Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Waves of Code

I swam with that open water group again last night. We went to a different area of Lake Travis, "Hippie Hollow", because it has a longer swim area than the place we went to last week. This site also happens to permit public nudity, so that was a little... awkward. It wasn't too bad though; there were only a couple naked guys hanging around and they weren't swinging their dicks around in the air or anything. ;) Anyway, it was really windy yesterday so the water was choppy as hell. My form completely fell apart because I wasn't used to this type of swimming and I started freaking out because when I'd come up for air, sometimes I'd just get a big wave in my face instead. I eventually reverted to my old "panic style" of swimming, which involves keeping my head above the water at all costs while doing free style. It was fun fighting for my life while trying to get a workout in though. :) All together I swam about 1200 meters last night (3/4s of a mile).

I don't know what happened, but on Sunday I started writing some code and for the first time in months, programming felt fun to me again. So fun in fact, that I am having trouble stopping myself and its somewhat getting in the way of my training. I added two new features to the video engine, loading menu skins from multi images and adding support for allowing multiple menu skins to be used at once. Since yesterday I've been performing major surgery on the battle code (it needed it... badly). Basically I'm wrapping up the GUI display and update code for a couple menu windows into their own classes, which makes the primary battle class much smaller and easier to understand. I'm really happy that I enjoy coding again, because I had honestly been forcing myself to program for the last couple of months to get our release out for Allacrost. We had a meeting over the weekend and decided on a small number of features that we would add to the game and then make a new release. We're trying to make our release cycle shorter while still introducing enough new features and content to make each release significantly improved over the last. We've been trying to recruit a lot of new people to the programming team to help speed up development efforts, but so far we haven't received very many applications (compared to what we are used to anyway), which is honestly somewhat disappointing. I don't know if we chose a bad time of the year or if our game looks too "finished" now in the eyes of someone who takes a glance at it.

My dreams are consistently vivid and somewhat exhausting these days. I'm actually starting to wish for nights were I don't dream, because sometimes I wake up after having fought in some war, or had some other major traumatic life event I had to struggle through. Even though physically those things didn't happen, they feel real to my mind, and the psychological stress I experience when I'm asleep often leaves me feeling burnt out by the time I wake up. Who knew sleeping could make me so exhausted? :) Seriously though, its becoming quite a bother. Once I find a new job and get on health insurance again, I might consider talking with a psychologist or someone else about this if it becomes a bigger problem. Speaking of jobs, I need to begin seriously looking for one now that our latest release is finished (I told myself and others that I wouldn't get a job until after that happened). I was going to start looking last week, but I was wrapped up with the aftermath of our release so I put it off to this week, but now I have my head wrapped in code and I can't stop (plus I kind of need to get this battle code commit out the door ASAP, because no one else can work on the battle code while I'm working on these large changes). Anyway, time to get back to the code =D

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1 Comments:

Blogger Jastiv said...

I have always found, that if dreams are not pleasant and too exhausting, I need to be careful what I think about in those few minutes before I fall asleep. Thinking about pleasant things makes a huge difference in the dreams I have, since they tend to include the things I think about just before bed.

2:44 AM  

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