Oooh look, a new theme! Same colour changing gubbins as before, but a fresh new non-Flash look, with some spooky negative-percentage background trickery going on in the header!
More updates soon - exciting news this way comes!
First of all, apologies for not updating in yonks - I could give you the usual programmer excuses about real life, work and so on but you’ve heard them all before, so I’ll dive right in to what I’ve been doing:
Archaos is very, very slowly moving along - we’re talking geologically slow here, but nonetheless there’s still a roadmap and there’s still progress on it. My aim now is to have a release before my 30th birthday (next year) and I’ll be damned if I don’t make it!
I’ve been experimenting with presentation and so on, and came up with a little thing tonight which I thought was quite cute. I’m really feeling the love for CSS3 and HTML5 now.
Wordpress has become my new powerhouse tool at work, and I’ve been churning out sites left, right and centre in this wonderful blog engine turned CMS (as of 3.1 especially so) - check out some of the following:
The last is our most recent project, and is very much not a site you’d expect to be Wordpress powered - such is its flexibility!
I don’t update on Twitter much anymore, as it’s become a bit of a joke now with all of the celebrities and ridiculous trends; it pains me to say it but I think Twitter is more about Justin Bieber now than anything sensible. Alas, I spend most of my social networking time now on Facebook.
Finally, I’ve booked a flight to Arizona in September for a two week photography road trip with two of my good friends - should be awesome!
Anyway, hopefully that’s got everyone up to speed on what I’m doing - keep your eyes peeled in the coming months for updates on Archaos and other projects.
I actually just did a \o/ in the middle of the office.
http://mashable.com/2010/09/10/adobe-responds-to-apples-new-rules/
Yes. Very much yes.
Well well well, I guess I haven’t posted here in… ohhh, ages? I owe you all an apology to be perfectly honest, as I’ve neglected to work on Archaos (or indeed any personal projects) in the time since my last update.
Life has panned out for me - work became extremely busy in the last few months, and my ever expanding role has ever expanded - and indeed shifted towards a more theoretical and management-style thang. I’ve been working directly with clients and producing a lot of exciting stuff for a lot of exciting projects which, if I get off my lazy arse and update this blog more often, you will no doubt hear about!
Another significant development is that I’m no longer a lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript - I’m a very much not lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript. I have indeed found a (dare I say it) lady geek - though to her credit, not even close to the caliber of my pure unadulterated nerdiness - whom I spend as much time with as my work and her sanity allows. I won’t allow myself to become soppy and embarrass her (and myself) but… well, I absolutely love you, and you make me a very, very happy boy. Oh bugger, I don’t think I succeeded there. Never mind!
This has meant of course (yes, you all knew it!) that my personal projects have taken a back burner in all of this. Well, I say a back burner, but I actually mean ‘have been placed in tupperware tubs and frozen’. I must say now that my passion for Archaos in particular has not waned one bit - however after such a hiatus, I’d like to start a lot of it again rather than try and work my way back into the existing code base. A problem with learning as you create is that everything you did a month previous is a bit crap - so stuff I started last year is gonna be pretty goddamn terrible now.
I will return to Archaos. I absolutely promise I will, and I have been reading Gooey Blob and other Chaos related stuff. The end of the year always proves to be a better time to get on with personal projects, and I hope to have something playable in December.
To those of you who still read this, still follow me on my similarly neglected Twitter account, I salute you - and I’ll be around more often!
P.S. Check this out. WOW!
I’m experimenting with a new blog format - namely one which uses Tumblr. I’ll be migrating the rest of the posts over and will more than likely map the old permalinks to the new Tumblr entries. Tumblr seems to strike an ideal balance between power and ease/speed of use, and as much as I like Wordpress, I think the future of blogging lies on more ‘connected’ services such as this.
The home page of the website will be more like the Rotates.org of old, and will include links to current projects or items of interest. It’s been a blast putting it together with Tumblr’s fantastically simple template language and thanks to being able to edit the CSS and Javascript in realtime via Web Developer and Firebug. Have fun and let me know what you think!
I’ve been exceptionally busy with work, and only had the energy left to play Global Agenda on an evening - I’ve not made any progress with Archaos since the last update but once I’ve gotten this swathe of hard labour out of the way, I’ll be finishing the server, building a basic client and inviting people to begin beta testing. Sorry to those few of you who are still checking the site every day (I love you all!), I will have goodies for you soon - promise!
The Archaos server now validates, processes and outputs a full turn of human interactions. This is a pretty major milestone in the development process, and I’m very happy with the results so far:
{
"turn" : 1,
"phase" : "move",
"interaction" : "sequence",
"finished" : true,
"actions" : [
{
"type" : "move",
"player" : "lewster32",
"time" : 1263682234,
"data" : {
"piece" : "p0",
"path" : [
{
"x" : 1,
"y" : 7
}
]
}
},
{
"type" : "end_turn",
"player" : "lewster32",
"time" : 1263682234
},
{
"type" : "move",
"player" : "bobster16",
"time" : 1263682234,
"data" : {
"piece" : "p1",
"path" : [
{
"x" : 13,
"y" : 5
}
]
}
},
{
"type" : "move",
"player" : "bobster16",
"time" : 1263682234,
"data" : {
"piece" : "p3",
"path" : {
"x" : 11,
"y" : 4
},
"flying" : true
}
},
{
"type" : "end_turn",
"player" : "bobster16",
"time" : 1263682234
}
]
}
I’d like to mention the huge amount of support, encouragement and fantastic resources provided by certain people of late. @andy_herbert has been a fantastic vocal advocate and provider of much inspiration and technical knowhow (he’s an utterly brilliant multi-talented programmer in his own right) and I owe an awful lot to his ‘cheery’ tone on Twitter! ;)
Secondly, I’d like to shout out a big hello to the Slashdot horde, who accosted the site a few days back. I got a hell of a lot of visits from these guys and I’m sure it’s helped spread the word about Archaos (even if that wasn’t actually my intention) and more importantly the Chaos scene in general!
Finally, a big thanks to @Zolyx for mentioning the project on his blog along with the other fantastic Chaos projects out there - muchos appreciated!
