Hot Robot

Posted on January 28, 2012 by kurozael

So Valve released a closed-beta of Steam for Android and iOS this week, which I think everybody has been waiting for since forever. I always dreamed of being bugged 24/7 by idiots on Steam who think that I spend every waking minute of my life infront of a computer screen; which contrary to popular belief, I don’t.

In all seriousness though, I can’t wait until the open-beta. Once I remove about 80% of my Steam friends list, I will finally be able to chat with the Cloud Sixteen anywhere I go; this is handy because I’m always coming up with new ideas and inspiration when I’m out doing things.

I don’t have much else to say about it really, here’s a chunk of random code so I can test this CodeColorer I installed:

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#include <iostream>

void main()
{
std::cout << "CodeColor rocks!" << std::endl;
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Linus the Git

Posted on January 28, 2012 by kurozael

Me and Alex Grist have been using Git as version control for Clockwork. I’ve never really collaborated with somebody else on a project before; I’ve always been a rather independant programmer, but Git has made development a breeze.

For those of you living under a rock, and are unfamiliar with it; Git is a fast, powerful, and easy to use distributed revision control system. It was created by the face behind the open-source Linux initiative, Linus Torvalds.

Once you’ve set up a Git repository for your project, the basic principle of Git is this:

Programmer A edits a file from a local clone of the repository on his/her system.
When Programmer A has finished implementing Feature A or fixing Bug A, they “Commit” to their changes; a note can be added describing what they’ve changed, added, or removed.
It would be wise at this point for Programmer A to “Pull” any changes to the remote repository; any alterations made will be cleverly merged.
When Programmer A so desires, he or she can then “Push” the changes to the remote repository.
Programmer B will receive these changes when he or she makes a “Pull”.

There’s way more to it than that, but that’s the basic idea; Git is awesome and I much prefer it to Apache Subversion (SVN).

Linus Torvalds
Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

Pool’s Closed

Posted on January 27, 2012 by kurozael

As you may or may not know, Alex Grist is now an active participant in the development of Clockwork. He has been working on CloudAuth, which is our system used to protect Cloud Sixteen’s schemas from unauthorised use.

I made a proposal for a packaging system for schemas, so that developers have the option of making them closed-source. We would have a website set up for authorised Clockwork developers, where they could upload their gamemode in a ZIP archive. The archive would then be converted to a “schema package”, which they can then re-download and distribute.

The schema package would be named with the .csp extension (Clockwork Schema Package) by the packaging site, and the end-user would place it in gamemodes/Clockwork/schemas/.

Little Boxes

Posted on January 24, 2012 by kurozael

Recently I’ve been watching Weeds. It’s a show about a mother’s ever-increasing struggle to support her children after her husband dies, by growing and selling marijuana to the “Christian” citizens of a small sub-urban development.

I remember seeing it on the TV a few years back, obviously rather late, as I live in the shadow of the United States; I shrugged it off and didn’t bother giving the pilot any major attention.

I watched the first season using my free trial of Netflix; and having granted the first few episodes exclusive access to my hippocampus, I fell in love with it. Unfortunately, Netflix only allows the viewing of the first three seasons; naturally I assumed these were the only three produced.

It didn’t take too much searching to stumble upon the existence of the final four seasons; but when I did, I had to endulge further. This hit show delivers dark comedy, satire, great characters, and an overwhelming thirst for more.

I’d recommend it to anyone.

3:44am

Posted on January 23, 2012 by kurozael

Liverpool Street Station. 9:00am, Monday. That’s what my mind feels like right now; a chaotic system of determined neurons, racing around the plastic explosives between my ears, to reach their destination.

As I listen to the same mundane YouTube playlist; that I’ve had on repeat for what seems to be every waking second of the past decade, various sub-systems of my noggin ponder seemingly trivial subjects.

One thing I’ve been thinking about non-stop is developing CloudEngineDX. As you may guess from the [appropriate] name, CloudEngineDX is a brand new version of CloudEngine, using DirectX.

When I return to Qantm to finish my last year, we will be learning DirectX, aswell as implementing Lua into our games; which is great, because I can use the next six months to building the engine ahead of time.

I’ll be posting quite a lot of CloudEngineDX updates both to my YouTube channel and to this blog.