General update

I’ve been incredibly unproductive in my month off. Mostly playing Death Stranding for a few days at the beginning, then reading and researching more than actually progressing at the workstation.

That said, I have made minimal progress on the hardware front, so there’s that at the least. Mostly just around the controller and getting more information on what to do for the modem and Ethernet.

For Shambler, I’ve just now tried converting the CVS repository to Git as the amount of security concerns for CVS are many. Of course this is much like Epic’s approach with Unreal Engine, moving from Perforce to Git for GitHub and I honestly don’t know how they manage. It must be a nightmare going back-and-forth like that.

UI-wise, I’ve been putting this off for a while. Initially, I was going to be using my work on [TERMINAL] for a basic menu to get things done. When I took a look at what I wrote, I hated it. It works but it’s not pretty and it’s also not going to be easy to expand in the future. Figuring that I’ll have to rewrite it at some point, I resigned myself to going all-in on the UI now. Little progress has been made and right now I’m only concerning myself with creating labels, buttons, and a list box. The trouble comes from also wanting to integrate the scripting language into the game that I’m at the moment 50/50 on implementing. On the one hand, it’s necessary to expand the game and allow for UGC, on the other, it’s another thing to worry about investing time in before anything can get done.

I’ve also been looking into various gamer service platforms for ideas on what to add for the dreamcast.live site. There’s only so much I can look at for presumed legal reasons. Xbox Live has always been in the back of my mind along with what GameSpy offered. A trophy/badge/achivement/gold sticker system would be neat, though I’m very aware of the limitation of expanding a gamer profile on a standard memory card and the write times of doing so. I’m quite far behind in my own memory card work and have zero idea if it can be relied on. I’d hate to make people use something they don’t want, which is also the reason for allowing scenarios to be burnt to a disc rather than rely upon external storage. I digress. Things like matchmaking, lobbies, and friend/guid cards/buddy lists seem like something that isn’t as invasive as something like a reputation and preference system. Off the top of my head, I can’t recall if either of those are supported by Xbox Live any longer. Rich presence is another nice-to-have. The use in Shambler may be pretty limited, however.

A major issue I have with the networking is that I really want to run it off a few Sun machines I have for a while, just because it’s really the whole point of this project. It’s not an issue of running them, it’s more an issue of running them as they are. Security patches and whatnot have come a long way since June 31 2001. I’d like to use them for a few years before migrating to either OpenIndiana, GNU/Linux, or some BSD variant.

I initally titled this as “Game UI,” but it turned more into a general update than anything UI-specific. I was looking to get a UI up-and-running for a silly demo build before the New Year. Doubtful that will be the case now.

Thinking back on the recent posts, I haven’t included any screenshots or video. I’m looking to rectify that. I want to start working on the site for Shambler soon as well, creating a roadmap, exposing the code and assets via Git, and hosting downloads. The issue I have with the last one is that in 2001, there weren’t many options for CI/CD. The only one I can immediately think of is Tinderbox, even then it’s noe idea. So I’m rolling my own. Yes, another thing to tack onto my “To Do” list, but it at least keeps me from getting bored. This does lead to an interesting question of how those builds get up to the public-facing server as it’s not like I’m going to port forward port 21 to one of the Sun machines.

Rambling over for today. I’m going to get back to work.