Archives week 47 of 2007

Got the game-state pack/restore code working. That should let us build a situation-editing tool so that teachers can build situations for students to solve. It's also useful for being able to walk away from a game and pick it up, of course.

Added a quick-and-dirty overview map implementation to the spike test. Need to get ...

Tried a bit of a spike test today. The idea is to try to make it easier to port an X11 application to the XO by using an overlay FS to capture what an installation does and then annotating the results with information to let Sugar launch the overlay.

Basic pattern is as follows:

* ...

Working on some refactoring today around the saving/restoring/initialising code for Productive. I'm trying to keep the "Map" class fairly generic, so that teachers and students can write more interesting map types later on. Part of that is deciding which parts of the setup are configurable in the map.

If we make every little setting configurable ...

Been working on the simulation code for Productive. Interesting thing is, even without the movement rules (all movements are instant right now) the game play almost works. That is, you can take over someone else's unit, you can build the cities, have to manage your resources, etceteras.

Doing something wrong with the scrolling code in ...

At some point we should see if we can convince the Python DBUS peoples to expose a method which lets one write a mainloop in Python. That would let Pygame scripts use the DBUS (and thus Telepathy) module natively, rather than having to integrate multiple mainloops in every application.

Yes, yes, I know threading works, ...

Games which are animation and graphics heavy, and which want to allow for heavy customisation and reuse, normally need to be able to manage collections of images which are not known at design time. You want something that lets you specify an abstract identifier and get back an appropriate version of the image for your ...

Was a bit fried today, so wound up spending the bulk of it in little errands and relaxing. The weekend was fun, and I've been smiling all day about it. That said, didn't actually get much new done on the game. I did get the licensing issues sorted out.

One note to people running Jams/Sprints: ...

This was a random thought I had as I was reading the morning's news (yes, morning, bit late today), particularly the survey showing Americans think they spend 25% of their budget on NASA. I, of course, immediately begin thinking of ways to show users in productive where their money was going... and went far-to-far... still, ...

We now have a low-level renderer that loads the artwork and renders the simulation results for territories and tiles when the simulation is running directly in the process. Basically, in an incredibly round-about way, you can see the grass grow, and you can see the crops disappear as the workers harvest them, but that's all ...