You know, I never realised shredding could be so much fun. Its a very satisfying noise, feeding your confidential documents into a shredder, and hearing them get slashed into ribbons. Plus it generates enough paper shreds to give about a gajillion hamsters warm and comfortable beds. I’m thinking perhaps we should get a hamster as a company mascot. Then, if we miss any milestones, we can simply claim that ‘the hamster ate the code’. That’ll fly, right?

On a less whimsical note, I’m looking forward to developing an script to automate an off-site backup process, so we can have at least a basic reliable backup mechanism to protect us against the worst ravages of hardware failures and/or arson attacks. Not that I’m expecting arson attacks mind, at least, not for the first few months.

Also on the cards – writing up various coding guideline items in the wiki. Probably I won’t give it any coherent structure just yet, I’ll just write it as individual items which can be given a better layout in the future.

Woah there. Sorry to anyone reading this through the RSS feed, which took my last entry as a prompt to mark as updated every single entry I’ve written. Hopefully this one won’t do the same…

Well, Monday and Tuesday were spent at the TIGA conference for outsourcing. Very interesting, great chance to meet people in the industry and make Black Company’s face known around the block. It also opened my eyes to just how the Company can go in the near future to cement its place in the industry and get a good financial basis for pushing along our own plans.

On an unrelated note, I’ve finished a first draft of the Company coding standards and made it available as a public wiki. Coding guidelines (as in, good ways to code, but not things which everyone’s code will be judged on) are still to come, and will be the fruition of many of the thoughtful scribblings done on the train to Dundee last month.

Things happening in the near future: going through some of the showreels and other various bumf collected from the conference (to assess potential outsourcing of art for the Assault demo), sorting out a TIGA application, buying myself a shredder (as I now have quite a pile of confidential documents that I can’t throw out), and sorting the details of a possible new contract in Dundee.

At last, I have returned from exile in Dundee, and rest easy in my regular office chair back in the enlightened city: Edinburgh. Much to do, including integrating our logo with the website, finishing up the coding standards (probably to be hosted as a publicly viewable wiki on the Company site), finishing up the basic project plan for the demo, and cracking on with the coding itself. I’ve poked and prodded a couple of artist friends, so hopefully we’ll be able to get some concept art up for the project – that always helps give projects shape.

Onwards!

Oh, and quickly before I trek off for another day – we have a new logo. Courtesy of Dave Keningale @ 4J Studios

I really, really hate 4 hour commutes. Blergh.

On the bright side, I’ve gotten a fair amount of work done. Some design sketches as to possible environment layouts for the demo level, quite a bit of production work. Laying out initial milestones and cash flow has been good just for getting things solid and on paper, and seeing where work needs to be done to make the project attractive to external funders/publishers. Its definitely looking a lot more feasible and attractive than it was 3 months ago.

But the best part has been reading Scott Meyers’ “Effective C++: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs. I agreed with almost the entire book, and even the couple of minor points I found fault with, its purely because I’m looking at it from a games point of view rather than a regular software view. Anyway, the book is now required reading for anyone who will be writing code for the Company. I’ve still to finalise the coding standards, but this book will form the core of the C++ side of things. If anyone wants to borrow my copy they can, but I strongly recommend you buy it yourself. I’m ordering the follow up book as we speak, I’m sure it will be equally useful.

Chaotic week this week – mostly been spent on contract work up in the wilds of Dundee (helps to get some money in the bank), which hasn’t left much time for anything else. On the bright side however, as of Monday I’ll be getting the train up and down rather than a car drive, so I’ll be staking claims on the little ScotRail tables and doing as much design/production work as I can on pen/paper, and transcribing it when I get a chance. For those itching for a chance to wade in and get started on some work, be patient; I’ve not forgotten you, I’m just trying to come up with coherent plans so as not to waste anyone’s effort. The contract itself is due to end somewhere around the 23rd of June, so things should start moving again closer to that date.

I’m trying not to laugh as I write this, although I must admit I find it a little frustrating that this particular piece of vapourware has already eaten enough funding to run our first project about a hundred times over. I’ll laugh a lot harder when I read the news reports about Infinium folding and the investors crying into their glasses.

Anyway, after a nice holiday weekend up north, I’ve been busy writing up various production things behind the scenes for the last couple of days, the most interesting of which is a walkthrough of the Assault demo. Its accessible to registered members via the Design forums, I hope it captures everyone’s interest.

Coding standards are still under construction (don’t worry, its not taken me four days just to do them, there have been other business related things ongoing this week), but for now on hiatus. As Phil pointed out (since he’s currently fighting a badly written C++ code-base), there are a whole lot more things under C++ that need to be standardised than are required under C. He also recommended Scott Meyer’s Effective C++ as a required read before I finalise the standards, so I’m going to wait until I’ve picked up a copy to finish writing up the document.

In the meantime, I’ve shifted to fleshing out the project plan and task list, so should hopefully come up with a nice long list of things to do, milestones, etc. More on that as it happens later…

Well, another week starts with a flollop onto the work chair. After a lovely sunny weekend, its back in the office, looking out at a damp, humid, gray-skied morning.

Anyway, back to the real stuff. Not a huge amount of demo progress on Friday, as I decided to help the Torque engine people out by fixing all of the Level 2 warnings in the libraries. Since they were pretty much all sloppy coding styles, it meant they were all over the source code, and so I got a whistle stop tour of the code-base and I think I’ve absorbed some of the methodologies they use. I might have an uphill struggle to actually get the developers to merge the fixes into the engine though, as the developer who initially said “that’s great, go for it” has since said “I don’t like typecasts”, which given the fact that the warnings are all because people were ignoring types and implicitely casting between them, is a bit of a cop-out. Luckily, someone there does things properly, because some of the code was cast correctly, so there’s a precedent which should make it more amenable to him.

So, the code I have now compiles at warning level 2, and I can turn on warnings as errors and have it be useful. Looking over the code also gave me quite a lot of reminders as to all the things that need to be specified in the coding standards document, which I’ll be working on today.

Also on the agenda: still to mock up the space station level needed as a test-bed, as well as a first pass at a task-list for the demo. More business/funding things need done this week, but not till Tuesday or Wednesday.