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.

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'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.

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.

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?)

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！

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

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.

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...?

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..

Oh? Have you come to any compelling conclusions?

Will do

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!

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.