flags's blog

I'm tired of whatever WYSIWYG plugin I'm using now. It's a pain to use and it barely works, so I'll be switching blogging platforms.

For now on, my posts will be coming from Tumblr. It's the easiest way for me to write posts and add pictures whenever I want, so it makes sense to just use it. You'll find the updates in the sidebar. Only major releases will be announced here in the future.

You can follow me directly right here.

After a long battle, I've put PyRooms on hiatus. The project simply grew too large for me to manage alongside schoolwork and social events, and I simply got tired of spinning my wheels and going nowhere. In its current state, Pyrooms is almost entirely bug-free and has properly functioning ALife. It is essentially a working roguelike that just needs more content (something I couldn't provide.) The codebase is larger than it needs to be, which was also what led me to making this decision.

But don't worry! All hope is not lost.

Lately I've been working on PyRooms much more casually. After the hiatus ended, I realized that the game was a lot simpler, but just needed some changes here and there to make it "okay to work on" again. These issues (as far as I'm concerned) are fixed:

In around four months, PyRooms will be a year old.

It's a been a long journey from here to there. I've re-written everything three or four times, and I'm fairly certain that I've promised some kind of public release each time I update this blog. However, I'm not here to promise anything like that; I'm here to talk about where the project is going.

Around January, I quit working on PyRooms.

My excuse was (and still is) that the game got too large to work on, and that sitting down to write a few lines was often a four hour dedication I couldn't justify making. In short, the game had become too complicated, and the longer I spent away from it, the larger it became in my head.  I thought I'd never be able to get in the same mindset I was in when I coded a lot of the more technical sides of the game, and was afraid to go in and mess it up.

The past few week or so I've been hard at work on something a bit outside my area of expertise: a peer-to-peer file sharing program called "Crescendo." From the documentation:

When the first semester ended and we were all sent back home for three weeks to annoy our parents, I found myself really starting to get into programming in a different way. Not like before, where my coding consisted almost entirely of PyRooms and CS projects, but in writing little things to help me out (mostly with my Linux server at home.) It seemed I was enjoying a different aspect of programming.

It's been a while since I've last updated this. I'm sorry for the wait, but I have nothing to show.

These past few weeks I've been doing a different form of programming, and have more-or-less focused on applying my knowledge elsewhere. As a result of this hiatus, I've learned quite a lot about other computer-y things, like getting down to the nitty-gritty of the Linux operating system via a weird experience when installing Arch to a flashdrive.

I worked on PyRooms today.

Nothing visual has changed, which is disappointing, as most people relate that to "progress," and I'd be lying if I said I didn't believe that partially. Oh well, at least you can see the map generator doing it's work, here.

I've been on another break from PyRooms, but not programming entirely. I've updated the projects page with something I've been contributing some code to; some people might find it very useful, so check it out.