… I had an “awe crap” moment as I moved up to the comment box, since my goal for last month was “Do something awesome by the end of June, because last news from Senseg suggested that their tech should be on shelves by then, and that seems decreasingly likely with their continued silence, and that particular technology sounds easy to reproduce, given available information”. All I did was not-quite finish a major update to my one money-making game (I completely lost steam on it yesterday, and was consciously aware this meant I should just testplay, compile and publish, but I’ve mostly been reading HPMoR discussion for the past 24 hours, minus sleep).
I’ve been working on a new game (“new” being kinda subjective, here) this year, for which I set a schedule going from January 2013 to September 2013, trying to take the planning fallacy into account. I’m rather far behind schedule in a number of ways; the biggest one being that my attempts at creating a kickstarter project have continually failed (I absolutely lack the necessary human relations skills to get the help this would require, never mind that my goal is to include decent graphics and sound that do not come cheaply), another being constant struggles with motivation and akrasia (I seem to have maintained slightly less than a month of work on it at a time, followed by lengthy gaps; I would very desperately hope that the end of May/start of June is gap enough that I can make significant progress in July).
(Side note: I have not bothered mentioning this here before, other than under the nebulous heading of “work [not] accomplished”, since it’s relatively irrelevant to the subject of Lesswrong, and wouldn’t generally expect doing so to accomplish anything—it would plainly be more rational to donate time/money to more useful things, and one or both would effectively be what I’d be asking for.)
My expectation, then, is that I’ll be uploading that update soon (this week, if I have any self-motivating power whatsoever), then turn my funding efforts toward Indiegogo (since it’s clear that Kickstarter and Amazon do not like my data, and correcting this appears far more difficult than just using a different service), which would optimally include a project video, which is a nontrivial step that I’m still unsure of how to make. It was my goal for the past two weeks, until the update to the existing game took over.
On a different, but potentially related note, I’ve been looking in to how one would go about adding decent graphics (more than the standard windows dialog boxes, at least) to a program using only DLL calls, assuming a lack of c-style structures. I’m having a much easier time getting things done using an engine that wraps Angelscript than a lower-level language (I initially focused on Java, but was having difficulties getting my programs to run on other computers and could not find an explanation as to why), but this engine is specifically optimized for Audio Games, and has very recently added basic DLL support—an attempt was made to support C-style structures, but this has not yet come to pass, so I’m stuck with a very primitive system that can only pass around primitives and their arrays, and pointers to a limited extent. Since it’s pretty well restricted to Windows, I’ve looked into user32 and gdi without apparent success; openGL seems like an option, though diving into it when it may very well not work with this engine seems like quite the time/energy investment (where I’m hoping to move back toward Java once the current game is farther along, for both better graphics and cross-platform reasons.).
… I had an “awe crap” moment as I moved up to the comment box, since my goal for last month was “Do something awesome by the end of June, because last news from Senseg suggested that their tech should be on shelves by then, and that seems decreasingly likely with their continued silence, and that particular technology sounds easy to reproduce, given available information”. All I did was not-quite finish a major update to my one money-making game (I completely lost steam on it yesterday, and was consciously aware this meant I should just testplay, compile and publish, but I’ve mostly been reading HPMoR discussion for the past 24 hours, minus sleep).
I’ve been working on a new game (“new” being kinda subjective, here) this year, for which I set a schedule going from January 2013 to September 2013, trying to take the planning fallacy into account. I’m rather far behind schedule in a number of ways; the biggest one being that my attempts at creating a kickstarter project have continually failed (I absolutely lack the necessary human relations skills to get the help this would require, never mind that my goal is to include decent graphics and sound that do not come cheaply), another being constant struggles with motivation and akrasia (I seem to have maintained slightly less than a month of work on it at a time, followed by lengthy gaps; I would very desperately hope that the end of May/start of June is gap enough that I can make significant progress in July).
(Side note: I have not bothered mentioning this here before, other than under the nebulous heading of “work [not] accomplished”, since it’s relatively irrelevant to the subject of Lesswrong, and wouldn’t generally expect doing so to accomplish anything—it would plainly be more rational to donate time/money to more useful things, and one or both would effectively be what I’d be asking for.)
My expectation, then, is that I’ll be uploading that update soon (this week, if I have any self-motivating power whatsoever), then turn my funding efforts toward Indiegogo (since it’s clear that Kickstarter and Amazon do not like my data, and correcting this appears far more difficult than just using a different service), which would optimally include a project video, which is a nontrivial step that I’m still unsure of how to make. It was my goal for the past two weeks, until the update to the existing game took over.
On a different, but potentially related note, I’ve been looking in to how one would go about adding decent graphics (more than the standard windows dialog boxes, at least) to a program using only DLL calls, assuming a lack of c-style structures. I’m having a much easier time getting things done using an engine that wraps Angelscript than a lower-level language (I initially focused on Java, but was having difficulties getting my programs to run on other computers and could not find an explanation as to why), but this engine is specifically optimized for Audio Games, and has very recently added basic DLL support—an attempt was made to support C-style structures, but this has not yet come to pass, so I’m stuck with a very primitive system that can only pass around primitives and their arrays, and pointers to a limited extent. Since it’s pretty well restricted to Windows, I’ve looked into user32 and gdi without apparent success; openGL seems like an option, though diving into it when it may very well not work with this engine seems like quite the time/energy investment (where I’m hoping to move back toward Java once the current game is farther along, for both better graphics and cross-platform reasons.).