Today is a date to remember.  I finally have my primary coding projects (a Houdini plugin, my engine, and a game) doing nightly builds on the three supported platforms: Windows (WinXP), Linux (Ubunutu 8.10), and Mac OS X (v10.5.6).  This has been mostly working for a few weeks now, but one thing or another kept breaking causing one of the platforms to not run the cron job successfully.

The entire system has a fairly simple setup right now.  It’s basically a collection of Python scripts that are executed once every night.  It tracks errors, time it takes to compile, and so on.  Once completed, it sends out an email to a local mailing list on my server, so that I wake up knowing everything is working fine (or what I need to fix if it failed).  It also supports packaging up a new release and uploading it automatically, but this is an optional step that only the Houdini plugin I’m developing is using right now.

There is still a lot of room for development with this collection of build scripts, but it definitely does the job for now.  I would like to create a web interface that keeps track of the projects and platform builds, so that I can get statistics on build times, how often the build is broken on what platforms, and other such information—all of which could potentially be graphed over time to see trends.  However, none of this is particularly crucial to the continued development of my projects, so I will only update the build scripts as bugs come up or features are needed.

This last year has been a lot of fun.  I’ve met many new people, made quite a few friends, and learned much in the process.  Definitely played more pool in one year than the last few years combined, and I have no intention of slowing down.   I also did Jiujisu this year (though I haven’t in many months)—really need to get back into it.  Over Christmas, I went showshoeing for the first time, and it was great!  I could go on and on…it has most defintiely been an eventful year for me in a really good way.

I have a hunch that this will be a good year as well.  I’m anxious to see what life throws at me this time.

The holidays have finally arrived!  Yesterday was an official snow day for Buzz Monkey, so I actually got that day off as well.  Today, I’m flying out to Colorado to spend time with my brother.  I’m anticipating a lot of snow and some skiing and/or snowboarding.  Of course, there will also be a lot of relaxing and doing nothing—just what I need.

Hopefully the weather conditions aren’t so bad that I get overly delayed on my flight to Portland.  Crossing my fingers.

It has been far too long since my last update!  A lot has been going the last few months—most notably, we shipped Tomb Raider: Underworld for the Wii!  As it is with most software development, there were ups and downs, but it was definitely fun overall.  I feel I learned a lot from the project as well.  I’ve done quite a bit of cross-platform development in the past, but never in the console world (the small project I did on the GBA hardly counts).  My previous experience was fairly easily adapted to the Wii, but there were still some interesting hardware quirks that snuck up on me occasionally.  However, all things considered, it was a really good experience!

Also worth noting is that as of August, it was my one year anniversary at Buzz Monkey!  It really has been a great year.  Doing what I love doing and working with intelligent, competent people is a joy.  I’m now very excited to see what new projects we work on!

We started the day a little later today due to the late night. We did, however, make it to the Wil Wheaton talk. Admittedly, I didn't know who he was, but once I was told he was Wesley Crusher from Star Trek my ears were open. He turned out to be a really good speaker. He gave the keynote at last year's PAX, so he had a very warm welcome here. He started by giving a short introduction and then read an excerpt out of his recent book.  It was actually a compelling enough excerpt that I want to read more.  After all that, he answered various questions from the audience. Definitely a worthwhile experience!

After that we got food at the Daily Grill next door—it was quite delicious.  Luckily, we finished eating just in time for the talk on Spore.  There has already been a lot of coverage on Spore, but it was still fun to watch a live demo.  As one of the talks pointed out, Will Wright makes really good toys, and I’m actually looking forward to playing this one.  I wasn’t interested at all in The Sims, but this may have some redeeming value.  Just the sheer amount of creativity from the community already is pretty staggering, so it will be fun to see how the worlds in the game evolve.

The second day was considerably more interesting than the first. We started the day off with Raising Our Kids on Games. It was a panel of 5 parents in the game industry who gave their opinions on how games influence their children and the approaches they take to raising their children with video games. One of them actually uses WoW as a means for keeping in touch with their kids while they are on the road. That's definitely something I didn't see coming in our culture. Ultimately, they used two techniques for handling games: 1) managing the amount of time they get to spend with all media and 2) put all such media in a public place--like the living room. When asked about the laws to prevent children from buying content not suitable for certain ages, their responses were primarily that we as a nation need good parenting and not good laws. They emphasized that age was not really a good judge of when someone is ready for certain content. Instead, it needs to be judged on a case by case basis. There was one person in the audience who advocated a completely open policy with their children and that innocence is possible without raising children up in ignorance and being over-protective. The panel, however, felt that a completely open policy may not be suitable in all cases. They used the example that showing a young child a horror movie might give him or her nightmares for weeks, which could scar the child negatively for years, so it's important to know your kids and expose them to the world when you believe they're ready. Alright, enough about that talk--needless to say, I found it quite interesting.

The next talk we went to was on Designing Virtual Worlds. This talk was hosted by two people from the tabletop industry who are now in the realtime game industry creating MMOs. They seemed really excited to be in this industry and were especially happy that iteration time was so much faster. For D&D books you would have to wait over 9 months (according to them) for a fix to unbalanced gameplay whereas you can submit patches and fixes in just a matter of weeks with video games. They also really emphasized allowing players to make persistant changes to the world. They are working on an as-of-yet unannounced title, so supposedly they are integrating more persistance in the world. As they pointed out, the MMO genre is still infantile so there is still a lot of growth to come and a lot of uncharted territory. I haven't really been a big fan of the genre, but this did excite me about the possibilities of it. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this development.

For our final talk/presentation, we went to one on the new Prince of Persia and Farcry 2. I was highly impressed with both of these titles. It was especially great to see the level editor for Farcry 2 running on the XBox 360. He implied that the developers used these same tools, but I'm wondering how well that worked and how the artists felt about it. It is really intuitive to see the game running as you create the game, but using a controller could be considerably more frustrating than a mouse and keyboard. I also wonder how well it would work with source control--it should be straightforward, but they may have had unforseen issues. As far as the audience, this is definitely one of the most enthusiastic and aggressive crowds I've ever seen. You have to be a pretty good presenter to withstand and control this crowd.

I took the day off from work yesterday and took a leisurely drive (starting at 9am) up to Seattle to meet a friend of mine at Microsoft who's working there as an intern. It just so happened to also be the weekend of PAX. We didn't get into PAX until 4pm yesterday, so we just looked around the exhibitors area. Looked at some Starcraft 2, Fallout 3, Little Big Planet, etc. I'm hoping to play more of all of those today. There were also D&D tables setup for people to play as well as lounge areas for people to play their DS games. However, since I'm not very familiar with D&D and do not own a DS, I was unable to get involved. Perhaps if there's a beginner's table of D&D somewhere, I'll give that a shot today.

As far as my impressions of PAX so far, it is way more nerdy than I had anticipated. I am fully aware that I myself am a nerd, but I believe myself to be a vastly different type of nerd--apparently. There were a plethora of cosplayers and there was an overwhelming stench of BO. Also, I had expected at least some developer presence, but there really is very little. You have some designers from companies, but I figured there might at least be some companies showing off development tools or engines, but PAX really seems designed for the gamer. This may be immediately obvious to the people who keep track of PAX, but I have read very little about it. There are also a number of talks that you can go to. They seem to all be very high-level which may prove to be interesting. We didn't get to go to any yesterday, so I'm hoping we get to go to some of them today. I'm interested to see the level of interaction and the amount of intelligent input from the audience. That's the other noteworthy aspect, there is a really wide range of ages at this convention. The conventions and conferences I generally attend are primarily people mid-20s and upwards. This makes the atmosphere of the place feel even more diverse, which is perhaps a good thing.

Alright, I'll stop rambling about this for now. We are going to catch the public transit today instead of driving, since it seems like a faster and cheaper way to get there. Hopefully it turns out to be true. Back to the geeks!

Finally have a day off!  Been working weekends for almost a month now, so it’s really good to have a day off.  Because of all the working, I haven’t had time to really stock up on food, so I went to Sunrise Asian Market today to stock up.  Unfortunately, they were closed as they’ve been numerous times that I’ve gone.  They seem to just close randomly for a few weeks without notice—it’s very odd and frustrating.  Luckily, there’s another good asian market in Eugene called King’s Asian Market, so I went there instead and was able to find all I need (e.g. jiao zi wrappers, vinegar, noodles, etc).  It’s very refreshing to walk through a store that is so reminiscent of the stores in China, and it really elicits a lot of memories.  The atomsphere definitely makes it more conducive for spending money—at least for me.

I’ll proably just be spending the rest of the day doing nothing, and that’s no doubt a good thing.  I’ve had a sense that my productivity has decreased due to the increased workload.  I can work long hours for months, but I definitely feel it’s better to take periodic breaks or you end up spinning your wheels.  On that note, back to relaxing!

Last few weeks have been crazy busy!  I’ve been working weekends and long hours for quite a while now.  It has been really rewarding, though.  You really start seeing a lot of progress at this stage.

Admittedly, I’m looking forward to getting some time off so that I don’t burn out.  There have been some side projects that I’ve really been wanting to get back into.  I can’t stress enough how important it is to have side projects when you are working as a coder professionally—or more generally, in any profession.  You do learn a lot from just working every day, but many of the tasks become repetitive and you don’t really expand your horizons that much into other sub-fields.  It’s pretty easy to just start putting your nose to the grind and doing work.  At that rate, though, work just becomes like any other job and starts getting boring, which isn’t good for anyone.  It definitely takes determination to work at home after working all day at your job, but it’s defintely necessary.  On that note, I better go and follow some of my own advice…

The last few weeks have been quite busy at work, so it was a real breath of fresh air to finally get to go to the Oregon Country Fair this weekend.  With around 20,000 people attending, it was really quite the event.  At least three of my co-workers went there for the entire event—camping there the whole time.  Some of them have been going for over 10 years!

I must say, it was really quite the cultural experience.  I’ve experienced large concentrations of hippies before, but this really brought it to a whole new level.  Unlike the many rumors of it being stinky and awful, however, it was actually a really wonderful experience!  Sure, there were a lot of people and it was crowded, but it was also very relaxing and there were exploding colors all around from the designs and decor on the shops to the costumes that people were wearing.

I must also stress the sheer vastness of this fair.  From one end to the other is well over a mile!  What also really adds to the experience is that it is right in the middle of a forest.  So while you’re eating there (they also have an excellent selection of foods from many countries!), you are surrounded by live music, dancing, and nature—really enjoyable.

So I must say, if you are ever in Oregon around this time, it is something you really have to experience!  You certainly won’t regret it!