Hammer of Code

Well after almost a full weeks worth of meddling, script writing, and the addition of wormholes to RIsk I’ve finally managed to begin filming my screencasts. As things turned out I quickly realized how useless my scripts actually were, and quickly reverted to “winging it.” Since I intend to down the screen captures I don’t exactly need to worry about screwing up, simple pause, and start again. I have to admit how alien producing a screencast feels for me in general and as part of GSoC. Today I managed to record my advanced screencast and my map making screencast. Since the train is now rolling I see no problem in recording my basic screencast tomorrow. For everyone’s entertainment I have uploaded to youtube the uncut/unedited recording of my advanced screencast; please let me know if the panning is too jumpy, the recording is short enough I can redo it with some different configuration to clean that up.

Other than that I am a little confused about how good the screencast needs to be. I don’t want to seem like a schmuk getting tongue-tied on film, but does the odd slip-up here and there ruin the entire paragraph? Please let me know what you think…

EDIT: OK, so the audio is pretty quiet, and it sounds like I’m blasting off to somewhere. I’ll probably rerecord the audio with better audio, unless I can clean it up.

Well it is my first day back at work without family meddling around the house. It is a lot easier to get, well, anything done. I spent some time today playing around with clients and finalizing my plans for the screencasts. I’m very glad to have wormhole support as I now no longer need to explain why it is so darn difficult to play Risk . Since adding wormhole’s to the Risk ruleset it is now impossible to play Risk without a fully up-to-date client (including libtpclient-py and libtpproto-py). I’ve had some difficulty getting a client up and running again in OS X but things have been a breeze on linux. Hopefully the version number of tpclient-pywx can be incremented to force upon everyone Risk compatibility. Other than that I have little today to talk about. My foray into screencasting should begin tomorrow; I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about that!

Rings the bells and spread the word, vacationing family has finally vacated! I am now free from the influence of 4 adults and 5 dogs intruding on my workplace. I have to say I really expected things to go a little better than they did; Originally half of the family was staying at a local campground, but when their time ran up and they were going to leave they found out their trailer was massively out of alignment. They needed to stay an extra 1/2 week for their alignment appointment, and as a result instead of only having 2 people/dogs at the house we had double. I don’t hate my family or anything, its just too many people and dogs in one place.

As for work things have been delayed but not so much I am behind schedule. It was very exciting to learn that many of the AI ‘fellows’ would be working on a Risk AI; It has forced me to think more deeply about how Risk works from an outsiders perspective (and probably going to improve the quality of my screencasts.) I should be recording my screencast’s video this week, and dubbing this week or next. I also received some positive feedback from my mentor Tyler about my map import code; Surprisingly (since I still undervalue myself as a coder) I was not far from the mark. If I put in a concentrated effort it should only be 1-2 days to really clean up that code. I also received some feedback about comments in my code from Mithro: I’m not terribly far from the correct path, but I will be “doxygenating” my functions most likely in the “wrap-up” week that is the last week of GSoC.

Another exciting development from Mithro was the creation of a “Wormholes” patch. The patch updates my Risk code to properly draw lines between planets. This development has to be one of the biggest things to happen to Risk this summer. Map imports was big, and cool, but “Line drawing” is a huge usability feature that Risk was sorely missing. A big thanks to Mithro and anyone else who aided him (and by proxy, me) in getting Risk to display properly.

Well as a culmination of many things this week probably turned out to be the biggest waste of time/disappointment of my time with GSoC. As a result of 5 large dogs, 4 adults and 1 baby taking up temporary residency in my home (I think its called “visiting”) I’ve gone from productive to… well not really much. I did my best to get SOME space here and there to work; I managed to write scripts for my screencasts, and help the AI guys get started making an AI(s) for Risk. (This of course is the only real exciting part of my week.) I did also get to start today in getting the PyOgre client running on my machines, so I can get some good screen shots for Risk. I’m presently hoping anyone with a plane or helicopter might come and rescue me and my laptop to a more dog/relative-free location…anyone?

Contrary to last week I can actually link to some commits(first half of scripts, second half, map); There have been less and less (commits) now that I am winding down. In fact, my TODO list has dwindeled to a managle 4 items:

1. Clean up SVG map import
2. Implement awarding continent ownership bonus
3. Dub audio for JLPs screencast
4. Record + Dub my own screencasts

As for my plans for next week; I plan to get lots done. I’ll be recording my own screen casts as well as audio for JLP’s. I may also get around to ownership bonuses and cleaning up my SVG map imports Luckily for me family will be leaving Tuesday morning, and I should have a good full week to work! (something I must say I have been missing)

Well I’ve finally gotten a substantial break away from family to get some productive work done this week. As I was saying earlier, I’ve gotten the default map for the Risk ruleset all sorted out, and I am now working on scripts for the three screencasts I’ve decided to do (Map making, Basic play, and advanced play.) The massive amount of company I have in my home at the moment makes work and blogging pretty difficult, but I’ll survive. For now I will have to leave you with a preview of the default map:

Well I’m getting the feeling I will be having less and less to write about daily in the coming few weeks as things start to wind down. Right now I’m working on scripts for screencasts and I just finished the full default map in SVG. I’ll be sure to post links to videos as I get drafts prepared.

I unfortunately need to be brief this weekly report; Companies coming saturday and our house needs much tidying and chores, many of which I am responsible for . This week was another one of those “feel good” weeks that happens when a lot of things go right very quickly. The last such time like this was getting the ruleset playing. This time its map imports. I was astonished at how quickly the pieces fell into place. At last weeks close I had just gotten support for TinyXML integrated, having already spent a lot of time planning and thinking. Once all that was finished things just happened; I went from no map import to full map import in less than 48 hours, leaving me a little bewildered.

After pumping out so much so fast I still have a lot of questions about the quality of the map import. Much will need to be tested, and things will need to be adjusted to fit just right. Luckily enough TinyXML has been very easy to work with and any adjustments should be more “boilerplate” than anything (and error checking too ). For the very reason of “so much, so fast” I decided to step back from map imports for last 2 days, and start thinking more seriously about my screencasts. I don’t think I got as much done in regards to screencasts as I wanted. I had wanted to get recording some audio for JLP’s video, but I somehow couldn’t start.

Next week will see me putting up preliminary instructions for map building, as well as working on screencasts and tidying up map imports. Wish me luck, I’m going to have more family around in the next 2 weeks than I think I’d care for

Well today was another one of those odd “productive days.” I got naming constellations working, as well as their bonuses. At present to label a constellation all one needs to do is create a text object with %NAME%|%BONUS% that has the same color as the constellation being labelled. This may or not be the best way to get things done, but for the time being it works. I’ve now gotten a little bit ahead of my supervision and am planning to spend a bit of time dubbing JLP’s screencast to give my supervision time to comment (as I’m sure there will be positive and negative opinions of my work [even I have some :O]).

For anyone interested in my cats: its been a day off of subcutaneous IV and both cats appear to be acting normally (no signs of kidney failure). There’s been cat pee in the litter-box, we’ve seen both cats eat, and behaviour is normal; All good signs for healthy kidneys. Another day or two of normal behaviour and we should be clear.

I dare say it, but these last two days may have been the most productive days I’ve had all summer. Now, its not that I worked an excessive amount, its just that things WORKED out… Now this efficiency is compounded by the fact that yesterday I spent almost the entire day dealing with my cats (one, the other, or both, we don’t know) possibly eating some Lily petals; We found out shortly after that this causes renal failure, and after a benign bloodtest and subcutaneous IV (phew ) we’ll be monitoring the cats for a few days to ensure they are OK.

Back to coding: Long story short, I’d just barely started implementing XML imports, for real (the library was successfully being built, loaded, etc.) and I’m pretty much done now. It took less than a full day to get it implemented, and I have to say, TinyXML is REALLY easy to use. I’m left now with figuring out some simple (and straight-forward) way to grab constellation names from SVGs (and even store them to one in the first place ) At present my thinking is to get the name of the constellation from a text box with text the same color as the constellation color.

I guess I should also say HOW exactly my import is working at the moment. Not counting the lack of constellation names this is what I have so far:

• Users create rectangles in Inkscape to represent planets/systems. The color of the rectangle indicates the constellation that system belongs to. To name the planet/system users edit the properties of the object by changing its “id” to the name, and the “label” to the same.
• Once the user is satisfied with the orientation and number of planets they proceed to create “diagram connectors” to indicate connectivity between planets. Make sure to snap the connectors to the center of the rectangles, you should be able to drag the rectangle and have the connectors adjust on their own.

At this point in time I guess I’ll continue to refine and bugproof the import code, but its very exciting to have a working model so quickly.

Glad to be back into the swing of things and actively coding again. This week marked the end of the first half of GSoC and the beginning of the last! All in all, it was a week full of “in-betweens;” I spent a good portion of the week working on my official GSoC midterm report, as well as my Thousand Parsec midterm report and the other portion on beginning to integrate TinyXML (for map imports) into the ruleset and planning screencasts. At present it is my intention to implement map imports, create informative screencasts and improve the quality of my ruleset overall, before the end of the term. Those plans will be finalized this weekend after I speak with my mentor more formally.

As for myself, I’m doing quite good, very anxious to start new work. As I said things are mainly “in-between” and I’m waiting on things here and there to get the ball fully rolling. At present I am waiting to here back from JLP on screencasts (as he is producing some as well) and the community-at-large on properly creating a module for including TinyXML++.

This weeks recap won’t be day to day, as it was more of a blur; Here is what I got done:

• Started developing ideas for screencasts to better inform new players on playing Risk
• Fixed up some of the more annoying bugs, particularly the “phantom-ownership” and “view” bugs. See branch-log.
• Wrote my GSoC Midterm evaluation
• Wrote my TP Midterm report
• Created (and, eventually merged,) a WIP branch to add TinyXML support to without breaking the ruleset. At present the changes are now merged and I am waiting to find out the proper way to use/create a “ticpp” module. commit.
• Spent time accustoming myself to how TinyXML is used.
• Decided on using SVG to represent maps visually. Most likely planets will correspond to circles, adjacencies to lines, and constellations to color (thanks mithro!)
• Emails, emails, emails, and some more emails. I think I could get by if it was my job just to write emails to people all day