Since this will hopefully be my last year at the university, and for other reasons, I have been quite busy. As such, I have had to make some sacrifices, such as game development (as evidenced by the lack of updates to this blog). Again. But since I will be less busy after I finish my studies for this Autumn, which should happen next week, I will be free to continue working on Artillery Brawl, and hope I will be at least slightly less busy during the next semester! After all, it would be nice to have something in my portfolio to show when I start applying for jobs to write my thesis at. I also promise to try and get the card game I wrote about playable in the near future.

In other news, Python 3.0 was released while I was away. The improvements, especially to Unicode handling, look really interesting and I would really like to switch, but unfortunately, I can't... None of the libraries I'm using for Artillery Brawl - setuptools, pyglet and pymunk – have been updated for Python 3.0 yet. There's not much I can do except wait, so for now, I'm sticking with Python 2.6.

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

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!

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!

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!

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

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.

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.

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.