Control Minecraft with only your Eyes

A beautiful story, really liked this....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-43998773/i-play-minecraft-with-my-eyes

You know...

You know that moment, when it's been over a week since you blogged, and yet you feel like it's been five minutes as you're so busy... Yeah, I've got that feeling right now...

So I thought I'd take a moment to list a few planned projects I have for these pages, if I ever get time for them....

The first is to look at the Intel TBB library, this is intended to assist in taking full advantage of the multicore capabilities of Intel chips, not something that has ever fully come into my sphere of interested (beyond running threaded code with posix threads or boost::thread or std::thread of course).

The second is some more Javascript, Python and MySQL interconnection code, in order to write a ticket/development control system, this is because I need a new one, I'm a little tired of the ones I use professionally, and the good ones out there on the interwebs are generally paid for, or limited for free, services.  So I want something super simple to handle my tickets... "Super Simple Tickets"... SST... That has a ring to it.

The third is to finally, go through some of my old Atari hardware, I plan to go through a video series just building from all the spares I have an Atari STE and I'm going to sadly sell it, as I have a LOT of junk left around the place.

A fourth might be to put together some AM1 powered AMD based machine, in order to see if the Intel TBB leverages itself smoothly onto that platform, and it appears to be pretty cheap to get entry there.

A fifth is to start recording some more game-play on my brand new EVGA nVidia 1080 GTX SC, which is an awesome piece of kit and has opened up the scope of my game play from my retired EVGA nVidia 700 GTX SC... Yes, Superclocked to Superclocked I have moved, and it was a tear because the 770 still stood up and produced such good results on the games I play, however, Unreal Engine 4 based games coming out over the last year have started to test it, and I never could get good performance in early versions of Ark (before they optimised it) and not at all in the currently unoptimized Player Unknowns Battlegrounds... So an upgrade I had, and nearly £600 later I'm a very happy puppy.  Though the delivery was rather shoddy.

And the final sixth is related to the fifth, to record more about the Medieval Minecraft Fortress and underground themed base I've been building from the excellent book I reviewed previously.

Anyway, that's what I'm planning to be up to... 

What are you guys doing?

Development : No Tests before a Prototype

I am NOT a fan of test driven development, does this mean there isn't a place for tests whilst you work?  No, it does not, I believe there is a place for tests whilst you are working, however that place is beyond the initial hard development and broad strokes of laying out the project.

When you first begin a new project there are so many things to consider, settings, scopes, layers, inherited domains just so much you need to physically take from the design pages through your teams brains and down to the keyboard.

I could even define this as a "pre-sprint" within Scrum to push out a product that the owner can then give you that first feedback on; especially if they are none technical and from this point on, from this first step you can cycle through Scrums into Sprints and with that change you can seed your development into more expansion and maintenance of code, when you do that, when you have something to test against then you need to add those tests and start to use them as a tool.

They should not drive your development, they should drive your keeping the developed work in order.  N-Crunch, N-Unit, G-Test... All these frameworks on certain languages (like C# and Java) work very well as you can reflect out the language, but before you can reflect out something with languages like C++ or C you are stuck over-engineering your tests before that first evolution of the project.

There is a name for this first evolution, it's called a Prototype.

Not many teams value a prototype, indeed Scrum itself never mentioned them, you are meant to jump from idea to stories to backlog to releasable code, and in my opinion this is not easy, it's not really communicative of what you are doing either, especially when the product owner is the only person within the development stack whom can redirect the team, but without that first tangible something many product owners can be literally lost.

Earlier this month I talked about the idea that a product owner needed to use the software life-cycle, an old idea, but a good one... Today I'm saying before you can really start to use inline tests within your IDE and before you can start to run scrums you need a prototype, arguably an even older development paradigm.

So what is my point?  Why do I keep bringing this kind of topic to the fore?  Well, simply put I believe there are far too many teams with far too many people in them not willing to push the envelop, whom are not willing to ask questions of the process they are following, not willing to bend or twist or shape the working environment to their way of working whilst simultaneously keeping up the bests practices those processes are there to enforce.

I suppose a Scrum Master should help with this process, but I find far few do, because the division of my problems with these Agile development mantra lie in the disjoint between idea and actually hitting the keys.  At times I see teams which are literally headless, they are a dozen monkeys typing a dozen keyboards, and they're being cheered on by the Scrum master, beyond those walls however they've no idea how it applies to the company, they have no interest or feedback on the return on investment that the Product Owner is all about.

A prototype, beyond a discussion, beyond the initial design, it can form the best kind of spring board and drive the best kind of Product Owner feedback down that chain, but it has to be created unfettered, unburdened by the micro-management of a scrum or sprint, it has to be created in a linear no-none-sense holistic head-space and used as a tool.

This is not being done very often in the teams I see around me.  Perhaps because it is thought of as old school, as a "has-been", however, if you look the hyper success of some products; say Minecraft; it maybe managed however Microsoft want now, it maybe teams running sprints, however Notch started it all with a Prototype.

Epic Build... Announcement?

Something is coming....

Three Games I Can't Face (Again)

Three games I often think about, but which I could never return are raising their heads with me lately, the first being Eve-Online.

I was invited back by a friend, whom wanted me and my three decently trained (for 2012) accounts to go back in to the game, and run mining operations for him.  If you're not aware, mining in Eve is pretty much staring at rocks, you have to be in a special place, and busy with other stuff to let your game time turn into this monotony.

He assured me there's loads of new stuff, "since you like mined Xel, there's loads"... But my heart just wasn't in it.  I did install the game, and try a free account for like 25 minutes, until I got utterly bored with it and had to stop.

My main problem is probably the style of game play, I loved Eve, I played way back before the new engine.  It was a clicky menu fest then, and it seems twice as much so now.

Though I still love the Armageddon!

The next is World Of Warcraft, I don't often get invited back to WoW nowadays, but when I initially quit I was asked perhaps every other day.  With the release of the movie however, my interested was peaked, and so I took a look... 

What have they done to my beloved Stormwind?

I just can't, I can't face it.  But I look back on my appearance on "Shut Up We're Talking" (which incidentally spawned this very blog) and I remember saying that damage & level inflation would devalue and dumb down the game... Boy, was I right, or was I right?

The third, and final one, is CubeWorld.  I was big into this when it came out, I begged a friend to lend me his account before I bought it (which he wouldn't - *cough* tight wad) but buying into it, was great.  It mixed Zelda with Minecraft with a proper olde tyme Adventure feel.

I had high hopes it would become part of my regular rotation, unfortunately, development seems to have utterly stopped, and it blows in the wind like dust from my gaming bones.

Do you miss an old game?  Do you insist you have quit a game, or stopped subscribing to it?... Let us know what it is in the comments below!

Minecraft : Microsoft Edition.

I just heard something.... I.... I....I can't bring myself to say it.... So here's a picture....

Did Notch not look at what happened to Bungie?

All, I can think of is this....

Minecraft Ordeal 4

For my Minecraft Ordeal of late there's so much to tell... I've been renovating my home base, expanding and linking places with rail, I've been in the nether and finally found netherwart so started to brew potions, I've also found a village and turned it into a fortified position and also caved...

I've caved so much that the skeleton spawner has more than quadrupled the number of skeletons it generates, but my caving duties are still not done through my hole base chunk.

 

I've done the base out in a combination of yellow and orange colours, notably a lot of sandstone, for which I like the texture I have loaded...

My rail links come into a new arena like area I've opened up off the side of the base

Where rail links slice at a set level I've kept them below ground and capped them with glass causeways

And of course this new rail infrastructure has been pushed down into my dep mines

I've kept the inside pond in the base, for night fishing... Though I'm yet to find any wolves or cats to tame...

My next projects will be a highrise rail link to the fortified village, villager breeding and then I have a stables to build with the many mules I've acquired.

Minecraft Ordeal #7

Whilst doing a little mining....

I found a skeleton spawner...

So having noted down its coordinates I went to the above ground coordinates and decided to make a water trap, leading to a mob elevator to bring them up to ground level...

 I cleared the forest, and began to build...

Once it was working, I then made it a tad taller, to put the skeletons onto 1 hit kills, and made this an Arrow/Bone/XP farm, my first serious farm... But it got a little taller...

But, the view from the top is ace...

Weekends Ending

I'm not sure whether my weekend actually deserved to contain the word "end", because I didn't stop once, between jet washing, and cooking, shopping and actually coming into the office on Saturday I don't feel rested at all...

I did get to play some Minecraft however - screen shots to follow - and I also began more looking into OpenGL, you can skip back through the blog and see I was working on texture mapping some area and viewing it a few years ago, I never really got to use that as work in the office took me in a different location.

But I'm looking at an OpenGL application to leverage Windows, Linux and MacOS... Possibly even OpenGLES, so the Pi & mobile platforms in the longer run.

I have prepared Wednesdays next post about the Virtual CPU code we're working on, so stay tunes for that...

In the news I noted this article:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27187582  

General Dross

With a week between posts you might get an idea how busy I've been, I'm fighting several problems at work, project problems, and I'm also trying to figure a few things out at home.

Hopefully over the next few weeks some regular game-play items might be brought up.

I did have a play with some red stone and rails in a test work on Minecraft... And I had a few hours playing my big main world over the weekend... but Enjoyed a brief swim in Lava which put me off.

My current big world project is an mob spawner, which of course means I'm spending a lot of time lighting u p the caves below my world.

I've also enjoyed the latest installment from Acquisitions Inc...

Minecraft Ordeal #6

In this update to our Minecraft world, I've pretty much been fleshing out that project I mentioned, firstly I needed glass, so I set about cutting a hunk of desert out...

This made a nice area to set up a small garden...

Not optimised, this is just a grid of pumpkins because I needed lots of lanterns...

So, this is why I needed them... Just a bit of bed rock?...

Well, no, because above is this...

It is a strip mine, straight down, with a large stair case, and fully lit with lanterns, there are regular landings at the higher levels, but from here I'm going to set up four main corridors, for each point of the compass and off of them slowly dig out a huge grid of tunnels, branch mining.

Minecraft - Ordeal #5

Today I've not been to work, when I came in last night I had a terrible, and I mean agonizing, pain under my right rib towards the front... I thought it was trapped wind, so ignored it... Big mistake, its kept me up most of the night, and when I woke up this morning I just could not move.

I'm moving now, but it is agony, I don't want to eat and I'm in such pain... But hey ho.

Before this took over me, I did play some Minecraft, so I drafted this post for you guys last night...

I didn't do anything too interesting, I started a project behind my base, out in the desert, I'm making out a square I'm going to sink as a vertical open cast/strip mine.  But before that I needed to expand and finish the storage.

So there are ranks for 9 more double chests, and then either side, I'm adding two annex's, one for an anvil, and the other for potion brewing.

Also, from above on my base ground level, I'm definitely able to just dump my inventory into the water stream and it come into my junk chest...

 

Minecraft - Ordeal #4

I spent a lot of time painting the man lab today, yes those plastered walls had aired enough in their gleaming white, so there's now a feature all in a chocolate sort of colour.  And with pay-day being Thursday, I'm going to get some nice finishing touches.

I also fitted a new light in here, so that's lovely too.

Game wise I spent the day painting and not playing, but I did have Youtube playing, and from my list of "watch later" items I found a load of Minecraft items, so tonight with an hour to spare I fired up the old minecraft, and set about a new storage area, with a simple water feed bringing items from the surface down to it for me...

Deep below I also spent the last of the prepared glass shoring up the lava pool I'm undermining for diamonds.

And that was that.

One thing I did programming wise was find a bunch of my old DirectX 9 interface books... Now, I do wonder whether leveraging DirectX9 is a good option in a game today, to get all those low powered notebooks and older PC's out there all jogging along.

I'm still fascinated by OpenGL of course, for its cross platform ability, but I do wonder whether the likes of SDL or Ogre3D using interfaces should be what I look at.  Though of course one doesn't want to reinvent the wheel...

Minecraft Ordeal 3

I've been back in my Minecraft world, and I'm a little disappointed by a couple of things, first of all, that lava pool, I've breached it above and below with glass, it's even bigger than I previously thought, it goes under other rock in a circle now over 100 squares around.

This is a major problem, you can see my lower mining hall below, were I've propped the lava pool up on glass, and you can now see above where I've made a passage directly through for my higher mining shafts, but it is a lot of dangerous work, I was at one point down to 1 heart and burning before I had my water out to quench myself.

And that only then resulted in more damn problems...

Then the temple... What a let down... There was basically just a shaft down the middle, and TNT below a pressure plate... No adventure there at all, not what I expected.  I dunno, I expected something like CubeWorld, I assumed CubeWorld had copied Minecraft, but now it seems not.

Here's my expedition and you can see I expose the trap after digging down parallel with the shaft, in the chests was gold, bones, iron and one saddle as well as a lot of rotten flesh.

I had all the sandstone I could away with me, filling my inventory... But still no adventure, no fulfillment.

CubeWorld lacks any depth, Minecraft lacks any adventure... I don't know what to do... I'm tempted to sub to Eve to make sure my name gets on the statue... And I'm even tempted to download WoW again.

I would love to have the time to sit down and write my own new game, a mix of D&D with Lort of Ultima, with I dunno, something else... But I really don't have the time when I'm in a programming mood... Work is taking over, I worked a 6 day week, where I should have done 37 hours I've done 54; and the project is still not done.

I need something I can put on and zone out with...

So Wow is the perfect place for me, I find other games, like D&D online, LOTRO and the like to look terrible... I like the cartoony world of WoW... It's just not the same as the old days... And I've been out of it for 2 years... and really for the amount of time I'll get to play it, would £9 a month be worth it?... I doubt it.

But, take a look at my Battle.NET account and it says there's "Wow Starter", which is free to play?

It's a whole other account?