Happy birthday to Me!

First off, let me apologize quickly for missing my post deadline last weekend. I decided to take a second break this month in order to celebrate my birthday without the stress of writing another post. As much as I love working on this blog, it takes enough time and effort for me to want breaks here and there!

Anyhow, you can expect this month's roundup to land on Sunday at the usual time. I've made great progress, so I think it'll be a pretty good update.

Getting Organized - 5 - Some Awesome Work

When we last left off on my quest for good time management, I decided to share my pizza recipe instead of being productive. Clearly, I'm making good progress. Now then, it's time to do some actual programming.

Awesome!

No, that's not your cries of joy. Awesome is the Window Manager that I use on all of my machines nowadays. In addition to laying out my windows in a pleasing fashion, it also exposes a powerful lua API for customizing and scripting, well, everything. This includes the UI, allowing for some very in-depth customizations!

Last time, I made a list of tasks to complete:

1. Automatically opening my wiki every morning
2. A simple timer that fits with my workflow
3. A way to create tasks remotely while at work

Today, I'm going to finish off the first task. Furthermore, Awesome is going to help me with that.

Hello, Wiki!

Originally, I said that opening my wiki in the morning would be "super-easy to do". I lied! I lied to everyone, even myself! And what a lie it was.

An Unexpected Snag

The easiest way for me to make programs start on launch is to add them to my xinitrc file. In this case, I actually can't do that. Because the terminal that I run vim in won't have its settings ready before my xinitrc finishes running. That means that if I use my xinitrc to bring up my wiki, the colors and fonts will be wrong and it'll have a horrifying scrollbar that looks like it crawled out of Windows 3.1.

Obviously, I don't want that. Awesome gives me the ability to run applications, so I can have it launch my wiki. Perfect, right? Wrong! To help debug scripts and configuration, Awesome provides a mechanism to restart it without closing anything. This is also great! However, this means that every time I restart Awesome it'll also open the wiki again. So, we have a conundrum.

The Solution

The second problem can be solved, but it'll take a few small additions. The goal here is to have Awesome run certain programs on startup, but only if it isn't restarting. To do that, I need to store some information across runs.

Conveniently, Awesome has an event that runs when it exits. Even better, that event tells you whether the exit is part of a restart or not! So, I simply write a value to a file based on whether Awesome is restarting or not. Then, Awesome can read the value when it starts and use it to make decisions. The result looks like this:

awesome.connect_signal("exit", function(restart)
    local lastrun = io.open("~/.config/awesome/lastrun", "w")
    if lastrun ~= nil then
        if restart then
            lastrun:write(0)
        else
            lastrun:write(1)
        end
        lastrun:close()
    end
end)

...

local lastrun = io.open("~/.config/awesome/lastrun", "r")
if lastrun ~= nil then
    local was_quit = lastrun:read("*n")
    if was_quit == 1 then
        for i,e in pairs(autostart_once) do
            awful.spawn(e)
        end
    end
    lastrun:close()
else
    for i,e in pairs(autostart_once) do
        awful.spawn(e)
    end
end

for i,e in pairs(autostart_each) do
    awful.spawn(e)
end

As you can see, it's actually pretty simple. Anything that I add to the autostart_once list will only start if Awesome shut down properly last time it ran. On the other hand, anything in the autostart_each list will run every time Awesome runs. This makes for a convenient solution that I can use as much as I want going forward.

So, that was a semi-complicated solution to a relatively simple problem. Come back next time for some tougher-but-more-straightforward scripting.

Roundup, May 2017 - Oh man I sure do hope the mosquitoes don't--

It took great courage and perseverance, but I finally drove back the mosquitoes that definitely ate all of last week's update. So, here it is:

Additional Comments

I had some difficulty capturing/rendering this video. Last time, I used glc for the video capture. However, glc's audio recorder is really buggy and doesn't work on my machine. It's also quite old, so I'm worried about relying on it too much. This time I made a recording with FFmpeg, but it's just a normal desktop capture so it's a bit slower than I'd like. Next time, I'll probably try to capture the video and audio separately. It might be annoying to line the two up in editing, but it will probably result in a higher-quality video.

The big gain from rewriting the audio system is that multiple audio players should now be able to play audio from the same source at the same time. This means that I don't have to reload a sound effect every time I want to use it, and instead I can easily load once and play hundreds of times. As you can guess, this is really useful for games where you could easily have a couple dozen objects that can make the same sound.

Goals

• Time left: about 2 1/2 months
• Application Module: Done 
• Audio Module: 95%
• Core Module: Done
• Editor Module: Not Started
• Gameplay Module: 80%
• Missing joystick emulation for input
• Graphics Module: 65%
• Missing sprites
• Missing text
• Missing framebuffers
• Missing particles
• Math Module: Done
• Resource Module: 65%
• Missing sprite loading
• Missing font loading

This month went a little slower than I'd hoped, and some of the code that I wrote feels a bit rushed. As a result, I'm going to need to do another quick pass on the audio and resource modules at some point, just to tighten them up a bit. That's not what I'm doing for June, however. I want to get the last couple essential features, sprites and text, done. This will happen as part of a greater attempt to finish off the graphics module as a whole. I don't expect to finish all of it this month, but it wouldn't surprise me too much if I could sneak framebuffer support in.

If all goes to plan as it has so far, I'll have over a month left over to clean up any loose ends and improve my workflow in preparation.

Next month's posts will feature lots of Linux shell scripting. Much like in May, I'll be kicking off next week with some more organization work.

Mosquitoes ate my update video

Man, don't you hate it when small, buzzing insects devour files off of your hard drive? It's the worst. It's also something that definitely happens all the time, and our modern society is powerless to stop them. Remember when your favorite thing was cancelled or delayed for no apparent reason? Mosquitoes. Yup. Definitely 100% not telling any sort of fib or white lie right now, and frankly I'm a little wounded that you'd suggest that I might ever not tell the truth in a vain attempt to cover up my own shortcomings.

So, because a swarm of mosquitoes ate the update video for this week that I definitely made and didn't put off for too long, I'm making a little life post instead. You can expect me to have it finally finished remade in time for next Sunday's post.

Let's talk about my weekend

I had a really busy weekend, which is why I was unable to complete my video powerless to stop the horde of ravenous arthropods from devouring my video files.

On Saturday, I went on a hike in the Laurentides with a group from the office. For those who don't know, the Laurentides is a region of Quebec that's packed full of beautiful lakes and mountains. Just imagine every photo of the Canadian wilderness that you've ever seen.

This pretty lake is the perfect environment for breeding the harbingers of your hard drive's doom

The hike was 5 1/2 km, and circled a small lake. It was a good length, long enough to be enjoyable without overstaying its welcome. The weather was warm and sunny, but not so hot as to be uncomfortable. In many ways the conditions for this hike were ideal. They also happened to be ideal for the terrifying force of mosquitoes that hounded us and our video files, especially the latter. For every person, I'd say there were 10-20 mosquitoes buzzing around them. They didn't manage to ruin the experience though, and I'd definitely do it all over again. Oh, and uh....some of them, err, hid inside my backpack? Yeah, sure, we'll go with that. Then they emerged to feast upon my defenseless PC or something. It was awful.

Artist's rendition of the event

Unlike most activities that I engage in, I brought my camera with me and took a few photos. Several shots came out quite nicely, so I might do this more often:

(Click any image to view at full size)

On Sunday, my family came in for a visit. They brought my bike over, so once I buy a new helmet I should be able to travel much farther in the city! After that, we went out for pizza and ice cream, then took a little stroll around Parc La Fontaine. I'm not fond of spending lots of time with family, but I really enjoyed this little outing quite a bit! They seemed pretty happy too, so it was a good day all in all. Oh, and they were...yeah, they were totally devastated at the carnage caused by those darn mosquitoes. Yup!

So that was my eventful weekend! As you can see, I was quite busy and didn't find time to make this month's update video set up adequate anti-mosquito defenses. Anyhow, this week is mostly still May so I'm still keeping to the schedule to some degree. Expect the monthly dfgame update next Sunday at the regular time.

EDIT: According to Blogger, this is post #256, so if we were counting with one byte I'd have to stop here. Thankfully, that's no longer the case!

A post-graduation reflection

Last May, I got my Bachelor's Degree at Champlain College. Now that May has come again, I thought I'd give a quick recap on my first year out of school.

Getting a job

I started hunting for jobs on and off several months before graduation. Unlike many of my peers, I was in the interesting position of not wanting any sort of game development job at all. For years, I'd read stories about the horrors of game development and how it churns through the annual supply of bright-eyed college grads. So, I applied to software development gigs and got ignored a whole lot!
 
I suppose it's natural. Game Programming doesn't sound like the most reliable major to pick, even with the work I've done on my own. Ultimately, I got my current job through a mix luck and networking: My friend Vince (lead programmer on The Last Light) recommended me to a recruiter from Ubisoft Montreal during the end-of-year showcase of our game, and that led to an offer. (Seriously, networking is really good and you should do it) I wanted to stay close to my home in Vermont, so I decided to take the offer rather than keep looking.

Canada!

With the offer accepted and some necessary summer prep work complete, I found myself on the other side of the border just in time for Fall. Due to a scheduling mishap, I ended up arriving a month and a half before my start date, giving me plenty of time to settle in and explore the city. In order to best take advantage of this, I spent the majority of the time sitting in my room with a tiny specter of legal and financial uncertainty drifting lazily over my head.

Now that the weather is warm and I no longer fear for my checking account, I've been spending more time going out and looking around. Overall, I'm super happy to be here! Being half-French, I'm enjoying the mix of languages especially, even if I now have an irrational fear of peanuts.

Yup definitely not made of spiders no siree

...Moving briskly on, Montreal is a really nice spot to live. I've got a nice inexpensive apartment on the Plateau, and some streets are lined with enough trees to almost give the feeling of being in the woods! As someone who grew up in a reasonably small town village, the neighborhood makes me feel at home while still providing all of the bustle and convenience of a city close by. (And of course, there are some standard socialist benefits like free healthcare and unified public transportation systems)

Work life

Unfortunately, I won't be discussing too many details of my work. I'm not 100% sure what is/isn't covered under my NDA, so for now I'm playing it safe and speaking in very general terms. If I get that cleared up I might discuss some juicy details in a future post. So far, Ubisoft has been an incredibly pleasant surprise. Being a big publisher, I was expecting them to screw me over at every opportunity, but I have absolutely no complaints about them.

I've only truly been "on the job" for a scant few months (I was in a long-term training up until mid-January), but I feel like I'm trusted and relied upon regardless. I usually get handed a bunch of requests and long-term goals, and then I'm left to my own devices until they're finished. Not only have I not done any overtime, the senior devs that I work under have made a point of reminding me to take it easy on the hours and stay fresh. Some of this can be chalked up to the fact that the production I'm on is still at a very early stage, but even so I was expecting much more pressure.

Another fear that I had was about whether or not I'd be allowed to continue my personal work unrestricted. Ubisoft requires you to send in a 'request' for side-projects, but:

1. The restrictions that come attached are mostly just obvious things that most sane people wouldn't do in the first place
2. The responses get back to you in a reasonably timely manner
3. I have pushed no fewer than 19 personal projects through the official channels, and to this date not one of them has been refused.

Point is, they're pretty nice about these sorts of things. It would be even better if they didn't ask for requests at all, but at least the process is simple and painless.

The work itself has been really fulfilling and exciting for me. I've been doing tools work since it's the closest I can get to normal software development, and it's been a lot of fun! It makes me a little disappointed that Champlain doesn't cover tools programming in their curriculum at all, given how crucial good tools are to large-scale production teams. I'm mostly working in C# and WPF, but my experience with Vala and GTK are still coming in handy regardless. Indeed, it feels like both my personal and professional work are fueling each others growth.

To sum it up, I've managed to land a fun and not-too-stressful job in a city where I feel at home right out of college. I can't help but feel lucky where I am right now, and I hope my current streak of good luck lasts quite some time to come!