Thursday, January 25, 2007

A big empty box

I can't say that this week has any better than the last in terms of hauling my arse out of bed at a reasonable time, but at least things are still going smoothly with the game. I've just managed to complete the basic competition engine, which will give me some room now to go off and work on other aspects of the game knowing I've got a bare bones machine to work with.

I haven't bothered to speed up any of the fixture-checking routines as yet, there's not much point when the database only has one or two competitions in place at any one time. I'll wait until I've populated the game world enough to actually see any major slowdown during the checking process, and by extension any speed gains from new routines.

Hopefully by the end of the month I'll have implemented a decent front end to the system, and a module to manage all the human players in the game, a save and load system, the basic shell of the game. That'll leave things nicely poised for February so I can start fleshing out the world, building little people and commanding them to their doom.

Friday, January 19, 2007

One Week Gone

I've got some mixed feelings. It's very clear that I work a hell of a lot better now, and get more done, but somehow I feel I haven't really achieved enough to give me an entirely positive outlook on the whole "never wanting to have another job again, ever" plan.

Then again, a string of 11.30am starts and one day that waited until after noon to begin probably played as much of a part in that as anything. Today was a bit of a lazy day, accomplishing much less than the others, which I'd put down to being Friday except weekends are a meaningless concept now.

So, what did I do? Well, I've been spending the time working on testing the storage and updating of league and knockout data, and they're working well. Knockouts still need work, I've cheated a bit thus far, but I'll focus on that later. On top of those I've then implemented a main engine which "controls" the game time, so to speak - it takes care of the in-game clock, advancing it forward in real time or faster, better speed settings, and carrying out necessary tasks. One such task is to collect all the fixtures that are played on this game day, for which it has to get out of bed at 2am. It does it by brute force at the moment, running through every fixture in every competition in the game (i.e. none at this point), so that'll need hugely optimised in order to keep the game running at high speed.

I don't really want to spend any time sitting about waiting, and if there are to be competitions in over 250 nations I'll need a nicer routine.

Hopefully next week I can drag myself out of bed at 9am, and with the extra time I might be able to make huge strides on bringing all the competitions together and interacting properly.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

It Begins

It's been a month, for various reasons. I'd like to blame Christmas, Half Life 2, Far Cry Instincts Evolution and even alcohol, but that would all be lies. The real truth is I ended up taking a mini-holiday for the hell of it.

I did so because as of Monday, I'm going to be working on the game full time. Obviously this means I'll run out of money eventually and you will be able to find me and a dodgy laptop coding away in an overflowing gutter whilst I fend off tramps using a bit of an old bone, but such sacrifices need to be made for the hell of it.


This is possibly a good thing. Also, potential goodness stems from the fact that the blog is an entire year old. That warm, fuzzy feeling then gets smattered (it's a real verb!) into oblivion as I tell you that it's been a bit of a shit year, in fairness. Aw, fuck. Have I really not done much? Well, apart from the nice interface.

Poo.