The past half year has been really enjoyable personally, but bad for my side project. My wife (as of August) and I left our home in Boston and travelled for four months through Europe. Then we were in Ontario for Christmas, and now finally we have settled in our new jobs here in Minden Nevada. For those who need a brushing up on American geography, Minden is an hour south of Reno, just across the border from South Lake Tahoe California.
I won't lie, my odometer project stalled. The Freescale kit got packed before the trip and is currently sitting somewhere in storage here in Carson City, waiting for us to take possession of our new home. I do have some positive news regarding my exploration project. During the trip I made an effort to put some time in to it and did get a python project to about the same level as I had with java. The fruits of my labour can be seen below:
Yes, those who are a little more astute will notice that I am now developing on a Mac. My wife is an avid Mac user and we got a macbook air for our trip. Python has the beauty of being cross platform so I could easily take the same source code and bring it to my PC (which is also sitting in the same mysterious storage locker as my kwikstick kit).
I did not do any bound checking on my project so if the boat goes too far north or south it just floats off the map. This program DOES load a map from a text file and draws land vs water which is a step further ahead than my last Java attempt. I am moving towards an MCV (model controller view) model of programming. However, the project currently uses an event manager which I am having second thoughts about. On an airplane ride with my wife I talked over my problem and collectively we came to the conclusion that rather than having a 'dumb' controller I should have it do the bulk of the model manipulation. This would fit more cleanly into the MCV paradigm and allow me to change the interface without affecting game mechanics. I should also be able to easily jack in AIs for the computer players. Fun stuff.
Stripping out the event manager and adding smarts to the controller are my next steps. It will no doubt take my progress back a little. But let's call a spade a spade, my project is not off the ground yet.
Until we meet again...
I won't lie, my odometer project stalled. The Freescale kit got packed before the trip and is currently sitting somewhere in storage here in Carson City, waiting for us to take possession of our new home. I do have some positive news regarding my exploration project. During the trip I made an effort to put some time in to it and did get a python project to about the same level as I had with java. The fruits of my labour can be seen below:
Yes, those who are a little more astute will notice that I am now developing on a Mac. My wife is an avid Mac user and we got a macbook air for our trip. Python has the beauty of being cross platform so I could easily take the same source code and bring it to my PC (which is also sitting in the same mysterious storage locker as my kwikstick kit).
I did not do any bound checking on my project so if the boat goes too far north or south it just floats off the map. This program DOES load a map from a text file and draws land vs water which is a step further ahead than my last Java attempt. I am moving towards an MCV (model controller view) model of programming. However, the project currently uses an event manager which I am having second thoughts about. On an airplane ride with my wife I talked over my problem and collectively we came to the conclusion that rather than having a 'dumb' controller I should have it do the bulk of the model manipulation. This would fit more cleanly into the MCV paradigm and allow me to change the interface without affecting game mechanics. I should also be able to easily jack in AIs for the computer players. Fun stuff.
Stripping out the event manager and adding smarts to the controller are my next steps. It will no doubt take my progress back a little. But let's call a spade a spade, my project is not off the ground yet.
Until we meet again...
