It's been a while

Feb 27, 2012

Yeah. I know. So, in no particular order, here’s what’s been happening

  • I’ve suspended working on my unrealscript plugin for eclipse and open-sourced it. The basic grammar rules for parsing and lexing are in place, but it looks like the unrealscript classes that come with the UDK have more exceptions than rules in them, and I’m tired of working on it. The original plan was to finish it and sell it to indie devs, with a free-for-non-commercial-use license, but I already have a day-job where I do boring stuff every day to pay the bills, don’t really see the point in doing the same thing in my free time
  • I started porting (read:trying really hard to port) the newly-open-sourced Doom 3 engine to NaCl. That evolved into first porting it to OpenGL ES 2. And that too is on hold right now, because…
  • I’ve started learning (Common) Lisp. It started with a desire to learn Functional Programming. Having heard a lot about Clojure, I did some research and found out that the Joy of Clojure is the best book out there about Clojure, period. However, the authors and all reviewers recommend that the reader know both functional programming and the basics of clojure beforehand, so I decided to pick up the Land of Lisp book first. It’s been fun so far, I’ve been exposed to higher-order functions before, and the only thing I’ve admired so far is how terse the language is and how data and code can be intermingled with quasi-quoting etc., but I haven’t yet reached any of the deeper stuff like macros and such.
  • I’ve switched to Emacs. I’ve been using Vim exclusively for the past two years, and I’ve been hearing great things about Emacs for a while now. Learning lisp seemed like the perfect opportunity to make the switch, and I’m not missing Vim so far. Ok, I’m missing the modal editing a bit, but I’m pretty sure I’ll get over it soon.
  • I’ve applied for Game Development degrees at a couple of universities. Keeping my fingers crossed.
  • I sold my Xbox 360 and got a PS3. Played Heavy Rain. I can see why people call it more of a movie than a game, but I enjoyed it. It’s a radically different experience from every other game I’ve played so far. Finished Demon’s Souls. Created one more toon in Dark Souls. Playing the first Metal Gear Solid at the moment, but my eyes are begging for mercy. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are in the pipes.
  • A friend came out to me. That was slightly weird.
  • Had a hackathon at my place over the weekend. I got started with an in-browser version of Zatacka. Took me 48 hours to draw just the player’s own snake on screen, move it around with two directional keys, and get it to detect collisions with itself. I’ll be polishing it the coming weekend, will add other local players. Will also add several rounds and a scoreboard. The code is up on github (seems slightly odd to say that though, considering the fact that the “source” is just three files, one of which is index.html and the other is a BitArray implementation that I stole off the net because I was running out of time). I’m starting to like Javascript
  • Met up with a cousin I hadn’t spoken with in over a decade. We ended up talking for four hours, three out of which saw me participating equally in the conversation. That doesn’t happen very often, I tend to just listen. It was nice. She’s married now and has two kids, seems to be happy.

Guess that’s all for now, hopefully there’ll be more up here soon.