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Aug. 28th, 2008 11:25 am
prog: (Default)
Broker than I thought I was. Suddenly unable to pay bills, prior to this check that came in the mail yesterday. I shall toddle down to the bank after I finish writing this. Check is fairly fat, so it'll last for a little while, but fun spendy-spendy time is over for me until my next period of full-time consulting.

I did manage to do my taxes, finally, and I've started to track Appleseed's finances by starting a new file with plain-old Quicken. Now that I use Freshbooks to track my time and invoicing, Quicken does a fine job handling the bank accounts, including tying certain transactions to tax forms.

Hm, I think these events are connected. Suddenly having over $9,000 vanish out of one's bank accounts is liable to cause some distress.



Picked up "Dogs in the Vineyard" last week, on the grounds that it might make a nice setting for a text adventure game. I didn't know before this that all the PCs are explicitly ~20 years old, and virgins. The notion of roving gangs of indoctrinated, armed youth with little life experience, but a license to carry out God's judgement as they see it, strikes me as terrifying, like roleplaying the Chinese Red Guard. Wondering why I haven't seen anyone else take up this angle.

I haven't actually played the game, and there's much to love about the rules and setting elsewise. I would absolutely be willing to give it a try and see what came of it, but I dunno if that will actually happen, since I am not much of a role-player. I remain interested in checking out indie RPGs that have small scopes and "gamey" rulesets, like "Agon" or "Prime Time Adventures".



Was disappointed by the XNA user group meeting I attended at Microsoft's Waltham offices yesterday. It was really more of a class, with an MSFT employee behind a lectern, stepping through code for one of the XNA example games (a simple RPG). On top of that, it was a continuation of the same topic from the prior meeting. I lost interest quickly and slipped out after less than an hour.

There were no women in attendance, and I may have been the youngest person there. Two other attendees looked under 40, after which there were a dozen more guys ranging up into deep greybeard territory. This is cool, but the lack of younger folk surprised me, since to my mind the typical person who wants to make an XBox game would be significantly younger. I wonder if the idea of offline user group meetings is becoming increasingly alien to anyone under 30.

(I muttered about this on Twitter, since little else was accessible from my phone during the class. One person responded that younger folk just call user group meetings "meetups" now. I would have liked to go to an XNA meetup; in fact, I think I was rather hoping for one. This was not that.)



I may sacrifice a weekend to prototype that game scheduler idea. I've made one already, for Volity, and it would give me an excuse to learn Catalyst much better. Catalyst is what one can rudely-but-correctly call Ruby on Rails for Perl, and it's what my larger client makes use of. I like it a lot, but I don't think I'll really grasp it fore-and-aft until I build a Catalyst solution from scratch, for myself. So.

We have GO on rationalization for latest cockamamie project idea, sir.
prog: (Default)
• Traded emails with my contact at MS about Project X's status, since it's been four weeks already (sheesh) since I signed the NDA. Was told that, why yes, they would like to see a new prototype submitted with the proposal, and they appreciated my effort to make that happen. So, that's probably the last they'll be hearing from me until it's ready to go.

• Allowed [livejournal.com profile] mr_choronzon to help me shop for a PC. Its many parts are sitting in my newegg.com shopping cart, awaiting further orders. It's not cheap; on his advice, we aimed at building a decent gaming rig on-par with the XBox's specs. I'm keeping my jets cool about it, coz buying it would wipe out the remainder of my Project X Stage One budget. May be able to revisit it and shave a hundro or two off the cost.

One ASAP must-buy, though, is a wired 360 controller. XNA studio makes it easy to simultaneously build and run Windows and 360 versions of a game, and quick incremental testing would certainly be a lot easier if I could just plug a controller into my computer and run the thing there. I've been doing incremental testing on my 360 itself, and its navigation UI is just too clunky. (Being a game console, it's optimized to act like a bookshelf, not a desktop.)

• Finished all the XNA tutorials. The final one has you taking your Asteroids game and adding multiplayer and network functionality to it. I'm really surprised at how much of the XBox Live API is exposed to XNA - more or less all of it, from the looks of things. It's very invigorating, and I've begun to plan how the game will actually work.
prog: (Default)
Posting from the Windows side of my Mac. I just confirmed that exporting XNA games to an XBox works as advertised, at least if you're running Windows natively; there seems to be no way around it if you're going through VMWare. Am presently attacking the Asteroids tutorial I posted about earlier.

On the fence about buying another damn computer. An alternate strategy is to use my G5 for the things that I had been using my MacBook for. But... enh. My MacBook is better at being a Mac than the G5 is. It'd be a downgrade. Maybe I'll feel differently once I've put a couple more checks between me and the hurty, hurty tax pay-off.



I have been sticking to my exercise and my "diet", which gets scare-quotes because it amounts to: Hey, why not pay some attention to what you're shoving into your gob, for once. I have been eating only when actually hungry, and allowing myself one (1) treat per day - like a honking big P.B. Cookie from Rossini's - since I find that I don't really desire more treats than that. The treat always tastes very good this way. It is always worth every totally worthless calorie.

This is all noteworthy because I've stuck to it long enough that my body's adjusted itself in a way I'm not used to: my appetite dropped by a discrete quantum literally overnight, two nights ago. It took me two mealtimes to work through a True Grounds breakfast burrito, and it's been like that since. Everything else seems fine, so I'm not doing my usual reaction to internal changes of jogging up the walls gnashing arrgh it's a tumor. So that's all right.
prog: (tom)
XNA 2 is great. The documentation really wants you-the-reader to rapidly understand how to make games with it. It hands you the full source of XBox-SpaceWar, and a lot of documentation projects would stop there, leaving you to learn by poring over the code. The XNA docs, though, say "OK, now let's borrow all of its art assets and rework them into an Asteroids game," and proceeds to lead you through the process, step by step. That is genius. I would be proud to write code tutorials as good as this, some day.

So, yeah, the scariness and scope of the project I have in mind shrunk by 50 percent today, and I feel I can now hold it (using both arms, and lifting with my knees).

After I do taxes (yes, I know) I will start planning on buying a cheapo PC that I'll dedicate as an XBox development station. It's not so much using Windows that is painful - it's having no access to all my stuff and tools on the Mac side of my laptop, while I'm booted into the Windows side. All my favorite note-taking and organizational utilities are there. And Google tells me that combining Mono with XNA is possible but deeply voodooish, so I'm not gonna go there (but thanks for the suggestion even so, those what suggested it).

WIll also hafta hand MS a C-note for the privilege of sending builds across the room to my own damn XBox for a whole year. But that's pretty much the only other cash outlay until prototype, so that's cool.

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