First Life Recap - April 2012 - December 2013

I see that I have not posted in a long time here.

There are some reasons for that.  To sum up, I've been too busy with First Life (IRL) to worry about Second Life (blogging, etc.).

What happened?  In no particular order:

• My wife gave birth to our son.

• We sold our house.

• Moved across town to an apartment.

• We had Lennar build a new house; moved in.

• A re-org at the office moved my development group into the main IT department.

• I was reclassified from a Software Engineering Supervisor to a Senior Solutions Designer (aka architect).

• I took on additional responsibilities at work - participating in a process/guidance team.  My contributions so far have been in the areas of unit testing and app logging.

• Helped my son deal with pyloric spasming.

• I got a CPAP machine.

• Completed a feasibility study for a new personal business project involving web-based community services.  This involved proof of concept code using Authorize.Net APIs.

• Started work on a laundry timer Windows Phone app.

• Resumed work on the PIC-Guam prototype.  

• Wrote and released a "How to Create Apps" Windows Phone app located here.

I decided back in Q3 of this year that I would work 3-5 hours a week every week on personal projects.  I split that time evenly between PIC-Guam and other projects.

I put in about 100 hours since May 2013 on PIC-Guam prototyping.  I did the following.

• Added automated unit tests to fix issues with range calculations.

• Completed the level 1 Fire Combat AI.

• Completed the level 1 Movement AI, including optimizations so the AI runs fast.

• Completed an initial design for the level 2 AI.

• Randomized casualty allocation.

• Added fortifications.

• Added suppression effects.

• Added assaults to the game system.

• Some small fit and finish fixes.

• Some internal refactoring where necessary.

The game runs all the way through the Orote scenario with the US run by AI.

Next steps are to add assaults to the level 1 AI, and then to tailor a variant of the AI code for defense for the Japanese side.

The overall plan remains to complete the proof of concept app and then talk to Chris about completing the game for all scenarios and putting it on the Grognard Sims store.  And then the next game and the next and the next!