Game Development Status

Total for the month 34 hours; total for the year to date 232 hours.

I am continuing to work on the artillery code. I now have AI code in place to put artillery units into battery; I am debugging a problem getting them back out again.

I am going to reduce my game dev hours for about the next six weeks or so. Times are getting sufficiently interesting at the office that I feel the need to go for my MCAD certification. To that end, I'm going to be putting in a couple of hours most days studying for the exams. Hopefully things will stabilize soon at the office and I can devote more hours again to the game.

To Bland or not

What's in a name? I decided to take a look at this blog and its surroundings from "outside the wire". I ran a search on Yahoo. Not too bad...I got top billing, and one more mention later on, from my Yahoo profile. A lot of junk there, though. I'm not sure I want to be associated in any way with some of the hits that came up.

I wonder whether I ought to change the name of this blog? I chose the name at 4am one morning on a whim: one of my coworkers had taken to using it as a nickname for me 'pon occasion. The content of this blog has changed somewhat as well. Originally I planned to post "dear diary" type content to the world at large. Nothing too risque or edgy (as if a blandman could muster up such attributes). Instead I find myself using this as a software developer's log.

Perhaps I should change the name to better reflect that (and distance myself from the other blandman junk). "Ground Truth"? "Incoherent Light"? Gonna have to think about this for a while...

Game Development Status

I've been working on the game every night this week. (part of my standard "not dating anyone at this time" schedule of activities) I have 18 hours in for the month so far.

I'm working on the code that automatically plots fire. Doing some serious refactoring of the code.

Got a decent review from Ed Wimble on the ConsimWorld site about the game.

Interesting what Ed said about stacks. We've wanted to provide stack-based movement since day 1, but have been working on other things. I'll have to think about this.

A pity the AI was more broke than usual when Ed came by at Origins, I'd had it moving about 2/3 of the French in a more-or-less recognizable manner before I took it apart to move forward again in development at the con. Fair cop on the AI in any event; it's not ready for prime time...maybe by Halloween the way things are going. I'm working on the Fire allocation code right now, then I'll add code for Assault and Charge plotting.

Chris drafted a nice divisional level doctrine document. I'll be implementing that once I have the AI combat code all working.