Bits & Pieces

Added some new things to the blog this evening. I added a hit counter courtesy of Bravenet. I also added a fine Terror threat level indicator. Wolf!

Halo 1.5

Yes, that's what they should have called it. I finished the single player campaign on "normal" difficulty in about 15 hours. I remember thinking I was perhaps two thirds of the way through when I got to that little "boss monster" encounter. Two thirds felt about right. The boss monster was no big deal to take out. The subsequent cut scenes were reasonable, I felt...they gave me enough time to yawn, stretch, check the time, and loosen up my fingers for the start of the rest of the game. I couldn't believe Bungie ended their content at that point! Roll credits my arse! C'mon people, either put the content in or call the game by it's appropriate name: Halo 1.5.

I'll spend money on future Bungie games as soon as they finish Halo 2, and I can confirm from reviews and walkthroughs that a) they made another Halo game that has a real ending (hey, Halo 1 had a real ending...that rocked!) and b) this next Halo game isn't just the remaining 1/3 of what should have been in this game.

Coming Up for Air

Just a quick tag...been quite busy at the office. I just got the green light to extend my web-based Invoice Application to the remainder of our offices. Here's a pic of the "View" page (click for full size):



I am also working on a new Incident Reporting System -- an ASP.Net/VB.Net system to allow field office to document accidents, illnesses, and the like. And I continue to upgrade the Retain Tracking System, a .Net Compact Framework inventory support app, running on Symbol PPT 2800 Pocket PCs with barcode scanners. RTS talks to our Lab Information Management System (LIMS) via a web service. See the pictures below (click for full size):



That's what's going on during the day.

---

I'm still trying to keep up the momentum on Eylau. I fixed the AI movement problem...the AI is moving again, and the code is the better for the recent refactorings. I also fixed a problem with leader units: sometimes they deleted their executed move plots after moving, so it was not possible to see the movement path in the UI. I'll be back to working on the Divisional AI by the Friday.

Friday, yeah! It's a day off for me.

On a personal note, I'm doing the dating thang...third date tonight. :-) I'm still running, and (still) playing Halo 2. Doing some work around the apartment to reduce the amount of clutter. Doing the family and friends thing. Perpetually seeking balance as best I can.

Visual Thesaurus

OK, this is just too cool: Visual Thesaurus has an online demo. OMG this is awesome. I think This just went on my must buy list.

Game Developer Status 1/31/05 - Update

I put in another hour the evening of 1/31/05, to make the monthly and yearly totals about 28 hours.

I performed smoke testing for the changes I made in the code sweep over the weekend, and it was smokin'! Things were not too bad, considering that I got side tracked into doing other refactoring without testing in the middle of the refactoring I was doing in the first place (bad Bill, bad Bill!). The AI is not moving. I started work on localizing the problem, and did manage to verify that moves were being generated. OK, some time after the moves are generated they are deleted.

I'll pick up again later this week and fix this, then it is back to tweaking the divisional AI.