I’ve been pretty busy playing Fallout New Vegas since it released Friday, have played around 20 hours and just recently got Veronica (voiced by Felicia Day) as a companion and made my way to the Strip to talk with Mr. House (voiced by Rene Auberjonois), it’s like being in geek heaven.
I really like the game so far, tt’s basically the same as Fallout 3 (not a complaint), and I like the story and setting so far. I do miss the 50′s music, but I listen to the Fallout 3 soundtrack almost daily anyhow
Seems like since I got Veronica the game has started to freeze up when trying to close it. But other than that it has been very stable and bug free.
I did however notice a strange bug with Veronica once I logged in.. She kept grinning for the entire session. It started to really creep me out:
I declare this day, “I love Google day”.
Why? Because Google has such a vast array of awesome tools which I use every day. Their user interfaces are always powerful, elegant and simple, and because of their dedication to open standards and open source in general.
Up until recently I’ve been using ToDoList (read my previous post about it) to keep track of all tasks that needs to be done for the Trekwar project.
Don’t get me wrong, ToDoList is very nice, except there are a few drawbacks that made me go look for a replacement.
It’s Windows only, so using it from linux would be cumbersome
It’s not online, so I have to sync the file between different computers
It’s hard to share the list, or make it public (there is html report, but the output is not very nice, and you’ll have to generate the file + upload it) which is a hassle.
It’s hard to use this to get a good view of what is needed for a specific release (like to view every task that is needed for alpha, beta or release)
JIRA I’ve used JIRA a bit at my real job, and it’s pretty good. It’s online, and I installed it on my server to give it a try. I quickly had to abandon that idea seeing that JIRA is extremely bloated.. It uses like 600 MB of ram just starting up, no idea what it uses the memory for, it’s not doing anything remotely fancy that would require that amount of memory.
So I decided to run it from my desktop computer, now I get the same problems as with ToDoList with having to sync files between computers, and difficulty making the task list public. Also the interface itself is pretty bloated and slow, even tough it has pretty nice views for planning and when doing the tasks.
Toodledo
In trying once more to find the perfect tool for managing the tasks of my scrum like development, I tried out Toodledo. I found out about it because minecraft (awesome game BTW) also uses Toodledo as a public task list. Which is good as it lets people following projects get a sense of how much work/time is needed until the next milestone.
Toodledo is a online to do list, and it works very nicely for scrum development. It’s quick and easy without all the bloat of JIRA and gives you pretty much the same information.
It’s very easy to add tasks (subtasks require a pro account which is 15$ per year, well worth the money), and you can create context’s like “alpha”, “beta”, “release”, etc.. and add folders/tags which can be anything. There are lots of different views, I mostly use the main view which has all the tasks grouped by context and sorted by priority. There is also a view for seeing all the tasks in a particular context (like alpha) and the estimated time for all the tasks. (currently 94 hours of work needed before Trekwar can go into alpha).
My only problem with Toodledo is that subtasks don’t show up in the public view, but it should be implemented shortly. Another great thing about Toodledo is the forum, which is frequently visited by the staff/developers.
So if you’re looking for a good way to organize your project, I can definitely recommend Toodledo, and you can try it for free at their website.
It’s been too long since I got any programming done on my Star Trek game Trekwar, but today I managed to implement animation support on the main map, as well as get the sensor system and fog of war working (still needs a bit of tweaking):
I’ve gotten a new job, and been working on another paying project as well (Comicon does not pay for itself you know). But this other project is almost done, and then I should be able to get back to doing regular Trekwar updates.
I’ve also switched over to Toodledo for maintaining the list of features to be implemented, so hopefully you can see the issues under “0.4.0 (Alpha)” shrinking over the next few months
Seeing that I got nothing better to do, I finished up a half done project of mine the other day.
I wrote this program mostly just because I was messing around with different pathing/filling algorithms and the Java PixelGrabber class.
The program lets you color different motives (animals, people, vehicles, etc..) and I’ve probably spent more time coloring dogs and bunnies than actual programming
I guess we CAN make cool music that’s not Black Metal. Haven’t felt such a surge of patriotism since the good old days.
The song says what I’ve been saying for years (except I’m usually not as polite): “Some people prefer other languages, and that’s OK if you’re retarded I guess”
I was inspired by Dani’s The Guild mashups, and wanted to make one of a Sin City poster/dvd cover.. Instead I ended up with a Sin City inspired wallpaper.
Click to view 1920×1080
Since this was originally supposed to be a mash up of the movie poster, Clara was to be edited in last. However as I changed my mind in the middle and made a desktop background, the element where she was supposed to be did not work well for a wallpaper.. And adding her in with the rest of the cast would at this point mean making the whole picture from scratch :/
10 points to the first who spots the little “photoshop disaster”
I love google analytics*, it’s great and awesome in all sorts of ways that I won’t go into right now, instead allow me to present some funny search queries that have all somehow led people to this blog.
*For those of you who didn’t know, Google Analytics is a way to know how many people visit your website, what they search for, or where they come from, etc…
variations of “stargate universe sucks” - 1100 hits
variations of “new star trek movie sucks” – 1800 hits
So far so good, at least there are a few people out there with good taste, but it is when you get down to the more unique searches, those with only a few hits that you find the weird stuff.. Apparently even tough Stargate Universe sucks, somebody on the show has huge (or big) tits
Stargate universe big tits - 13
stargate universe girl with big tits - 6
“stargate universe” “big tits” - 2
big tits on sgu - 2
big tits stargate universe -3
girl with big tits on stargate universe - 1
actress with the huge tits on stargate universe - 1
who is the girl with the big tits on stargate universe? - 1
biggest tits on stargate universe - 1
chick with huge tits on stargate universe - 1
sgu stargate universe big tits - 1
star gate universe big tits - 1
stargate universe huge tits - 1
sgu kills off big tits?- 1
stargate universe chick with huge tits- 1
stargate universe chick with big tits- 5
I can only assume they are looking for pictures of Julia Benson:
Hmmm. I just realized that due to it’s questionable content, this post will undoubtedly attract more hits from people with nothing better to do than googling for Julia Bensons boobs..
So I might just as well throw in another picture, I’d hate for people to leave here empty handed.
Some other weird searches with only 1 hit
why do the shields on the enterprise suck? – I have no idea, the real question is why would somebody write that phrase in a search engine? mexican knick knacks – I bet this guy was especially disappointed with my blog why are everyone in stargate universe morons? - I… Don’t… Know… all video editing software sucks and makes no sense at all - You should stick to pictures, they are simpler to wrap your head around best brand donkey balls chocolates - I’m afraid to even comment on this one fedcon convention swine flu - Hah! I see I was not the only one worried about swine flu duing fedcon 2009. Not so much worried about catching it, as guests not showing up feed trondheim - I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye out for starving children jello shot launcher - Let me know if you find one! ms paint police - These guys should have a SWAT unit!
While cleaning up in the core classes of Trekwar yesterday (documenting functions, formatting/structuring code, minor improvements) I also saw lots of equals(Object o) methods. And in my infinite wisdom I decided to use generics since it is used pretty extensively throughout the code anyway, so I changed basically all the equals methods.
Now this is not a problem when writing code, as you pretty much always compare objects of the same type. However, the code also uses the Java Collections contains() method a few places, and it always uses the equals(Object) version. So when my classes no longer provided this method, the default one inherited from java.lang.Object was used instead. This caused a strange array of bugs to appear (star systems on the map not shown with faction color/icon except for the Cardassians for some strange reason, users not having any technologies, unable to build any structures, generally erratic behavior, etc..). Luckily I discovered the cause pretty quickly and only wasted about an hour or so on this
I guess the lesson is that objects that needs to be compared, directly or indirectly by contains() or other methods, should always define an equals(Object) method that just passes the call along to the equals method written with generics.
