Attack of Comformity

Well, this week I started back into the work force. The good news is that I really like my new job. My boss is really cool and so are the guys who have been training me. Once training is over I'll pretty much be working on my own most of the time, which will be ok as well. Time was eaten up completely by work and family obligations this week. I only managed to code a total of about two hours, most of which time was spent working on the gamepad code and doing a bit of reading in that area.

I should have at least two hours a day to work on game stuff once training is over too as I ended up working some overtime almost everyday this week to get through the first part of training. It's going to take me a little bit to get some balance going on so I can fit game development related stuff into the mix. I should also be able to do 20 hours a week extra every other week when my son is with his mother, which will help out and then probably two to four hours in the mornings when my son is here if I get up at 5am. So, things will be progressing still. I will get the game pad code done by Sunday night. I've got a lot to do after that as well. More later.

Enough with the snow already.

I'll be glad when spring is finally here. Don't get me wrong, I love snow, but after it snowing at least two times a week for the last two months, I'm just tired of it.

I start my new job tomorrow. I'll be working for Scientific Games as a service technician for lottery computers and networks. It should be exciting, seriously! Plus it will allow me to provide for my kid and for game production as well, it's got many benefits and will be the coolest job yet to date.

Ok, now back to some game production notes. As stated in my previous post I was to spend the weekend working on implementing dircetinput and Xinput into the engine. I sat down to start that yesterday, but I ended up getting side tracked from that and working on fixing the bullet path code for barricade, which I managed to fix. There still is some adjustments that need to be made to the speed of the bullet as the dot product changes so as to have the velocity of the bullet remain seemingly constant. Kind of a trial and error thing there to get the feel right. I also started restructuring some of the management components for the engine, such as the command console and organizing a better structure for game state management. Currently I just have it setup as IDs, but have been wanting to change over to a stack like implementation for state management. I started designing that also.

Today, I'm fighting a cold "AGAIN!", it's like every two weeks I get a new one. I don't get it. I quit smoking cigarettes again months ago, I work out almost every day, get plenty of sleep, eat lots of veggies and fruits, yet still manage to get a cold regularly. It's annoying to say the least. Especially because it causes me to not feel as focused as I should and I get side tracked a lot more easily then I normally do.

With that excuse in your mind now, I started to get the game pad stuff added into the engine. I'd say I'm about a quarter of the way finished with it, but I decided that I'm going to wait to finish it because, well, I'm having trouble concentrating because of the cold. So, instead, I'm going to take it easy the rest of the day. I probably won't get back to it until Tuesday night, as I've got to work and spend time with my son on Monday, but that's ok, things are still progressing and it shouldn't take very long to finish up the game pad stuff.

Ok, I'm going to go lay down now.