If only I could …

My original plans for the night, was to be working on my games and setting up a test suite for the SAS project I’ve got on the side burner. However, since  being informed  Thursday that my Saturday was being taken *away*, I’ve been tasked with not staying up all night tonight: fat freaking chance of that. So instead of being up until 7 am working on code, I played a few hours of Quake Live, lol.

I expect that tomorrow is going to be a living hell anyway it’s sliced…. have to be used as a navcom so we can get to work, it’s likely to be to be on par with the worst job I ever had, and is in effect, a continuation of the second or third most utterly-exhausting-fml job I’ve ever had…. the kind you feel like you were dead when you get off work, instead of feeling like you’re dying. On the upside, I ought to get to see a few dogs that I haven’t seen in a while; which reminds me of a pair of sad memories[1][2].

One way or another, tomorrow is likely to be a wash out, of torture and getting nothing done. I’m already wishing it was Sunday…… !

Don’t feel like going to sleep, but if I don’t start snoring in the next 15 minutes, I’m not likely to be up tomorrow; would rather be having a snack. I know my body, and in all probability, I’m probably going to be awake for 2 or 3 more hours 🙁 🙁 :-(.

Quake + Sleep != good mix

Been playing QL again, won two matches and placed in a third before taking one extra for the effort.It was kind of hilarious in it’s own sick sadistic way… I won because of applied tactics. The matches were free for alls, and on maps where shotgun, plasma, lighting, and rocket weapons are the most common upgrades to your starter kit: machinegun and gauntlet (buzz saw).

After so many years in [SAS], it’s a triviality for me to be able to calculate the most ‘ideal’ target to engage first with whatever weapons stock I’ve got available…. heard of baddies, shove explosives or paint’em blue with plasma. Even use of the virtually useless machine gun can be useful in a pinch: to pepper the loosing half of a brawl or as a hair cutting follow up to a couple crippling rockets or a plasma flourish, which can sometimes be more expedient then scoring another good splash with the rocket launcher before the enemy manages to kill you lol.

Having always prided myself on piloting skills Mech Warrior, coupled with a heavy knowledge of tactical movement from life in [SAS], it’s also possible to calculate more ideal movement patterns for giving myself a small edge. Once you get used to the games controls, you either master movement quickly or die a noobs eternal death.

Combine all that with effective area / equipment denial techniques (king of the kill!) at the choke points, makes for scoring huge numbers of frags quickly unless the swarms of enemies manage to frag you fast… the key is not dying.

Good clean manoeuvring – always being aware of enemy positions, power ups, and obstacles, while taking care to evade enemy fire as you set up a lethal volly. On the first match I won, it was surprising no one accused me of using an aim bot or some kind of crystal ball for the efficiency with which I nailed enemies while snatch power ups, like a maniac on steroids >_>.

Simple bits of psychology, instinctive/near mathematically determined engagement patterns,  mental timers, and ever increasing ease of manoeuvring through the game environments multi tasking nature…. and volia, you rack up frags until someone out does you.

In a way, Quake is probably the most addictive action game since the original DooM was released! I’ve never really cared much for Q3A or UT style gladiatorial games, but a few games of Quake are much better at cleansing stress then playing Raven Shield. Experience as shown me, never play RvS when pissed, or you will have a vein popping out of your head lol.

I’ve just posted a call for title/story ideas on [SAS], in the hopes of moving foreward with the TacFPSGame project and my toolkit for working on the Starfighter game.

Today I was reading an arcticle off /. and started to think…. gee, wouldn’t it be an interesting game idea: it started me to thinkin’ and combined with all the Quake Live I’ve been playing lately, get’s me back in the mood to work on game development lol. I really want the FPS to reflect my style of things: it should be fairly realistic in nature, but still a fun action game. Perhaps the original Rainbow Six or SWAT 3 are my strongest inspirations for the tactical elements, while Quake III and Urban Terror remind me of how much fun “Crazy off the wall” can get ;).

When it comes to the general game design and architecture, I know what I want both inside and out. It’s just the issue of having time to work on it. My primary loops at the moment, are working on EPI and some stuff for [SAS], but once that’s done, I’ll have plenty of time, in so far as my available coding time goes that is lol.

I’ve also elected, to start testing a conversion from C++ to Python. I originally elected C++ because it was the lowest common denominator for getting the best tools, and well, I can care less about having to deal with manual memory management. My reasons for contemplating the switch over, is because Python has largely become my standard utility language for cross platform stuff—and I would like to be able to play my games on my FreeBSD laptop!!! 90% of all heartaches have been due to differences between GNU Compiler Collection and Microsoft Visual C++. The most pissy problems being how they implement templates >_>. Ah, sweet, sweet C++, all your best features are also your biggest liabilities.

Most of what I’m interested in, is doing the game logic and stuff, I’m not willing to spend 6 months to 2 years writing a fourth rate rendering system when there is plenty of good open source code to draw upon. Yet, I’m not interested in being limited by most existing engines, like updated Id Tech 3 (Quake III: Arena), Blender-stuff, or the snazzy Unreal Engine 3 that was recently released. You could say, I don’t want an engine, I want a frame work :-/.

I was originally planning to integrate python for AI and level scripting tasks anyway, so big deal… it would become less problem to do it if everythings in Python anyway hehe.

Why I ****ing hate my life here

I don’t know what it is about coming home from work, that gives me a feeling of doing nothing: probably an intimate knowledge of how many interruptions I’ll have if I do work on anything :-S.

A lot of thoughts have been on my mind lately. Hasn’t been a very nice couple of days. Much of my time has been spent contemplating large portions of my life, and the future outlook. Really, it is probably a good thing that I can’t update my journal from work, other wise I might actually survive to get things off my chest. When I’m at work, I’ve always managed to have the most focused thoughts: it’s just that time of day, but alas, by the time I get home, there’s too much to worry about to retain most of them for long, until they’re lost to the interrupt storms.

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of life here and how to describe it, I managed to think of, what would be equal to several type set pages :-/. Too blasted tired to pour over that again but it would vindicate what I feel. The only concise description that I can think of, is emotional torture; I’m not sure if there is actually a definition of that, but it’s what things feel like here, a subtle form of torture. There’s no better way I seem to be able to describe it then emotional torture and people who don’t care, nor are capable of understanding the things done. Any other way of explaining it, I think would require treading incredibly more painful grounds then that, and I’m already well aware of the differences between my and my families definitions of most concepts 8=). I operate on my own, more “English language and logic driven” definitions of things.

From thinking back through the ages,  I can recall a time where I was actually happy in life: the only worry in the world being that my brother would pop the final cork and our mother would leave us holding the bag. Spanning ~90% of the range of memory I have been searching through, hell, I can even remember a time when my family was borderline on becoming homeless, and being far better off on the inside. Since, I guess the mid ’90s, things have been increasingly bad. The price of progressing from being a pawn in their games, to being an appetizing target to punt around the line of fire.

No one has dared lay a finger on me in years, at least a lustrum or more. The only place I fall under assault is where nothing can ever show through but my eyes in the dark. Last time anyone tried getting violent with me, my mother ended up with sore wrists for a few days: because I had locked her hands together until she finally “Chilled out”. All I had down was bump into something in the hallway and it sparked firsts flying. I have no problems with disciplinary action when I do wrong, but ahem, just being pissed enough to try pounding at me doesn’t cut it ;). Under normal circumstances my reactionary back then (cica 2003-2004), as it would be today if someone started up like that, would be my old triple combo followed up by a point-decommissioner to put them flat out on the deck before they could counter, but I only restrained her from doing harm. I spent enough years of my childhood, hearing my mother going on and on about how her first husband beat her, that I am incapable of ever striking a woman: my mother included. So obviously no intent of harm was in my heart, only a forceful deescalation. Looking back at the past, it is ironic, because the impetus for developing my combative-knowledge was to protect my family in the event of emergency, not to protect myself from them lol. It’s been almost that long, if not longer since I’ve been involved in any brawls, but the muscle memory is always sharper then the muscle.

After that incident in the early-mid 2000s, I think is when my family figured out that I had learned much to much about fighting, to be vulnerable to any blow they could dream of landing without my permission. Since then, at least in my mothers case, she knows how to dig in by other means. It’s like being ripped apart without taking a blow.

Perhaps it’s probability that my families crazy sign-of-weakness thing, would likely making me a target the likes of a bleeding fish in a shark tank, or that *hammering* just what this shit does to me through anyones head, would be much more painful then dying inside… but all the same: I rarely make an issue of it. I’ve learned through experience at trying, that it does no good, save to give more ammunition to hit me with again. Life here has allowed me to develop one hell of a poker face, because any sign of cracking would likely be like putting blood in the water, and that means being dug into deeper. Whatever I feel on the inside, you won’t see it cross my face unless I put it there, or I’m ready to keel, and it takes a lot of hurting to get me there.

I believe that you can try to build people up or ripe them down, through your words and actions. For the most part, I believe in building people up instead. Because I know all to well how it feels to be ripped down and torn apart by the wolves. The only time I do widdle away at people around me, it’s in jest to cause a chuckle, and my friends know it’s a joke: other wise I wouldn’t say any of the negative remarks I do make. That’s how I am, I don’t believe in inflicting the same pain upon others arbitrarily. My mother on the other hand, is a master of making me feel miserable…. an absolute master compared to anyone else. Never underestimate how your treatment of another person, can impact them, that’s the one thing I’ve learned from my family.

Over the past couple days, I’ve looked at a very large portion of my life. The only thing I can say, is that they don’t care as long as their agenda is archived… because I don’t know if I can emotionally tolerate another explanation. It’s impossible to hit me but it’s easy to strike me in the heart, that’s what they do. Nailing until it hurts inside, and any attempt at making that known, is just going to see things get worse.

The other day a friend asked me if I was ok, I told her I would probably be fine in a couple days; I was at a bit of a loss for words. In the past decade’ish, my family has pushed me hard enough. Three times in my life, I’ve come close to a nervous break down and bounced back from it. Once contemplated suicide and never will again, period. I’ve also had several depressive episodes (IMHO anyway) and enough periods of “bleeding out” from this place. These fucks will never kill me.  It even shows in my call sign… like a spider, if you want to crush me, you really have your work cut out for you.

Today I was remembering a song I used to sing to myself silently as a child, whenever my family managed to hurt me where the sun doesn’t shine. In thinking about it, it feels more like an slaves song, something no one else in my generation is likely to comprehend (the history majors aside). How much has really changed since then? They still do it, only more often and with greater skill.

All I can say, is my D-Day is coming….

Old regexese mastery revisted

For keeping my mind off things, and passing time while more up to date ports compile, I’ve spent some time working on neo (a replacement for my private updater.sh; itself a replacement for portmaster/portupgrade). When I had last left off, I was trying to integrate code lifted fro NPMs pkg_info wrapper, used for splitting canonical package names into the packages name and version numbers; when I noticed comically that the old kludge didn’t quite hold water. Kind of ironic, considering it was one of the most throughly tested snippets of code I have ever written lol. The principal problem was making it deal with names like libsigc++, pcre++, and libxml++—which contain regex meta characters (the +’s) and dealing with ()escapes breaking the algorithm.

So I just sat down and rewrote it, *properly* this time around, and it works like a blasted charm, in half the amount of code and a fraction of the execution time to boot. The only downside is between development and testing, I’ve spent several hours on it, and I’ve got to get up for work early tomorrow :-(. But hey, it’s not like I could have gotten a decent nights sleep anyway…. and I would rather have something like this catch my focus, then leave my train of thought to it’s usual ends.

neo is basically meant to replace updater.sh, but at the moment, I’m focused on replacing portversion—to make it worth using. Basically, I gave up on portupgrade and portmaster, and wrote a shell script that is more to my taste (updater.sh) some months ago. Using it is a simple thing:

# portversion -o | grep '<' | awk '{ print $1 }' > /tmp/pu && vi /tmp/pu
# /home/Terry/updater.sh /tmp/pu

leaving me to manually select and sort the list before starting the upgrade. Now I could easily insert filters to handle that kind of stuff in a highly flexible way, but if we’re gonna do that…. may as well ditch the portversion dependency, and that means ditching /bin/sh :'(. Making the current dilemma, converting the wacko zacko formats of version numbers, into something comparable in order to tell if it’s up to date or not. Technically, a straight compare could be done, since it obviously isn’t up to date unless it matches the version saved in the INDEX, but that precludes handling common edge cases.

That was a freaky moment… was sitting here writing a post to a mailing list over ggrps when the light/tv started to fade in and out. Did a quick ^A^C in the hopes that I might get the text copied to qlipboards file store, and flushed to disk before the system could fail…. no such look, an hours of typing gone: and I’m not rewriting it.

The strange thing, is it wasn’t a normal power outage, but more of a fluctuation. Part of the building went dead but part remained, on extremely low power, and I’m talking like a lamp making like it’s been given a 10 watt bulb lol. The best way I can describe it, is that it is as if the available power was tuned down waaaayyy low, and anything not able to compete for enough power started to shut off.

What is this, Republic of Turkey or something?

EPI rolls on

It’s been a bit of a busy hectic, if slowly progressing day :-S. Most of my time has been a juggle between being driven crackers, and trying to actually get stuff done. I’ve made about 9 commits to EPI and created more wiki content, so at least it’s been a viable use of time.

Since I’m more familiar with git then any of my colleagues, I’ve been focusing on the git side of wiki content for now. Source code management / version control technology is pretty simple to use, and although I can’t speak for the early days, modern git (1.5+) is down right easy lol. Well, it sure makes me happier then Subversion ever did >_>. Most of my experience with git, has been as sole developer, and should we say, without having to worry about patches, so I’m more intent on having this kind of stuff documented in our wiki then I normally would be about such a matter.

Also did experiments in writing the program documentation in DocBook XML. So far so good, the manual page outputs from docbook-xsl is pretty damn good, and the HTML will do perfectly enough I think, when mated to a little CSS, hehe. I’m not sure what we will be using for writing our documentation  beyond the Wikiverse, but the best options are DocBook, Plain Old Documentation, and GNU TexInfo. Personally I prefer POD but DocBook and TexInfo are more appropriate. I shared the DocBook manual I did this afternoon, along with links to the documentation for the GNU Compiler Collection, to serve as examples of what the two systems look like. If we need any custom XSL files, I can probably whip them up; already have rudimentary stylesheets to convert a book to forum and blog posts ;).

For the most part, I’ve been rather melancholy mood of late, so being able to focus on EPI has helped me a lot today. I’m usually happier when I’m able to ‘geek out’ then when I’m assaulted and bored…

A little $HOME, NPM, and EPI fun

Been cleaning up my home directory a bit, particularly ~/Projects and the dumping ground in ~/2besorted lol. I’ve managed to find a lot of old notes, even have imported a couple saved items into del.icio.us. While I’ve mostly dropped all my bookmarks, there are still a few files with old bookmarks in them. I merged them, using the old `cat files | sort | uniq > newfile` method ;). Sometime I’ve gotta shift through them and see what’s worth keeping. Since ma.gnolia’s great lossage, I’ve still have been maintaining the habbit of using Google and my brains limited RAM as a substitute for bookmarking >_>.

I’ve also taken some time to sort out the change over from Subversion to Git on NPMs source forge page. Last night, I started work in converting my updater.sh to Python… figured to dub it ‘neo’ and incorporate it as part of NPM. Hey, I’ve always wanted to remove portupgrade from the picture… lol. The neo script is basically meant to be comparable to portmaster or portupgrade, and whatever century time brings me back to Neo Ports Manager, will likely serve as the backend. However, I must admit, unlike NPM, this part is somewhat of a selfish agenda at heart: it will be able to do more then my updater.sh can without help.

Finally found the time to add a few pages to the wiki being setup with the Encapsulated Package Installer project. The stuff there is still mostly bare, because I’ve been focused else where’s the past couple of days. Mostly the content added was centred around development tasks, going to have to settle down and plan out what changes need to be made. All in all, things have been moving foreward. When it comes to my personal projects, EPI has the lead seat, and the rest are enqueued, in terms of programming.

That being said, of course I have my strokes of working on other things when shorter periods of time are free: the odds and ends, hehe.

This Journal Moved To Blogger

Well, I’ve still got a years worth of posts to transfer (groan!) but since I’ve been updating my journal at blogger consistently since the last post here on LJ, and half the people that follow my journal periodically, have probably updated themselves… lol.

This is the official transferring post!

I have moved to http://spidey01.blogspot.com/ and will be updated my journal there, leaving this Live Journal setup to be as a matter of posterity. LJ has a policy of leaving inactive accounts lay, so I expect this page will survive longer then most references to it. All future updates are going to my page on Blogger. If anyone actually tracks me through bookmarks or Atom/RSS feeds, time to update.

Few people if anyone read my blog, so it’s not much trouble, beyond updating my forum signatures lol.

Ahh, a good day…

Spent most of the work time, thinking about todays tasks. I really did not expect the new continuation training sessions to go over very well, just an inkling. Almost had a full server, but lost a few due to connectivity issues and ~20 minutes delay in trying to get as many bodies as possible. But hey, if we had started on time, there would only have been two participants to scare off  >_>.

Things went pretty well, tried to keep the live fire exercises fairly easy since it was the first session. Ezbassr and company proved to be more then up to it, much to my relief lol. The purpose of continuation training, is to give you a rough and tumble environment to practice your skills. It’s not a piece of cake, you’ve gotta be sharp, or you’ll fall flat on your face. Ah, the joys of [SAS] training :-D. We train harder so we can fight Eazy ;).