Unwelcome Compromise

Alright, now on to Allacrost. If you keep up with the site news at all, you'll see that we've been rather sluggish this year. So sluggish, in fact, that at least once we've been accused of being a dead project (we are not though, not by a long shot). A lot of the people on our team have been not outputting nearly as much as they usually do. Especially myself. This year has been the first real break that I have had from Allacrost since I started this project over four years ago, and for a while it felt really good. Now I feel guilty when I ignore Allacrost and instead choose to spend my time watching Netflix movies or playing games with my little free time. I can't speak for everyone else, but I know there are three reasons why my time to spend on Allacrost has diminished by so much.


First, my training takes up a lot of my time. I'll spend anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours a day exercising (not including travel time, socializing, etc.) and I usually workout 6 days a week. Many times I'll workout in both before and after work, so those days are even tougher. Allacrost used to be my primary hobby for many years but I've just replaced it with something else (for better and for worse). The second reason is work. In my past job I used to write code all day so when I came home, often I was sick of programming and it was the last thing that I wanted to do. So since I hardly do any programming at my job lately, I thought to myself "hey, I'll come home and won't be burnt out on programming!". Wrong. My work is so demotivating and my days at work are so long and boring that when I come home I just feel lazy and lethargic. I think work is actually making me a little depressed as well. The third reason is I've been having trouble maintaining my Debian system. I run Debian unstable, so I guess I can't complain too much. I didn't update my system software for a long time but finally did it a few months ago and decided to install a new kernel. Well, I couldn't get the ndiswrapper to work for my USB wireless device (even though it worked and continues to work fine in the old kernel) and I had problems with nvidia's graphics drivers as well. I spent nearly half of my Saturday trying to get those two to work once and made almost no progress, it was very frustrating. To make matters worse, the upgrade broke the graphics drivers in my older kernel, and I can't get them working again because that software isn't available anymore in the Debian packaging system (AFAIK). I've also had headaches with hardware, including a dying (in a very loud and annoying fashion) north bus fan on my motherboard, which I replaced with a passive heat sink (that I had to modify with a hacksaw to get it to fit with my graphics card) and I think its not quite enough, because now occasionally my system will randomly freeze up in a very bad way and I have to restart my system. I've been considering extreme solutions such as buying new hardware or installing Ubuntu over Debian, but I haven't made up my mind yet. I really want my system to be more quiet though...when I built it years ago I tried to choose components to make it as silent as possible but it is still definitely loud. I can still work on Allacrost on my laptop of course (running Ubuntu), but I hate working on my laptop (ergonomic issues with it).


Anyway enough of those issues. So we've been on the cusp of our next release for Allacrost for like two months now. There's just not a lot of motivation on the team right now and we have been really taking our sweet time with this one. Its kind of annoying actually. I'm not sure if I'm correct here, but I've been thinking that maybe I'm the reason that the rest of the team has been slow and unproductive. I am the leader of the team, and I've been so detached from Allacrost for a good part of this year that I don't know what people are working on, or who some of the new people are, or things like that. So I think that my actions (or rather the lack of them) has led everyone else to feel decreasingly motivated about Allacrost and things just kind of gradually slipped away. Even though I'd like to resume the commanding leadership role that I used to have, I don't know if I have the capacity to do that if I'm also working and training my butt off. I've been trying to encourage some other people to step up into being leaders so that our team can continue to function well even when I'm gone, but its difficult.


One thing that I think would really help our team out in a phenomenal way is to have a team manager. We've had three team managers in the past (all of which have left the team). They've all been a great help in their own way, but none of them have really stepped up the way I hoped they would. I really want a manager who lives up to that title. Our previous managers have been more like "support personnel", helping with the website and other miscellaneous stuff. I want a manager who organizes people, sets priorities, organizes content, leads design discussions, etc. I know its hard for someone completely new to the project to step up to such a role, but I still hope that we can find such a person someday. I know the manager of the FIFE project, barracuda (who also visits our IRC channel quite often), and he is exactly for FIFE what I want our manager to be for Allacrost. We are currently without a manager, so after we get our next release out I think we'll probably solicit for such a position. If we can get an outstanding manager (or managers) and have other leaders on the team live up to their roles, I think our team will be in awesome shape.


Content production has been slow lately too although our main composer, Ryan, has been producing a lot of new music lately. I almost feel bad sometimes because he has produced so much music for this game over the past four years, and yet so far we have very little game in which to present his works. The programming team made a decision a while back to stop messing around with our engine so much. Our engine is still incomplete, but its in good enough shape that it can do most of what we need. Much of our time last year was spent working on the engine, which is great and all but it doesn't really do much to help progress of the game in the short term. We've decided that instead we're going to be more focused on our short-term objectives. We know what features we need implemented for our next release, and we're going to do exactly what is needed to implement that feature. That may require us to go into the engine sometime to add support for something, but for the most part we'll be working on code for the actual game.


For the past couple of days I've been working on Allacrost a lot while I'm on my vacation. And let me tell you it feels really good to be working so hard on this project again. I've been working on the map mode code and fixing some issues in there and preparing it for additional features that we'll need in the near future. Its exciting to work on challenging design problems again (something that has been mostly absent from my job). My motivation to work on Allacrost has increased nearly ten fold in less than two days, its amazing. I wake up each morning and get right to work on it without even thinking. I'm hoping that this feeling will last past my vacation and that I can make a full comeback into Allacrost. If that happens, I hope that other people on the team will follow my return.


Well that's about all I have to say about Allacrost. Now back to writing code. :)

Recovery

It's been a while since my last post. I left Phoenix and went back to Austin on January 24th. I had hoped at that time that I would be getting back on my feet quickly, but I feel into an oblivion of laziness. It was pathetic how little I did throughout most of February. I mostly played video games and watched anime and slept. I also did something evil: I installed Windows XP onto my home computer again. I haven't had Windows installed on any of my machines for almost 3 years, but I finally did it. The only reason I installed Windows was so that I could play some of the old computer games that I rightfully own, because wine doesn't usually work that well, and my free copy of VMware was being stupid and wouldn't recognize the proper kernel headers when I tried to build the module, even though I made absolutely certain that it was pointing to the right headers. So, I decided to put my spare hard drive to use and dedicated it entirely to a NTFS partition, and now I dual-boot Windows and Linux. I only play games in Windows and nothing else, since that's all that its good for as far as I'm concerned. I thankfully haven't had any problems with viruses or malware destroying my machine (so far), which I think is because of the hardware firewall enabled on my router.

Anyway, my recovery rating topped out at about 80% about 10 days ago, but it has started to drop back into the 70s again (damn engineering has made me so quantitatively minded). I am very relaxed these days (too relaxed, in fact) and not suffering from anxiety problems anymore, but there are two things that I am painfully missing: drive and energy. I think the reason I have no energy is precisely because I have no drive, so if I can get my drive back I think I'll finally be myself again. But its harder said than done. I am not motivated to do anything anymore. Its weird, I still -want- to do things, but its like I can't. Things like: find a job, clean my house, exercise on a regular basis, make the world a better place, etc. I'm just really confused as to what course of action I'm supposed to take now. Before there was always a clear goal (a degree to obtain) and a clear path to get there, but my primary goal is so vague now I don't know how to achieve it and feel successful. My goal is, and has been for a long time, to make a positive, recognized, and lasting impact on the world. Right now my best path to that goal is through Allacrost, but for some reason I just can't keep myself motivated for more than a few days at a time. The thing is, there's not a single thing in this world that I clearly and naturally excel at. I'm just pretty good in many many things, and furthermore I like those many things and so I want to do them more. But I don't know where to focus myself right now. Should I read more books? Should I make myself gain more knowledge? Should I continue to hone my programming skills? Should I pick up drawing once again? Should I resume my unfinished self-taught piano lessons from 2-3 years ago? Should I master the Japanese language? Should I train myself physically and resume competitive racing once more? These are all things that I bounce back and forth between on a daily basis, and all of the things I mentioned I wish to pursue. But I don't have the energy to devote myself to all of them right now, because I don't have a clear goal to pursue. It feels like I'm stagnating myself going in this circle.

In other news, Allacrost has been making some good progress in the past 2 weeks, although there was a lot of inactivity last month. We've hired 3 new programmers, a composer, and a couple of new artists have been contributing lately as well. After I re-wrote the map code from scratch in January, I started working on the script engine and made excellent progress in figuring out how to provide a communication channel between the engine (C++) and our scripts (Lua) that is a pivotal turning point for the programming side of things. I've also re-designed much of the "global" code, which represents things such as items, weapons, armor, inventory management, characters, enemies, and party management. I'm finished with that for the time being, and now I'm getting myself back into the map code.

I also did manage to apply for one (and only one) job last month. It was a software developer position at Applied Research Laboratories in Austin. The position was for the design of sonar data analysis and visualization software, which sounded really cool to me. It was kind of a PITA to apply because they required official transcripts, a statement of interest, and three contacts, which took a good amount of time to round all that up. Unfortunately, I think that right after they got all my info they must have hired someone, because I saw the position was pulled from the job listings page just a few days later. I honestly don't even know what type of job I want at this point. I don't think I'd be happy in another microprocessor design job, but who knows. I just want to enjoy my job and not let all the stupid management and bureaucratic crap make me angry and frustrated like it did back at Freescale.

Anyway, I've rambled on about nothing for long enough. I really should make it a habit to update this blog more often so I don't try to talk about a million things in every post I make. :p Thanks for reading.