{ Monthly Archives }
A good day, other than reading the comics on the web Saturday, completely left my laptop alone for the day. Spent time putzing with one of my college sons, then had pizza with both college sons, my daughter, and wife, and enjoyed a college basketball game.
Day T-57 Accomplishments (Saturday, February 13, 2010)
This past week was productive for me on my consulting work, but left me little clock time for iPhone work, and now at the end of Friday has left me with very little emotional or mental energy to do more than vegetate this evening.
Day T-58 Accomplishments (Friday, February 12, 2010)
All work and no play makes me a dull boy, so I guess it’s been a dull day. Fortunately, a productive, though extremely long one on my “day job”.
Day T-59 Accomplishments (Thursday, February 11, 2010)
I am one third of the way through my 90 day project, and it is probably time to take a look at my original and modified goals again–but today is not that day. I did not have enough uninterrupted time today to do that level of thinking or even get into Xcode.
But, in between running test suites, checking results, and fixing bugs I did manage to do a little bit of thinking about some user actions and what gets displayed on the screen.
When doing a longer touch series on the iPhone, I noticed that it was not too hard to get ahead of the “touchesMoved” process. The result is that when I do something simple like draw a line between those move points, I see that for moderate to fast movements, the curved lines my fingers drew was pretty jerky. I did a little bit of googling, some scribbling, and some thinking about how to overcome that visually. The precision of the events is plenty good enough for the game engine, I just want to make sure the displayed version of what the user is doing looks better.
Day T-60 Accomplishments (Wednesday, February 10, 2010)
Tuesday must be my day for being extra productive or overcommitted on other tasks. I will not be able to take time to work on iPhone stuff today, but I’m hoping to get this test release out the door this evening so I can double down on iPhone stuff on Wednesday.
Day T-61 Accomplishments (Tuesday, February 9, 2010)
I spent less time on my app tonight, but have more information from this session — feels like I’m finally seeing some traction from my work the last week or two.
Unit tests are great — takes away my worries about breaking something while I play. I could use some more tests for existing behavior, but I have enough to be reasonably comfortable at this stage. I now have enough infrastructure in place that as I add more behavior, I can add tests as I go.
I have a very simple black and white OpenGL view running that is giving me some feedback, but I think I need to implement one more piece of my design to get a better idea. So far, so good. I am reasonably satisfied with where the game play is heading, but there is tons left to do.
Day T-62 Accomplishments (Monday, February 8, 2010)
I spent (wasted?) an hour or so this afternoon trying to figure out what I did to mess up my Xcode project, but gave up and punted.
I started today with a working configuration with a separate target for the GHUnit test suite app. I added some more tests for an error I had caught last night, made what I thought were a few minor changes, but evidently changed something in the target configuration. The end result was that no matter what I did, I could not get the GHUnit test suite app to run. Unfortunately, I had made enough changes to my code and test cases without doing ‘git commit’ that I decided making a new project might be faster than rolling back to the last commited version. (It was)
I decided I didn’t understand enough about the interdependencies of Xcode configuration parameters, and started with a clean project, added the GHUnit pieces to it and had a working, simple project with two targets that behaved properly. I then copied my existing code into the new project, built, and things ran as I expected. I wish I knew what I did wrong earlier, because I am likely to do it again.
On the bright side, I have a simple version of my OpenGL view running using data from my game engine — which clearly showed an error I had not caught earlier. Those were the test cases I was building when I messed up my project.
Day T-63 Accomplishments (Sunday, February 7, 2010)
I finished merging various bits of code back into my main project. I use GHUnit for testing in that project so I updated some tests and added one or two more tests — but still have some key methods which need a few more tests.
I finally got back to OpenGL, and have spent a fair amount of time in the browser, rechecking the pages I bookmarked a few weeks ago. I think I have a decent, temporary plan for rendering that will give good feedback for trying some more things — but I haven’t quite finished, and it’s getting too late to continue.
Day T-64 Accomplishments (Saturday, February 6, 2010)
I spent several hours today cleaning up my code, simplifying classes by deleting as much code as I added. I also spent a fair amount of time testing and fixing code and was about to start adding more unit tests, but decided to call it a night.
Day T-65 Accomplishments (Friday, February 5, 2010)
I had a great idea this morning for a new non-game app, and was very tempted to dive straight in. Fortunately, the thinking part of my brain kicked in and recognized it as one my character flaws: starting something new and cool instead of making progress on existing work. I think lots of people suffer from the same problem. Since I still saw value in the idea, I budgeted an hour to make some notes, do some googling, and think through what might be useful — then successfully put it aside and went back to work. This evening when I was ready to start back on my game, I was only slightly tempted to divert attention to the idea — I think if I hadn’t take a little time this morning to capture my thoughts, it would have consumed all my development time tonight.
I thought I would be ready to start on display code tonight, but I had forgotten I had not yet implemented an important part of the game engine in my current project. I have most of what I need already implemented in little pieces spread across several smaller projects, so tonight I merged in classes and methods from them into my current project. I have it all reconciled, but still need to finish the code that ties the game events to the underlying model properly. I am caught up enough on my consulting work that I may take at least part of my normal work day on Friday to push forward.
After I have something finished enough for my wife and daughter to try out, I will post some screenshots and a few more details of what my game idea actually is, and will probably ask for some feedback.
Day T-66 Accomplishments (Thursday, February 4, 2010)
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