updated anymore. It would be nice if someone did something similar for Python… or maybe a library like that exists, but I just couldn’t find one.

Tags: C#, information visualization, parsing, screenshots

So, this is my new home on the Internet. The home of my game development activities anyway; the future is always unclear. Some of you may remember me from my old development journal on GameDev.net (I will follow in the wake of HopeDagger and continue linking from there to here for now). Others might remember me as the author of Spineless game engine, which is temporarily dead, or maybe just avoiding publicity for now.

Currently my time and energy are mostly consumed by studies, capoeira and Real Life, leaving precious little for game development, but it seems with the arriving winter my programming motivation is coming back too. We’ll see how long that will last. In the mean time, I might also write about my studies, at least as much as they relate to my hobby programming. We’ll see, we’ll see…

The blog, especially its theme and style, is far from finished (I’m still using the default style), so expect that to change in the near future. I would especially like to get a logo for the page, but I would need a good and free picture of the human brain for that.

Again, welcome! Comments are welcome too, as always.

Tags: Spineless