Project(s) status Friday: 12/11/2015

I started this morning off with disappointment.
Got told flat out by TGC that some of my art (Note, I'm not a great artist so this isn't horribly surprising) was of insufficient quality for the store they have.  Given the level of some stuff that's on there either they are upping their standards or I just *REALLY REALLY SUCK*.

Sigh.

Well, on with the project status.  My wife, as many may or may not know, is pregnant.  So we're anxiously awaiting our new addition in a few months.  It takes up a lot of my time.

What time I do have is spent at work, with the kid, doing housework, or very infrequently - playing games.

Every monday I sit with my 5 year old (Soon to be 6) and do some game-guru 'daddy time'.

Anyways... today I wanted to have an update ready but turns out someone posted some 'free weapons' that were blatant plagiarism and as such kind of mucked up my ideas for today's review post.  I may do a different one later, but not right now.  It frustrates me to be stymied like that.



Current project status:

1) NMC Book 2 - still waiting for beta readers to get back to me.
2) Javascript Mechwarrior Dark Age game.  No further progress (currently no desire)
3) Yet to be named "sci-fi" FPS game - good progress!  Figured out and corrected internal shadow systems, can now proceed normally.  Looks like I'll be getting a free scientist model from one 'henry weaver' and that will help CONSIDERABLY with some of the efforts I'm moving forward with.  Combined with the lackluster character creator (though I've done some interesting things with the face mapping) I have a bare bones set of 'original' characters plus some bad guys.  Now comes level design, then population of levels, then scripting, object placement for pickup objects, tuning, refinement, etc.
4) The doom analysis is complete for Doom 1.  Interesting stuff in previous blog posts  here here and here!
5) I promised to look at zombie AI code but someone already found the issue - so that's off the list.
6) I need to take more screen shots of my WIP.


At work, I'm writing a script to use puppet to deploy salt-minion on SLES SP3/4.  Irony level rising.

Project(s) status Friday 12/4/2015

I'm  resolved to try and keep up on my projects for once, instead of letting them languish.  Part of that is being open and honest with my few regular readers about where I'm at:

1. The Mechwarrior: Dark Age JS game has stalled.  This is because of inherent limitations in Javascript.  The most recent thing I did was build a shellscript which parses the DB @ www.warrenborn.com and builds a JSON for the various expansion packs.  That was done about a month ago.  The question then becomes - what engine do I want to move forward with? Easiest would probably be Unity, since it's got javascript as an optional scripting method.  On a plus note the basic combat engine for one on one combat works like a champ, including statuses like pulse lasers, flamers, etc. 
2. My Sci-Fi trilogy (book 2) is being reviewed by my proofreaders.  I'm fifteen thousand words and about 8 segments short of where it needs to be before it's a first draft.  So I'm waiting for their reviews so I can get an idea of how to fill out those missing pieces.
3. My Sci-Fi game (unnamed as of current) is stalled because of life; I am trying to work on it from time to time but it's hard when your job and home life take up 95% of your time.  Current issues are interior shadows in the Game-Guru engine and asset/story choices need firmed up.

In life, I'm a Linux Systems Engineer and Lead Linux Administrator.  I'm currently working on deploying SALTstack to SLES 11 sp4.  I've got most of the elements in place and a functional system running but boy howdy was it ugly to get moving.  You'd think something called (S)use (A)dvanced (L)inux (T)echnologies would be more compatible with (S)use (L)inux (E)nterprise (S)ystem.

I may write up a blog post on it.  Currently I am sticking with puppet for minor tasks despite it's raw incompatibility with Suse's package management system.  It's decent enough at user removal/etc though.  SALTstack however has the benefit of direct 'zypper' package management integration which is pretty sweet considering it's the backbone of how Suse manages packages.  So that's also been taking up my mental CPU cycles. 

One upshot from a gamedev standpoint is I learned how to make functional alpha channel decals work in Game Guru.  This gives me at least one solid tool to work with.  After that I want to work on doing skyboxes, because frankly I find most of the ones on the store are too repetitive or boring for my tastes.