semi/signal

Work on Doppler continues, also whipped up a quick page for it (http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/doppler). I’ll try to have the Beta 1 download up by Friday night. There’s still quite a bit of work to do, for now here’s a new screenshot showing the new interface:

For the past week or so I’ve been working on Doppler, a small file synchronization utility program. I was surprised to find that few such programs existed and the few that are around cost a bit of money and didn’t have the features I was looking for.

What’s so special about Doppler?

• Designed to be invisible (resides in the system tray), lightweight (uses very little processor power and plays very nicely with other processes), and magical (Doppler will automatically mirror changes to files and directories that it monitors)

• Doppler can be used as an automated backup system. The Doppler server keeps and manages its own “file system” (it’s just a directory where it dumps files). Just run the server on the machine where you want to keep the backup and setup the client to monitor the directories which you want to backup.

• You can run Doppler as a server and a client on the same computer. Mirroring files and directories on the same PC may seem stupid, but if you mirror to another drive you now have a backup – an automated backup!

I’ll probably have a beta version out next week. Currently I’m fixing bugs and still adding features. File versioning and compression (both for transfer and storage of files in the Doppler file sys.) are two main areas that I’m really looking into.

For now here’s a pic of the doppler control center:

Begun the process of reforming DR and finding new people to work with (GDNet Help Wanted Post). No replies yet. I’ll mirror this post to other, more art-oriented forums soon.

Currently, not doing much programming, playing Homeworld 2. I bought it a few months back, but haven’t had the time to play it until now. So far I’m pretty impressed. The graphics are, of course, much better (since HW2 was released about 4 years after HW) and it’s especially nice to see the higher level-of-detail in the ships and the prettier special effects. I won’t go into all the details about the game, but one feature in particular that I was impressed with was the idea of “strike groups”. Basically, you can group a bunch of different ships together and they form a strike group which moves at the rate of the slowest ship. I have dreamt of this since the first RTS game I played (Total Annihilation) and have wished for it in every RTS game I’ve played since. I’m sure anyone who’s tried to pull off a strategic attack involving multiple unit types in TA, Starcraft, Age of Empires, etc. knows that it’s increadibly difficult and what usually happens is that your units go towards the enemy from fastest to slowest and w/o the units reinforcing each other, your plan falls apart, you units all killed in a few seconds, you do almost no damage to the enemy, and your world domination scheme fails 🙁

One thing that did annoy me a bit in HW2 is the controls. The right mouse button now also allows you to move ships with 2 clicks (one to show the movement disc, second to move). This is nice, but the right mouse button is also for camera rotation and there seems to be a bug where, on occasion, if you rotate the camera while a ship is selected, the movement disc will pop up. This is very annoying, but I seem to have gotten into the habit of deselecting units before rotating. Oh, speaking of the camera, I’m so happy the guys at Relic added the ability to pan the scene.

ok, that’s all for now. I’m leaving for Georgia tomorrow night and I’ll be offline until Monday.

So busy with school that I haven’t had time to update. Anyway, finally got around to getting my portfolio online and I updated by resume as well (behold my amazing frontpage web design skills).

If you’ve checked the DR front page, you probably saw my news post about Nilesh leaving DR (well, he’ll be back in 2 months) and NZ being put on an indefinite hold. After I finish my finals I’ll be looking around for new team members, and I’ll basically try to rebuild the DR team from the ground up.

As promised in my last update, here’s a pic of NZ Edit, the Nemesis Zero map editor.





As of version 0.03, layers other then the current layer being edited are shaded blue. It’s a small improvement to help prevent accidental selection or deletion of a tile on the wrong layer. Of course, this is also optional and can be turned off to get a better view of the map.

Nilesh hasn’t had time to update the website and post new screenshots, so I thought I’d post a pic showing what our particle fx editor for NZ looks like:




(I’ll post a pic of the map editor soon)

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 2 days migrating DR to a new web server. Basically, just a lot of small things to take care of. I’ve also setup a personal page for myself. Right now it only has my resume and a link to this blog, but later on I’ll post more exciting stuff.

On the programming front, I’m still working on the new GUI stuff. Two things left to take care of: list boxes and volume controls (the two hardest). I’ll try to have this stuff finished tomorrow night. I also need to make 1 critical addition to the NZ map editor, that is the ability to flip tiles horizontally and vertically. I originally throught tile flips would be unnecessary, but after playing about with the latest tile sets Nilesh created, I quickly saw that tile flips are essential to NZ map making. The process itself is easy (just shift texture coordinates), but when you have to make the changes to the map ed., the map compiler, and NZ, things become messy. Especially considering the map ed. and NZ use different rendering engines and are written in 2 different languages (C# for the map ed., C++ for NZ).

On the writing front, I haven’t forgotten about the NZ story and script. The intro story is, for the most part, finished. I just need to make some minor modifications and correct some grammer errors. I’ll put a link to it on the NZ page once I’m done. The script is being worked on. It’s a lot easier to write than the intro story; simply b/c I’ve found that dialog is easier to write than narrative. I should have a lot of it done by the end of the week.

I’m on spring break right now, but I have midterms coming up (starting with a killer one for Algorithm Analysis class next week Wed.), so I’m trying to get as much done as possible this week.

I’ve been doing a major overhaul of the NZ GUI. I’m not too excited about doing this but it’s necessary in order to easily get story screens, intermission screens, and new menus into the game. With the improved system almost everything can now be defined externally through XML files. It’s great being able to design and play around with stuff w/o having to recompile code. The only thing that would be better is having a graphical GUI designer, but unfortunately I don’t have to time to make one.

Much of this redesign is internal work, but I also made some slight graphical improvements to the buttons. Check it out, they look a bit more metallic now (hmm, well not really, but they do look prettier).




Hey guys, I’ve started a blog 🙂

Aside from acquiring the title of “blogger” and fitting it with all the cool kids, the main reason for me doing this is b/c I felt that doing plan updates on the digital radiation forums were a bit limited. Readers (or reader, I have no clue how many people actually read those posts) couldn’t comment on what I posted and it also never really felt right doing updates within a message board post where your latest entry was pushed to the end of the thread.

Anyway, I’ll be posting more stuff very soon.