J-Space.dk

Alright, a Twittery status.

Red Dead Redemption. Status: 100% singleplayer completion, awaiting remaining trophies and online accomplishments.

Time for bed.

Okay, so I’m not updating much lately. Apologies. Nothing noteworthy going on right now

But I was just playing Red Dead Redemption, and managed to shoot my horse through the head whilst killing foxes in full gallop.
Question: great game realism or annoyingly bad design choice?

For a diversion, I’ve been rekindling myself with C, through it’s fucking distant cousin (though I should like to call it mother-in-law), C#.

For the first time in quite a while I’ve been forced to take care of proper type conversions to avoid type exceptions at every second corner. At once a wonderfully reassuring thing while also quite troubling. I’ve lost so much from the coddling of VBA and Python.

With a beta key in hand, I’ve gone to work dissecting and screwing around with the Galaxy Editor for Starcraft II (guess my shrinks right, I’m good to start, bad to finish).

The tool is extremely powerful, but is difficult to approach for programmers, I think. The scripting language itself is poorly documented as it is, and the only other way to create game logic is via triggers.

In Blizzard’s defence, that graphical approach is immensely powerful. Intelligently, you are only allowed to work with combinations in function calls and variables et al that actually makes sense (you cannot call the substring function when applying values to an integer, for example), essentially saving you typical type-restricting caveats normally encountered.

I’m trying to get a few more people I know in on the idea of an SC2 map or three – someone to keep me to it while I fiddle away.

On that note, anyone have a relatively straight-forward way to attach models or actors to other models or actors? … is that even the terms I’m supposed to be using?

In a way. Yes.

Why the HELL does a simple database connection have to encompass anywhere between 3 and 7 different object instances simply to be READY to work?

We have to make CodeSpeak a new de facto version of 133T5P34K, I am not kidding.

More to come.

I’ve recently come to realize that my understanding of individuals with no Y chromosomes is quite lackluster. None the less, I’ve moved a bit onwards on the out-of-work small project I’ve had small stuff to do with. I bit the bullet and learned a bit about wxGlade. It does have some excellent features, but I still consider it a first-step GUI design tool, where a lot of simple touch-ups must happen afterwards. Blending in MySQLdb (the best choice in Python-based MySQL connectors I could readily find) I’ve got the libraries I need for this project. I’m not in Kansas, anymore. This isn’t a simple “create an Access form and plot in a few thousand lines of code” affair. It’s learning all over again, module documentation, class references and every now and then some new language construct. I understand why programmers may choose to cling to a limited selection of languages when working, to stay sharp.

It’s a journey, it’s definitely a journey. But Python was probably the best route, given my budget (none), my experience (sufficiently close to none to be none) and my dedication (… do you even need to ask?). I like the language, especially for small-time script development. People would argue (and, fuck, I’d agree) that when working in Linux I might as well do some shell scripting. Yeah, whichever suits the point, yeah?

Anyway, nothing exceptionally happening, but I’ll try to keep some updates up on the progress of the sub-project. With some luck it can be generalised sufficiently to provide a simple data collection utility programmed in Python. We’ll see

Spending the weekend with a laptop without the necessary Python distro and modules, I’ve kept myself at work with a console-based approach to the visitation project. The shell simulation still lies as an excellent basis and has no problems running as a small self-contained command vessel. Right now I’m taking a break whilst looking at different approaches to option parsing. I think I’ve mentioned earlier that the OptionParser module in Python suits very well in principle, but I’ve discovered several innate implementation choices that makes it a bad choice for direct inclusion. One of the primary difficulties is the fact that if a user passes bad parameters to the parse, it will alert the user directly of the error (a formatting issue related to the rest of the script) and exit Python execution (a massive error, as it should continue running internally, allowing the user to attempt another call without having to call the superscript once more).

I could make a subclass, but there are so many unknown variables I’m afraid of handling with it, that I might just as well make my own implementation, albeit far simpler in structure (not much is required, really).

Well, back to work. Coheed and Cambria running in the background. Not bad.

After messing around with MySQLdb for Python for a night and a half, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong since I couldn’t connect to the remote server, I started wondering why “‘localhost” worked while running the script on the remote server and “<server-ip>” didn’t. Well, hardly for me to know, but it seems the default configuration of MySQL on some systems restrict connections to local ones.

Imagine that.

With that fixed I’ve come upon a couple of IDE’s I’ll put to the test. A current conundrum is laziness. I’m not in the mood to sit down with squared paper and calculate the intricate details of a perfected GUI design. I like the notion of wxPython’s FlexGridSizer which I’ll mess around with. I haven’t found a proper GUI designer I could easily get into (wxGlade seems like a hassle to work with, the Python-specific IDE’s each use some annoyingly specific bindings and IronPython can’t directly imported C extension modules), so I’ll go with that for the time being. Well, either that or implement it entirely through the functioning console. This hurts my head as well, though. I’ve never made a full-blown text app, and I’m not liable to complete the CLI any time soon.

Work is progressing smoothly, money is being saved as I garner more achievements in old games (working up a few New Game plus saves in Mass Effect, finishing off the last in Mirror’s Edge, Arkham Asylum and Fallout 3), and everything is just… so smooth.

Except for an annoying case of sinusitis. Then again, of all the bitter things that could hit me, I’ll take this as a blessing

Take care.

~T