Status Update

It has been a very busy couple of months, especially with getting a new puppy last month.

I’m in the process of restructuring my personal infrastructure! In extremely broad terms, this will simplify and clarify each servers role, hopefully making it easier and more predictable to maintain the infrastructure. I’ll write a in-depth post on this at a later date!

I’ve also been working on a number of projects related to the game Anarchy Online. Probably most notable is the launch of Demoder’s PlanetMap Viewer v1.2, adding many new features which are described in the thread. Work have begun on sanitizing the Itemsbot and CIDB tool chain by making an independent resource database parser which handles all items, nanos, icons and a few other data types. I’ll go into detail on this later. Vha.Net and Vha.Chat is being upgraded from .NET 2.0 to .NET 4.0 (client profile), and is receiving a new packet system in the process. I’m currently on the planning stage for porting Helpbot to Bot#; No ETA yet.

Photography status: Slacking! I’ve taken some less-than-stellar photographs, and have not bothered uploading these; I am probably going for a photo spree this weekend though; Hopefully I’ll be able to take some which are upload-worthy. :)

My game time is pretty evenly split between Civilization 5 and The Secret World – an amazing modern-time MMO RPG. If you didn’t check it out yet, you should – Ragnar Tørnquist, the man behind The Longest Journey, is the main guy behind the game.  The story easily sucks you in like a good book which you just can’t put down till you’ve finished reading. Quests are very original and fun – I end up doing quests not for their XP or loot, but for the story and direct entertainment value.

Towerwars.info didn’t update correctly this weekend

It was brought to my attention that towerwars.info didn’t update correctly this weekend. When I looked at the site, I noticed there were nothing new since 5th May. That’s a day and a half of quiet; And knowing the Anarchy Online community, that only happens when they’re physically prevented from raging war. Something was wrong.

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Coding, Motivation

I need more motivation/willingness to code things, especially AO-related things.
The tower war tracker isn’t even half-finished yet, while the patcher is about 98% done – just need some fixing, and I need to get around to give vhab what he needs to provide the backend with aodevs.com. This, again, relies on the aforementioned fixing. The map compiler is considered done, any further work is related to UI improvements and possibly further optimization for multithreaded work. Continue reading

Demoder’s Patcher: restructure is progressing

Except today, I haven’t been programming on the patcher since 30th October.

Today, I finished one major part: Streamlining how the patcher deals with distributions. Basically, one piece of software (application, map or GUI) will be considered a distribution. A GUI may contain multiple components, such as xml files (located in cd_image\gui\) and texture files (located in cd_image\textures\Archives). Continue reading