Stephen’s Weblog

So, the Ludumdare 11 competition is over (as of 2 weeks ago), and voting has completed (as of yesterday)- it’s been a while since I last posted.

You can see the competition results Here  - I got first place in the timelapse video, and third in the technical category - participating was a lot of fun.

Things are moving really slowly here lately, I’m trying to get a job, trying to get varioius odd projects done in the meantime… Haven’t really started on any of the big things I want to do, due to lack of time. I do hope I can get all of these things sorted out  soon.

The First Opti Competition is still moving along - in hindsight it’s really not doing as well as I’d like, and that’s mostly due to the theme. Well. I do have ideas on how to fix that - after this first compo I’ll be starting some more useful / reasonable / interesting competitions that will hopefully involve a wider array of people and won’t be quite so technically involved. I’m also going to add some more categories to the site, so there should be something for everyone.

I’m going to try to continue with weekly updates, because I know you all have nothing better to do than read about the trivialities of my life ;) yes, I’m being facetious. Sometimes I wonder why I write this at all; I do hope someone finds it interesting, but if nothing else it’ll give me something to laugh at many years down the road.

I’ve decided to enter the LudumDare 48 hour competition (#11) - it should be a lot of fun - 48 hours to develop a game completely from scratch! I’ll be sure to post here with the outcome, good or bad. Though I suspect the outcome will be good ;)

Ok, Finally - after a lot more effort than I thought it would take - the akkit.org optimization contest (for DS) is up and running, with it’s first competition!

Although the competition technically started a day and a half ago, I haven’t posted it yet because I didn’t have the test package ready, but is ready and posted now.

So, it is with great anticipation that I submit it to you, for review: Opti’s First Competition

Anticipation like, waiting for a pie to hit me in the face, or be run over by a car, or something similar ;) I do however want to see what level of interest there is, and try to make this into something that more people will be more seriously interested in next time (I am highly curious about how many people will be interested this first time) - So, to that end I am very interested in any sort of feedback. Anyway - That’s all I want to say for now, I’ll shut up before I ramble on about it for a very long time; Thanks for looking :)

So, I was holding off on posting until I had the optimisation contest site ready - but that didn’t work very well, it’s run a lot longer than I had planned for it to (oh, only a few months longer :P), but it’s finally getting to a usable state!

Currently, all of the public-facing user interface magic is done, I’m just wrapping up a few admin pages and testing things, but it’s looking very good! I’m going to aim to finish it up and get a proper competition started this weekend. However, if you want to get started and have some time to tinker around with the site first, have fun! The site is at http://opti.akkit.org/ - there is an IRC channel set up for support and general discussion (#opti on Blitzed). Also, please note the site still contains remnants from testing, that will all be swept under the metaphorical electronic rug when I get a real contest started but for now it serves to be some data to test with and show how things work. Comments and bug reports will be most welcome, as will suggestions for improvement - a design overhaul is planned for the near future as well (well, I like the design pretty well, but it’s functional rather than elegant, and it will be better if it’s both)

Since I’m not really in the business of detailing my life’s complexities in my blog (which, well, is what everyone else seems to use them for), the title of this post really sums up all I’m really going to say; Ordinarily I think life being complicated and interesting is a good thing, but it has it’s down sides too, and I’ve run into that lately.

That being said, I strive to not let things like life’s trivial and big problems bother me, and I’m continuing to work on entirely too many projects. Some things are making progress, others not so much. I’m prioritising Opti, followed by the logic analyzer, and I’ll decide what to do next when those are ready. I’ve picked up a few more smaller projects lately, tinkering around with graphics effects, video capture and image recognition, and I still have a stack of books to read.

I’m trying to decide whether I should disclose some of the smaller projects I’m tinkering around with and release binaries / possibly source / other information about them, I don’t really see this stuff being very useful to many people, and it does take time to document, depending on what level of disclosure I go with - but I think it’s generally pretty neat stuff - jury’s still out on this one but if you have an opinion I’d like to hear it.

Some of you might have been following this, but recently I’ve completed some DS homebrew code to make it simple to send data between processors; This took a good bit longer than it probably should have but it is done now, and being integrated into libnds as part of our plans for world domination, er, our plans to make homebrew easier. The basic idea behind the system is to take the single pipe between the processors (the IPC FIFO) and use a system wrapped around it to create a set of virtual channels, through which you can send data from one processor to the other. The system is set up with the ability to use callbacks, which will automatically dispatch the message on the receiving end to a user function, or the receiving code can just check the incoming queue occasionally. As it was designed, the system will pipe one of 3 types of value through to the other processor - it can either send a mainram address, a 32bit data value, or a sequence of 32bit values. It’s designed to be very fast and efficient about this sort of thing, the latency to send a value through is very low, and it’s all interrupt driven to receive data as soon as it comes in.

For now, the code is not available to the general public, right now it’s intended to be used as a low-level communication layer and currently the plans are being made to integrate it into the libnds examples as a way to quickly get information (buttons, touch, rtc) from arm7, and  provide a channel for controlling the arm7 (i.e. sound, power control, others) - the hope is to have a more solid interface for this sort of thing to help people who don’t really want to deal with the hardware directly but still want to play sound and things like that. I expect that some level of access to all this will also be provided for people who want to do their own thing on arm7, and this code I hope (and expect) will help provide a better environment for developing applications across both CPUs.

Well, some days I feel like I’m getting a lot done…. Some days I feel like there’s a lot going on but nothing’s getting done… And yet other days I don’t feel like doing anything at all.

I’ve been having a lot of that second type lately- sometimes making progress, sometimes not, but lots of things going on and not really apparently getting anywhere.

Here’s hoping next week will be different…

I’ve completed the vorbis decoder I set out to work on, mainly because I haven’t been able to think about much of anything else; It’s nothing fancy and it makes use of naive implementations of just about everything, my goal was just to make it work - which it does now… This makes me very happy because this is the first perceptual codec I’ve written completely from scratch; hopefully it is just the start of things to come :)

So, now I’m reevaluating the priority of everything agan, and will continue on the things that need to be done… Will post more soon.

Ok, so I haven’t really completed anything, but I did want to point those of you who are interested at a new wiki page in which I’ve clarified a lot of my goals and expected methodology for the “revolution” project collection that I’m working on getting started with (Wiki page for Project Revolution collection [wiki.akkit.org]).
If you want to be involved in this set of projects, of which the TCP/IP project is the first, please let me know, by any means of contact you prefer.
I’m hoping to kick off the TCP/IP project by the end of the month. It’s not essential that all developers are involved at that point, but it would help.

In other news, the number of projects I’ve been tinkering with lately is rather large. Some of them I’ll tell you about, some not - one thing I’m working on actively is an ogg/vorbis decoder.. I’m just writing a rough version for pc at the moment to verify my understanding, but I’d like to port it to DS. I’m working on an unnamed XNA game, that you might know about if you hang around where I do on IRC, but I’m not actively showing off. Some projects that I’m not working on that I should be are…. the optimization contest site, the nds test apps, and the logic analyzer code… Well, I will scrape my time together and allocate it where I see fit. I hope next post I can actually announce the completion of something or other :)

I’ve been working on a number of different projects lately, unfortunately none of them public yet.. And some new interesting directions are opening up to me, which is forcing me to rethink a few things.

In the meantime though I’ve put together a photo album of some pictures I took while the power was out here, I hope you find it interesting :) Ice Storm / Power Outage photo album (picasaweb)

Of course I know you’re just waiting for news on dstunnel, or some other project; Probably we’ll get some actual progress this month, whether it be sooner or later I’m not sure of yet.