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Sunday, 05:51 pm, 21 March 2004 How About A New Version? So I am planning on releasing version 0.665 of the Noble Ape Simulation this week. I think I am too emotionally connected with the nonsense people put on download sites. The new version is quite a bit smaller than the previous version and has the initial cludge of threading. Doing a release is like riding a bike. I used to be able to release a new version of the Noble Ape Simulation in about 15 minutes. Now? I don't know if it will take a similar length of time or not. How About A Mailout? Familiar readers of the Log, will be aware each month I write an entry at the very end of the month complaining about writing the Mailout. The Mailout in many ways is like a school report taking about a holiday. Welcome back to the control. Dream of your freedom, you're on lock down. This month, I think I will write the Mailout today. I have a little time this evening. Nothing to do. Crumb I have the Crumb movie going on in the background on my wife's PC. When I lived in the Shed, I used to watch the Crumb movie compulsively. I think it is the alcohol logic. When people are depressed, they need depressants. It was a reflective focus, the Crumb movie. I slept for most of yesterday and woke up around 4pm. The injury, now fixing itself after a week, really exhausted me. I woke up and started paint stripping some figures downstairs. Some old Space Marines. I was outside thinking to myself. This has moved beyond a childhood dream, to a thing in itself. I caught myself yesterday thinking about the origins of the miniature collection. I think the morality has ended. The collection has moved beyond righting a childhood wrong. I can't think how many figures I have, but I think I have enough. Noble Warfare Optimisation It's an interesting thing with software development. It never goes according to plan. I had some plans on integrating large sections of the Simulation with Noble Warfare. The problem is the kind of time bottle-necks with the Simulation are quite different to Noble Warfare. Take movement. When you are moving a couple of hundred apes at most, movement, that's a relaxed affair. When you are moving tens of thousands of combatants, movement is a major thing. In all honesty, the Simulation is written for tens of apes at most, not hundreds. So my original ideas when applied to actual problems don't work out. The hybridisation between the Simulation and Noble Warfare is a thing in itself. To-date, I have been working to a time frame which doesn't seem to be working itself through. I think my interest is to craft something rather than release something at all costs. I don't know how it will go. I have some plans I am working to, but the problems and solutions seem to be quite independent of my wants. I guess the bottom line is I don't want to force myself blindly to produce something in a rush. I think time is a luxury I have enjoyed to-date with the Simulation. If this is mapped onto Noble Warfare, it will be more manageable. Good afternoon. Friday, 11:20 pm, 19 March 2004 Just before bed, some good news from Willi Winter. Not sure if he reads the Log, but I got some stunning snaps from him. Here are a reduced two out of three. Breath taking...  Good night! Thursday, 09:08 pm, 18 March 2004 Greetings miniature painting fans... Phil Rosenberg finished the unit of five Cawdor figures and listed them on CMON. It's funny actually. I own two of three of Phil's listings. Willi Winter has gone missing-in-action, following about six weeks with no response to emails. I am not sure whether I should write off that experience and take the figure as a loss or keep persisting. Chris Blair is making occasional email contact and seems to be painting the figures when he gets a chance. Fred Reed is spending more time now make terrain. I suspect I have burnt him out with large lots of figures and he is turning his sights to terrain making to avoid Barbalet induced blindness. Good night. Tuesday, 08:32 pm, 16 March 2004 Barbalet - Strangely Not Dead... Following a few days of insanity and no log entries, I can offer the following discussion. I would like to start with Ice Cube's Predator. I found the tape in a pile of tapes from Australia. The first full track is insane. It samples about six funk tracks and recombines them in a stilted high-paced track. What happened to that music? I've gifted two, two-year memberships to the IGDA in the past two days. Maybe the effects of the pain killers I have been on. But I read the Annual report that showed a few thousand fee paying members. So my weekends have been wasted on an organisation that can't be non-profit, and can't command more than a few thousand fee paying members. I put my money where my ideology is. Noble Warfare is taking shape. Memory management, unit ordering and graphics. All coming together. I am delaying the screen shots to get closer to the final version. But currently I am putting in at least two hours a night. The interesting point seems to be how much paper work is ignored in the final implementation. I spent a couple of months writing down specs and writing example code. As I pull everything together, it is more important getting code that works than code that works to my original spec. Noble Warfare is the first application of its size to be developed through Noble Ape in one go. There is probably 3-4 times the number of lines of code in Noble Warfare than the Noble Ape Simulation. I have tried to keep the central code as generic as possible and I am reducing. Intellectual Property in the Age of the Rip Off Now the IEEE article as been well and truly released, I am interested by the lack of throughput the article has caused. Actually that is logically wrong. Basically, one article, no traffic. The issues of plagiarism is something I wanted to include in the article, but also something I think about quite a bit in my life. My intellectual property rights experiences, most of them have been forged in the rip-off. It seems strange developing Noble Warfare with the thought that this could be developed into a commercial endeavour. But I would much rather release it Open Source. The competitive element is producing a commercial quality game without any investment and releasing it through improving cycles. Hopefully developing a user base and expanding the application to the user base's requirements. Is my Open Source development basically a way of sticking it to the rip off? A little deep for an evening. Good night. Wednesday, 09:18 pm, 10 March 2004 So a long WeFunk show comes to an end and as written about a couple of entries ago, I hear the tail end of the commentary. Keeping the log multimedia, here's the sample from Show 321. Good show number. I think the sample captures an element. With this sound sample, I found another sample from my archive. With a slightly longer story. When I was fifteen I wanted to be on the student council. Actually I wanted to be on the school council that had two representatives. So I wrote a speech about what I stood for and what I believed in. I stood up and I gave the speech. The next person walked on stage, he said 'I didn't write a speech! Speeches suck! School council sucks! Don't vote for me!' Of course he was elected. I had another shot the next year. For a year, I planned what I was going to do. So I wrote a rap and performed it. I got 97% of the vote. The moral of the story. Sometimes the ends justify the means. Here is the sample. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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