By this time next week I will be in Las Vegas for Defcon 18 for just under a week and than spending a few days with my family after that.  The weekend of August 20 is Ludum Dare 18 and myself and Dave from Hybrid Mind Studios are trying to get a small group of people to meet up in the Portsmouth, NH area for the weekend.

In other news Game Developers have there own Stack Exchange site now! It’s still in Beta, but head on over to http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/ and sign up!

I’m also thinking about a site redesign for the website and for the new company…

Yes, you could always create a new workspace but this is isn’t so simple when you have a few plugins installed, specific project build and run configurations, (and don’t even get me started with custom editor settings…) this can quickly become a mess. You can export some of the settings and than reimport them, but overall I tried working this way for a time and quickly gave it up; it was just too much upkeep. After spending some time seeing how other developers use Eclipse where I work (some use Netbeans and others use IntelliJ) I realized that many developers, even those that have been using Eclipse for a while, don’t know about Eclipse Working Sets. By creating Working Sets and setting the Top Level Element, you can group your projects any way you want since Working Sets have no clue about project dependencies at all.

To create a working set, click on the View Menu button (the down arrow in the upper right corner right next to the minimize button) and select the “Select Working Set” menu option:

This will bring up the Select Working Set dialog from where you need to click the New button

which will bring you to the New Working Set dialog window where you would select the type of projects that the Working Set will contain. Now you can define the Working Sets that you will want to use and the Projects that should be associated with it. I suggest to create as many Working Sets that make sense for the projects that you have. There is no limit to the number of projects that can belong to a particular Working Set and a project can even belong to more than one. A Working Set is just an organizational tool for displaying Projects in Eclipse. I am going to just create  a single Working Set for the testing projects I have in my Workspace:

Now that we have a Working Set defined, we can use it to filter our Projects in any of the Views by going back to the Select Working Sets dialog and selecting a Working Set:

At this point the ordering of the Working Sets can be adjusted just by dragging and dropping it to the desired place in the tree or bulk actions on your Projects such as Refreshing an entire Working Set or limiting searches to a particular Working Set can be performed.

While Working Sets provide a bit of help in controlling the Workspace clutter, it’s not as ideal as being able to work with a single Project grouping like Visual Studio’s Solution files or IntelliJ’s project files. This is one area where I find Eclipse very lacking compared to other Java IDE’s.

]]> http://www.caseydunham.net/blog/2010/05/22/eclipse-working-sets/feed/ 0 http://www.caseydunham.net/blog/2010/05/20/developer-goals/ http://www.caseydunham.net/blog/2010/05/20/developer-goals/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 00:33:20 +0000 Casey http://www.caseydunham.net/blog/?p=145 I have an upcoming meeting with my manager at work to discuss my development goals for the year (I’m just coming onto this team so it’s a bit late) and I have of course been thinking about not only what my developer goals are, but what should a developer goal look like. I could easily list a ton of different technologies/APIs or frameworks that I want to learn, but in my opinion knowing a lot of frameworks isn’t enough so I am trying to think about other things that would make me a better developer. I know a fair amount of different technologies so I would rather spend the upcoming months refining my knowledge with what I am currently using.  Here are a few of the things floating around in my head right now as far as areas I want to improve in:

Tech

I want to increase my level of knowledge of these

• JavaScript/jQuery
• Hibernate
• Grails
• Maven

Methodology

I would like to improve my abilities in these areas

• Test Driven Development
• Agile/Scrum
• Software Estimation

Projects

I want to continue to work on

• Finish PlayWithYourPeas XNA game
• Contribute to an Open Source Project
• Write more

These are just a couple of areas that I want to either learn more about or improve upon. I have also been pondering whether or not to pursue the Certified Associate in Project Management certification. I have already met the requirements so it would just be a matter of a bit of study and to take the exam. I currently have no desire to be a project manager, but I think having this under my belt would go a long way towards reaching my longer term goal of becoming a team lead. I currently don’t have any other certifications and am not planning on getting any.

When constructing the above list of items, I was also thinking about SMART which is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timebound.  For example, applying this to my above list I could do almost all of these by building a small web application. However, to make any of these official goals I need to make them more specific like “build a website with Grails that does CRUD operations to a database as well as make use of a webservice” (that covers about 90% of the tasks I would use it for at work).  I would make this a bit more specific by outlining the type of site that I wanted to build, most likely something data heavy with a lot of complex forms like I have to deal with at work. This is also definitely attainable. I don’t need to build the next big thing but I could easily build a website that flexes all of the technology I need it to in a few months with spare time.  Even if I am not using Grails as an everyday technology, it is completely relevant as it uses technology I do use every day. Also, laying out the UI and handling form data is going to be a great exercise that I can apply to every other application I build. Timebound is the tricky one. I would want to set a time frame on when these goals should be completed that isn’t too aggressive but also not too far off in the future.

I will most likely refine these items and remove or add some over the next few days, but whatever makes the final cut, it is important to stay focused and to complete them.

Ludum Dare 17 is fast approaching and I am really looking forward to it. This will only be my second time around, starting with LD #15 (had to miss #16). I’ve been thinking a lot about what I will be using this time around. My last Ludum Dare game, Coffee Caverns, was in C++ with SDL. I was thinking about switching it up this time to use C# and the XNA framework, but I think I am just going to continue with my code from last time. I had thought about using Java and making a 4k game, but since I program in Java all day at work, it will be nice to get back into a bit of C.

In preparation, I think I might put together something simple and small, perhaps create a towlr? Maybe. Right now I am going to double check to make sure I have everything I will be using and play around with things this week. Currently, my stack will consist of the following:

• Windows 7
• Visual Studio 2008
• SDL
• sfxr
• Audacity
• Paint.NET
• Chronolapse

I’m thinking about also putting together a play list of some sort for the weekend as well and am looking for some new music to listen too. If I put something together I will share the list as well.

• Innovation – 1.68
• Fun – 2.41
• Theme – 2.0
• Graphics – 1.77
• Audio – 1.80
• Humor – 1.79
• Overall – 2.23
• Community – 2.88
• Coolness -  26%

Overall, I placed 92 out of 107 and won a bronze medal for Coolness.

Looking over the Top 10 entries, there are a few games I didn’t get to play in there and will over the next few weeks, check them out and probably play some of the ones that I already did a couple of times to see what makes them winners in their category. I will also be taking a close look at what was used in the creation of the game and see if I an pick up any interesting ideas through the games’ author blogs.

The next Ludum Dare, is going to be sometime in December, so I am making sure to leave my weekends open!

Each Ludum Dare has an associated theme that the game must be created around that is decided on by community vote. The theme is only revealed at the start of the competition and for LD #15, the theme was “Caverns”. I immediately had a few ideas but nothing that seemed too out of the ordinary. Upon deciding to enter the contest, I also made up my mind that regardless of what the theme was, my goal was to complete a game, no matter how simple, within that 48 hour deadline.  I did complete a simple game, but as usual with these types of competitions, didn’t quite turn out as I had hoped. This is an effort by me to talk about some of the things that I feel went right in the development of Coffee Caverns and what could have been done better.

The Good

Probably one of the best choices was to use what I was already familiar with, C++ and SDL in a Windows environment. I know that some people like to experiment with new technologies during these competitions, but I decided to not risk it, my goal was to complete a game. Along these same lines I also decided that whatever I did would be small. I have started and never finished numerous game projects in the past much like every other aspiring game developer and I also know that one of the things that separates aspiring game developers from game developers is that game developers finish things. I had a decent idea of the scope of what I would be able to finish and decided to stick with it.

I didn’t start coding or designing anything until the Saturday morning after the competition started. I checked to see what the theme was going to be and than went to sleep. In the morning I ate breakfast and started a bit of mind mapping while having some coffee. I started thinking about caverns and I kept coming back to danger and falling, falling objects like rocks, and than somewhere in the mind map coffee came up so I ended up mixing coffee with falling rocks. Awesome, sounds a bit weird let’s go with it. It came naturally that this would be an arcade style game and once I decided on it I stuck with it. The total design of the game was probably about an hour and that was with sketching a bit of a development plan as well.

I also liked that I was able to get a couple of sound effects in thanks to the wonderful program Sfxr. I am glad that I got the title screen in without too much trouble as well. It only took a little bit of trouble and was I think worth it. Although next time, I am going to check for a specific key press to transition as opposed to any key, it made taking screen shots of it a bit tricky.

The Bad

I think that my biggest mistake was not getting the prototype up and playable as fast as I wanted to. My intention originally was to use primitives for prototyping and later put in the graphics. By the time I had the framework ready I needed a break from coding and decided that I would play around with Paint.NET a bit to see what I could come up with. I should also mention that other than SDL, I was using no prior written code, writing everything from scratch. In no time I had created a couple of graphics that I thought would work, so I figured I would just drop them in. It wasn’t a huge time waster since I was going to do it anyways and in some ways did work out in the end.

The Ugly

Easily the worst part about the game and what I would argue is the game, is the game play itself. The game is no where near as balanced as I would have liked it to have been, the scoring is very simple, and there is very little feedback to the player. I spent most of Sunday doing game play testing and bug fixing. I had the majority of the code written by Saturday night and it was a good thing too as I had a few things come up Sunday that might have kept me from finishing otherwise.

The little things that I didn’t fix that were pointed out to me in comments on my Ludum Dare blog are in retrospect what could have made the game better. The player sprite being about a pixel off during the animation would have taken me all of about three seconds to fix. I also never got the score out of the title bar like it should have been. This would have been another easy fix that would have added to the polish of the game.

The other thing that people complained a lot about was my use of an installer. I had mixed feelings about it but I know and understand the irritation I am sure it caused others as I started reviewing a few of the other entries. At a certain point I was annoyed that I had to unzip things and will next time not bother with the setup and provide a straight running executable.

Summary

Overall the whole competition was very rewarding and I learned quite a bit as well and would recommend everyone who is interested in game development to take part in these competitions as often as they can. I am definitely going to!

Download Windows Executable – coffee-caverns-1.0.zip

Download VS2009 Source- coffee-caverns-1.0-src.zip

For the past year I have been looking to start my own game development company and give it a shot going solo. I’m not going to be quitting my day job to do this, but this goal will never be realized without restructuring what I am currently doing and making a little time each day to spend on prototyping and developing.  I also need to make sure that I spend time away from the computer exercising and pursuing my spiritual path. It’s the trinity of mind, body and spirit making itself known. I know from past experience that if I don’t keep this triangle of activities in check I will not make progress as burnout will surely set in one or all of the areas.

I am going to use this upcoming week to start incorporating some changes to my routine. I went for a long walk/run today and forgot how much fun it can be. I am going to start running at least every other day for half an hour and bring back a few meditation techniques.  I am also going to set a goal to have a small game done by two weeks from tonight to ease myself back into things. I will also be time tracking how long the development of the game actually takes as a starting point for better time estimations.

 Earlier this month as I moved to working almost exclusively from my laptop, I did a lot of housekeeping across all of my hard drives to get everything in one place and backed up. Looking at the list of all of the Visual Studio solution files of half started projects or all the random Eclipse projects, I decided that some action was sorely needed.

 I usually keep all of my development work, whether it is C++, Java or something else, under the same root folder usually called projects. This makes it convenient to see everything at a glance and to make sure that everything is backed up as needed. I started my pruning by making sure everything that I was working on was under this folder moving things as needed. I than started to ask myself the following questions about each project in the list:

• What, if anything, will I gain by finishing this project?
• Will completing this project teach me something that will help me achieve my long term goals?

 If a project didn’t pass both of these questions, it immediately went into a separate folder that I called shelved-projects. I may or may not come back to these ones but I also didn’t want to just delete them forever as they may have pieces of code that I may need again for some reason. I am going to start making this a monthly routine to keep more projects like this from cropping up and to stay focused on my real goals.

 I encourage everyone to do this as often as they feel necessary. It doesn’t even have to be software projects. It could be anything that you had it in your mind to do but for some reason or other you were unable to see it through to the end. Unless it is something to do with remodeling your house. You had better finish it or pay someone to finish it less your spouse gets mad at you!