Some of the fine folks in the IRC channel were complaining talking about how stale the content has been around here lately, so I figured I'd open a new thread so we could have something new to talk about.

So what are you working on right now? Do you have any projects? I think there was a thread like this a few months ago, but I don't remember. Anyway, It doesn't even have to be programming related. Lay it on me!

I'll go first:
I'm writing a 2D game-making library in JavaScript. It's called Momo and it's on GitHub. I've already used it to make a couple of games (check them out here). I've also used it to port some of my C++ games to the Web. It's still a work in progress, but it's getting there.

I'm currently working on two things:

1 - Windows 10 being a gigantic pile of a dog shit. A fresh install of Windows 10 is using all my RAM (memory leak) and "all I have to do" is install an entire SDK and start probing around kernel drivers to find out which one is destroying my system.

And Microsoft fanboys are basically falling over-themselves on Stack Overflow somehow frame it as "my" fault how a fresh install runs out of RAM, or somehow I don't know what the !@$@! a page file is.

2 - A simple Python script for Linux that basically detects when a process is using too much CPU, and sets the CPU priority AND IO priority to much lower. So basically, if any process attempts to "freeze" the system, it stops it.

What I'm always working on. Eagle, of course. Currently cleaning up the object registry and debugging some threading issues with multiple windows.

At work, I'm learning Perl, PHP, C#, JavaScript, Angular, Jasmine, Protractor and more. But mostly I push buttons on a website and then I push other buttons on a different website.

I suppose you could say I'm working on getting my motorcycle comfortable. Though technically I haven't started yet, aside from ordering things. I bought an Airhawk seat cushion and some "grip puppies" foam grip covers. I also bought a new pair of gauntlet style gloves to replace my worn "shorty" gloves. Alas, I haven't had the chance to try this in the past couple of days that I've received the orders. And it looks like rain for at least the first half of the week.

I'm also addressing a little fuck up with my truck. When I bought the truck it came with vinyl floors, which I just assumed was normal and sufficient. I didn't realize that you're supposed to have floor mats on top of them (I guess?) so for the past 3 years I've been driving around without floor mats. It seems snow and water from footwear has been leaking beneath the vinyl and causing the floor to rust. Either that, or water is leaking in and getting beneath it when it rains/snows, etc. In any case, there's a fair amount of surface rust. Since I finally realized that I don't have floor mats I've invested in some decent looking ones, and before I install them I plan to vacuum the floors and lift up the vinyl and try to sand and vacuum the rust up, and maybe lay some kind of oil-based product to help prevent further rust. Aside from purchasing the floor mats that hasn't really begun yet either.

Otherwise, I guess the only other thing I'm working on besides work is Counter-Strike. And I use the term "work" loosely to mean I'm conscious of improving my performance while also having fun.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft beat you to that. Two projects I have in mind, writing my own camera driver and a battleship game. I have very little focus so neither has any progress to report. I think I'll be working on making dinner soon.

Due to some random issues with the nodes on a Windows Failover Cluster at work, I been reinstalling Windows Server on the machines. Was almost done with the second node when I left work Friday, and basically needed to quickly remove another one as it started to have major issues (it will be number 3, I think number 4 so far has been the most stable, but a reinstall wouldn't hurt)

I'm doing a lot:

• Work stuff, but apart from that here are some projects I've been working on on my own:

• Learning ElasticSearch. I recently added ES backends to allegroplanet.com and oatescodes.com so I can experiment with them.

• Bought 2 books. One book called "Learning React", and another, "Effective Modern C++". I was super stoked on the latter because I've been looking for it for a while now. I've have been meaning to get it, but have been too lazy to order online. I happened by it when I walked into a bookstore today and they had 3 copies. For the React book, I've already covered the first 5 chapters.

• Developing steadily on two big projects, FullScore and AllegroFlare. FullScore's repo passed 1,000 commits recently, which is insane considering AllegroFlare has undergone much more development over the years. I think it is emblematic in the way that I am now developing software, which is with more compartmentalized commits. FullScore is essentially a music composition program, https://github.com/MarkOates/fullscore. AllegroFlare is my application framework https://github.com/MarkOates/allegro_flare that drives 95% of all the C++ programs I write these days.

Developing a tactical VR shooter game in Unity. Using different weapons and items, you must defeat ever increasing number of enemy AI that will work together in order to destroy you. The levels will be predesigned but selected randomly. I might try going for completely procedural generation after release. The game will be challenging, a few bullets will kill you. Locomotion is key, this will be no stand-still shoot at the waves of enemies coming - there are too many of those games already. I hope to release it on Steam before the end of the year.

Work-wise, I have been slacking. Few people seem to care, as I rarely venture outside. (Out of sight, out of mind, right?)

Reality-wise, I have been working on a mail server and TTY blips and bloops. This is even more fun than it sounds.

FullScore has piqued my interest. Are there any screenshots available? (I see a broken image link in the GitHub README.md; perhaps it was a screenshot at one point?)

• Work (launching a large website update tonight!)

• Studying Japanese, going to try and take the JLPT for N5 in December (hoping to go to Japan next year)

• Building a mobile game (hoping to start some alpha testing in the next month or two)

• Family (son and I are playing through Final Fantasy 1)

• Blogging (see sig)

• Gaming (playing Endless Legend again, and trying to stay competitive in Clash Royale)

Wow, how convenient! What if it detects itself as using too much CPU?

That's a lot to learn all at the same time. What kind of work do you do exactly?

Best of luck in achieving maximum comfort while you drive. No matter the comfort, be sure to drive safely. If anyone asks, just tell them that rust is all the rage these days. Oh, and have fun killing people in Counter-Strike!

Is there an intern you can blame for the random issues?

What is Allegro Planet exactly? The site itself doesn't tell me much. AllegroFlare sounds pretty cool. It even sports some GUI stuff. Edgar had better look out.

I saw some of the GIFs you posted about it on Twitter--pretty cool! Best of luck getting it on Steam!

日本のどこに行くの？JLPTに頑張ってね！

It'll throttle itself!!

I got sick of running random command line programs here-and-there, or installing updates, freezing my computer while they ran. It made no sense. Why should dpkg run at normal or high priority? Additionally, it fires off so many new processes that you can't manually freeze them. You need a script that keeps up with them as they spawn.

Currently, I'm just polling every 5 seconds or so (and you can set the rate, as well as what CPU usage to throttle, and what higher cpu usage to set heavier throttling by changing the process to an "idle" scheduling category). There may be a way to get an event fired off every time a new process is created. But currently running a simple script every 5 seconds or so is low process utilization (even more when I make the script stay running instead of starting it with watch, like a command script). It might go even faster by porting it to bash (no python overhead) but bash is actually pretty slow so I'd have to do some profiling to see. Additionally, I hate bash for anything but the simplest stuff. It's a pretty insane language. (*NIX commands are great. But the actual bash code, ugh.)

[edit]

Hmm, this might work:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~cking/forkstat/

[edit] Maybe not, it needs root privileges, that's not ideal.

Well, thank you very much!

I've been working on AllegroFlare for a long time now. It's still finding its design cohesion, has a lot of "wip" pieces, a lot of experimental pieces, a bunch of refactoring, needs docs, etc. I'm currently working on 0.8.9wip, which requires a major audit. Then I have a milestone to alpha release at 0.9.

Allegro Planet is something I'm really excited about.

The website doesn't really have anything substantial on it yet, but a decent amount of work has gone into it.

In theory, Allegro Planet would be a place where we could experiment with different kinds of "Allegro as a service" features. A lot of game development platforms (most?) have some kind of web-based component. User accounts, multiplayer services, online leaderboards, cross-platform build systems, payment channels, distribution systems (web stores), etc.

Allegro doesn't really have a place to provide or experiment with these kinds of game design things. It first occurred to me when I was working on AllegroFlare and wanted to make a networking component. I realized that at some scale, this component would need a dedicated server. Sometime around that time, I went to a game development meetup, and saw some guys were using a development platform that had a free multiplayer service. It was a rudimentary tick-tac-toe game, but the developers didn't need to set up servers, only needed to use the service.

An end goal for me is a game like Nintendo Land, made in Allegro that is:

• 3D

• built on the cloud

• cross-platform

• has elaborate shaders

• real-time shadow mapping

• multiplayer (via service on Allegro Planet)

• user accounts (from Allegro Planet)

Stuff like that is the potential.

What we have planned for v1 of Allegro Planet is a depot, similar to the depot here on allegro.cc It's coming along, slowly, but I'm playing the long game on this one, similar to AllegroFlare.

FullScore's really cool, too. The screenshot should show? I'm wondering why it doesn't. OK, now it's not showing for me, that's weird There's usually screenshots in some of the pull requests. Here are some:

• https://github.com/MarkOates/fullscore/pull/82

• https://github.com/MarkOates/fullscore/pull/81

• https://github.com/MarkOates/fullscore/pull/64

Does FullScore allow you to play music and record it through a keyboard? That's what I really want, to be able to see what I'm playing recorded as notes live.

As for AllegroFlare being competition for Eagle, sure but whatever, that's good. Gives me a reason to make more commits.

I have steady work now, and steady income so I'm gonna hire on a few people part time to work on Eagle. I was hoping to have a release done by now but this windowing destruction hang has really slowed things down. I get a commit or two done during the week and then I do a good portion of the work on the weekend.

So in reality I'll try to have a release of Eagle done by November or so. It already abstracts pretty much all of allegro into a driver and makes it super simple to create demo programs with. It's great for getting going quickly. Hope to have it ready in time for ChristmasHack or whatever its gonna be called this year. Sad I didn't finish KrampusHack last year, been looking for a chance to redeem myself. xD

Mark Oates: If you're gonna do all that work, I salute you sir.

I do that with FL Studio. It's really worth the money--although their semi-recent UI changes have completely borked my productivity to like 10%.

I'm currently working on something sinister... no ... evil ... no... perfectly sane.

It doesn't do that. That's probably not a feature that would be added anytime soon to be honest. It would be cool if I could add some kind of plugin capability, and a feature like that could be added externally.

Being able to record midi would be pretty awesome feature wise. How do you input notes? With the mouse? Can you make selections, copy, and paste, transpose, insert, delete, replace, etc...?

Not a lot. My ISP decided to discontinue the webpage service for people so my website with my game suddenly vanished. Not sure if I want to bother putting it elsewhere.

Somewhat. Older versions had mouse support, but the current version does not. It's better to think of FullScore as being more VIM-like than MS-Word-like. That is, there are a bunch of keyboard commands, most of which are one key stroke. Rather than "copying", you "yank". And rather than "pasting", you might paste-as-new, or you might paste-by-reference, or paste-as-instance, stuff like that [1]. Ideally, you would never need a mouse.

One of the objectives of FullScore is to optimize for speed of input, so getting the keyboard input right will be one of the first priorities.

A second priority is to get the theory right, and find a way to articulate and express it as fluently as possible through the interface. The theory used in FullScore is quite a bit different from traditional music theory. That is, traditional theory relies on a 5-line staff where everything is assumed to be diatonic (or modally relative). As a composer, you are somewhat limited and if you want to think outside of that context. It requires quite a bit of mental transformations and there are no staves to accommodate that. In Finale for example, there's a somewhat hacky way to get 5-line staves to represent different scales via a feature called "non-standard key signature", but the rest of the program explodes and the remaining features get confused.

In FullScore, however, non-standard scales are a first class citizen. FullScore allows the 5-line staves (or 3-line or 2-line, or whatever makes the most sense) to be contextually redefined. Contexts aren't only just limited to staves, either. They might be layered over different instrument groups through a section of a piece, for example.

There's so much more.

___

[1] There are a handfull of transformations so far, including transpose, double_duration, half_duration, split_note, retrograde, invert, add_dot, remove_dot, etc..

FullScore looks purdy.

I never thought about solving the problem through notation... Actually, I sort of quit notation cold turkey a number of years ago. I was a decent sight-reader, but it wasn't for me. Input, however, I have given a great deal of consideration. I look forward to seeing what kind of vim-like interface you come up with. Let me know if you want useless test banter.

Good luck with all your projects. Allegro Planet sounds even greater in scale than FullScore. I hope decentralization is given due consideration, as it's revealed itself of late to be a necessary pillar for most any community.

Oh? Have you come to any compelling conclusions?

Will do

The old MOD trackers got it wrong when they tried to emulate piano keys instead of guitar frets.

The old MOD trackers were emulating... MIDI.

I'm honestly not sure how you could emulate a guitar (and yes, I've tried plenty of VSTs). The more I play guitar the less I think a computer could work. Even if you get all the "variables", specifying those mass array of variables and their changes is a huge data entry burden, and, manually specifying them forces you to be conscious of every minute variable instead of subconsciously "playing from the heart" so you become much more focused on the details instead of the emotion of the piece itself.

[edit]

Mark Oates: Wow, you've been quite the busy beaver!

Absolutely nothing, well nothing that will see the light of day beyond my laptop monitor.

Yep, I bought it a few months back just for something to dabble with [yes, I realize I just admitted to blowing $100 for something to play with].

You can download FL Studio to play around with, just can't save your work, so I have been meaning to give it a try as it looks interesting. Seem some good Youtube videos of people using it and it looks very intuitive.

Wasn't Deluxe Pacman relatively very popular? Why on Earth would you not want to publish it again? Setting up a Web site might cost a couple dollars a month, or you could see if a kind soul would be willing to provide you the Web space for free. I'm sure the load isn't very expensive.

I have thought about it. I have zero experience setting up a website outside of my ISP's which was just a small amount of webspace and you FTP'd your html to it, pretty simple. But paying for a website etc... I don't know, it would be nice I guess but.... I don't make any money from my game.

For the time being I have it stored in Dropbox for anyone to download with links to the games on my Deluxe Pacman Facebook page.

The latter sounds reasonable for the time being. Though for what you need I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a free host. Or as I suggested, find somebody willing to host it for you free. Even if you paid, there are relatively cheap hosts for just a basic static Web site. I imagine most would be setup how your ISP was or similar.

I'd offer to host it myself, but I have no experience doing that for somebody else and my quality of service would be shit so that wouldn't be fair (and also, we don't always get along so that could be messy). Plus, technically my server is going to be decommissioned on October 1st so I have to find the time to rent a new server and set it up before then... Until then I don't have anything to offer.

You have it backwards. This is how they gimped it, you can save and export your creations, but you can't open them again to work on more until you purchase the full version.

After buying FL Studio, I bought Music Theory 3rd Edition and purchased Game Music Composition for $10 when Udemy was having a sell [which is often] as it uses FL Studio.

I used to take it as a competition to try and make the best clip of music I could in a single sitting.

Eventually I just got lazy and bought it. But some of those clips ended up pretty good.

One day, I'd love to buy a Native Instruments Komplete package with those hundreds of plugins and stuff. Also, a nice orchestra setup.

Back when I was in college, and still experiencing the energy and passion of 20's, created so many cool tracks. Many weren't up-to-par for most people, but each of them invoked experimental stories, and expressed powerful feelings. I miss having the energy to do that. To "feel" super strongly about something--even if that "something" is "wrong" or "shortsighted" in retrospect. Like loving or hating some girl that ends up not being important in your life a couple years later. The feelings are "real" at the time--even if logically it won't matter.

These days all my time goes into my poor health, and getting one step closer to losing my job.

This is the first thing I learned to create from the Game Music Composition course:

I need to finish the course, that is the only down side with Udemy courses, you can find yourself taking LONG breaks without planning to due to life.

Would you like to have your game on Allegro Planet?

The website is super-duper-beta and there isn't much design or usability in place at this point. I would need to upload your content manually for it to be included. But, it would be there and would be great production beta testing data to have while features are worked into the site. And once we have user accounts it would be easier for you to manage your game page.

Gladly, if for no other reason than to help out with testing the site.

Haven't decided. Any recommendations?

Thanks!

Who all is in for TINS 2017 next month? https://tins.amarillion.org/news/

何で日本語で返事しなかったの？

I haven't been to Japan yet, so I can't really make a recommendation. I'd like to someday go in springtime to check out the cherry blossoms in person and go sightseeing near Mt. Fuji though.

I'm looking forward to it!

Going to Japan to see mountains and fruit? Yeah, right. Somebody's going to be getting freaky in the red light districts of Tokyo.

Nah, sightseeing and food-eating is all I care for. I went sightseeing at Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Glacier National Park in 2007. That was a lot of fun, so I think sightseeing in Japan might be fun, too.

But hey, you do you. Don't complain if you pick up a few diseases along the way though. And besides... Japanese girls don't shave down there, so no thanks.

I think sight-seeing lots of places would be fun. Doesn't mean I study the languages. There are people for that.

I am a happily engaged man.

Nothing wrong with that. Albeit, I'd imagine it varies like any other culture.

While not Japan, an ex-colleague of mine studied Korean because of a foreign exchange student in his high school or something. He ended up moving to Korea on a teaching program, and ultimately "got the girl" (but fuck if I know if it was the same girl). He is still in South Korea last I heard.

I mean, a Japanese girl would be just like any other girl. If you want the lawnscaping altered make an inquiry. But probably best to just settle for any soil to ... "work"? Accept it as it is. The things that matter have little to do with that.

What am I working on? Currently on a whole world rendering engine and getting paid for it At home, I'm constantly switching between my own 3D engine (started as Allegro 5 project, drifted to pure OpenGL/Vulkan) - I can open the window and render black screen, yay for me Pumping out levels for Doom was more successful - well, I finished one level and the other one is almost done (need to tweak few things). Most of the time I have a second shift controlling an empire in Stellaris

Great! I've sent you a PM.

私は怠け者.

Ha ha. Fair enough. Here's another word for lazy: 尻が思い (しりがおもい). I think it's hilarious, because it literally means that your butt is heavy... too heavy to be productive apparently.

静かにしてくださいこの日本語は私の脳を溶かす

Thanks! I'm struggling a bit with the AI, and then there is ofc a lot of polish to be done. And then a trailer... So much work to do even when using an engine such as Unity.

Allegro on OSX

How do you feel about all the hate surrounding Unity? I've never used it myself, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Some say it's a terrible engine with inherent performance issues and design flaws. Do you find that to be true? Also, keep us posted when you make a release.

What'd you break this time?

I've got live system monitoring graphs I think I mentioned before. Well, I got them to post publically online through a proper DNS which was cool. Then it immediately dawned on me to add user authentication. Though there's no real content to worry about, it was better safe-than-sorry.

But, since I've got all that setup now, I realized with a hour or two of research and some simple config changes, I can actually host data files...

So my tiny humble chromebook running Linux with a Celeron processor, hosts an apache instance connected to a domain of mine. You go through the domain, to my router, to my chromebook. Which then connects forwards through some symbolic links to a samba server mounts which are connected to my WINDOWS DESKTOP machine hard drives.

At which point, I had my DESKTOP connecting to my public web server, through the entire chain, to access audio/videos on... my desktop.

But the silly part aside, I'm REALLY impressed with the modern internet. I could literally stream 4 GB 1080p home movies in Chrome. 1080p movies that are being funneled from a hard drive, to a network WIFI (Wireless-N not even AC!) connection, to a chromebook, back to the wifi router, to "the internet" (however many hops that includes) and then back to whatever machine is viewing it. Not only did it work on my machine, but also my brother (on a different ISP), as well as my CELL PHONE on a cheaper telephone provider (T-mobile) and STILL, I could watch movies without the video stalling.

AND, you could even skip around on the video and instantly have it continue playing. No sitting there buffering.

The future is amazing. I've got like 1-or-2 3rds of what my brother's Plex server can do (that he pays monthly for?!) for free. It doesn't work with MKV's in chrome. But MP4s (videos), and MP3's work great.

I can literally watch my home movies on my cellphone from anywhere now. I need to consolidate my many external hard drives to be a more logical media server layout but this is pretty neat! My wife could probably "stream" movies with her iPhone straight to the TV now without having to figure out or worry if they are available on Netflix/Hulu/etc.

Also, while Chrome has trouble reading certain media files, once you get the URL (I've exposed the standard HTTP directory listing mode), you can dump the URL into VLC and hit "load network source" and it'll play anything that it can play.

I've dabbled with it and even made a simplistic 3D RPG game via a UDemy course. So I can't really talk about design flaws or performance issues as the game wasn't that taxing on either to get a solid grasp on it.

I've noticed the biggest blow back you face as a indie using Unity is that if you are using the free version, chances are you won't get that many gamers playing it. You can thank the lazy "asset flippers" on steam for this one. The Made with Unity screen at the start is the kiss of death. Jim Sterling talked about this before too.

Just like the recent asset flipper that had made 173 "games" in a year or two that was banned from Steam, but the problem was that they would modify the name and re-release the same game again. They went by Zonitron, among others, if I'm not getting my stories mixed up as there have been a few the past year or two getting in trouble for very similar problems.

Developing is difficult enough without this sort of shade being cast over games based purely on the engine used.

I'd play games with the unity splash if they were good. But Unity isn't expensive either so yeah, "what's wrong with you?"

But assets should be custom! Every game is a piece of art and should have a unique art style. If you're buying (or using free) stock assets they're often not going to "look balanced" with each other across multiple asset packs.

If you care about your game, pay a couple hundred bucks and have some indie sprite dev build you some sprites that don't suck.

Even "programmer graphics" can work if they have a distinct style. But I am so sick and tired of seeing "RPG Maker" games on Steam as if they're real games. "Oh wow! A final fantasy 3 style battle system! I'm so impressed!"

I can handle asset flips and RPG Maker games, but I've already grown tired of the games that everyone dubs "walking simulators" like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture where you walk and hear voice overs tell parts of what happened. It was good for a initial play through, but I had no incentive to replay it even knowing I had missed elements of the story. At least with asset flips and RPG Maker they usually have actual gameplay to them.I feel like I'm doing a modified version of those early 2000s browser based house tours that realtors started doing to try and sell homes.

Doom as a walking simulator would be remove the fighting, demons, and guns. Then have the player just walk around the level while a voice actor tells you what happened during the levels. They are more like museum tours than games in my opinion.

I don't really care much about the hate. I have never encountered performance issues really, but then again I'm not striving to make an AAA game. For me the engine excels in this: shit works and I don't have to write things from scratch. This has allowed me to actually get somewhere with my game. This combined with assets (both graphics and other stuff like editor plugins) shortens the development time drastically. Less risk for complete drain of motivation, and shortens the time for getting valuable feedback on the prototype I'm creating. When I was coding before in C++ and Allegro I often got stuck with the implementation, stressing about engine features and code architecture and getting nowhere with my game. I want to make games and not engines, and that's why Unity is perfect for me

Are you sure your router isn't just figuring out that the domain name is mapped to itself and routing you straight through the LAN? I find that it's choppy to seek around on videos that I'm watching over CIFS connections on a NAS in the LAN, and everything is over Ethernet. I usually copy the next couple of files to the local hard drive to eliminate the lag.

I don't think my router is capable of using my LAN for my cellphone (and brother on a separate ISP). I've got like ~3 MiB upload. So it's probably just that Canada sucks.

Skipping definitely swells the upload rates to the maximum and can be slower if you keep skipping over and over. But one click here or there is almost instantaneous. Which is why I make a note of how amazing it is!

I'll PM you on Steam later a link and set you up a name/pw so you can test it out yourself.

It only runs when my laptop is actually on (and at home)... since it's a laptop.