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Well, everything is done now! Apparently things are still kind of broken; but if I feel like it, I can fix it later. The game is playable and the client has some chance to win, if they get a good run. I finally typed out all the documents and finally got a good video. I don't know how helpful my audio is though. Hopefully the write-ups are more descriptive. Once everything finally uploads to Perforce, I am done with this! Finally, I know how to network! \m/

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaag

Lag is the only thing preventing me from finishing. I think I will try a system of throwing out incoming packets if the queue gets too long. I wanted to have checks on the queue anyway. Theoretically, I want to add more null checks around every time the server is used, too. I'll implement those later. I still have time for such a small task. Perhaps tomorrow. Everything else seems to work perfectly though. There is a lot of delay on switching screens at the end of a round though, I will try to clean that up, too. So close, I can almost taste it. It tastes good.

Good Enough For Government Work

Well, the game works perfect (most of the time). I'll do some more bug testing and some code clean up and commenting later. The code is still a huge mess and has commented out code and stuff - but it works (most of the time). Occasionally, I lose a packet or read one wrong it seems and it falls apart. But I have a while and even some more time today. I'd turn this in if I had to. Still have to do the write ups and stuff though. Technically, also there's a flashy thing that doesn't work and the other player's jets don't make noise correctly, but... Well, I'll get the jets working later probably. Also, there's nothing to throttle the packet traffic if the other buffer is full and if the player drops with some perfect timing, there's some null errors on the network session I might search out for. But everything looks good for the most part!

To Infinity! And Beyond!

Well, a long list of things work. And a long list of things don't. Need to fix scores and lag and resetting at least. But I have a head start over everyone, though I have more to do since I left everything in. The handshaking seems to work, at least. I only have a few days left to finish this. I hope it works soon. I hope we can get him to move it to Friday or Saturday, too, but I don't think that's the case. I'll be in Belgium this weekend. So hopefully today and tomorrow I can finish it. I'd hate to have to work on it Monday. Retro works again though. And local works perfectly - well, I bet it has a bug now that I think about it, but it'll have to wait.

Shoot a Nuke Down a Bug Hole, You Got a Lot of Dead Bugs

Bugs, bugs, bugs... I am very slowly fixing up the code, but there are just so many bugs and when you fix one, a million more crop up. The game is mostly playable, but player 2 begins to lag quickly and the server needs to wait on them. Reset isn't quite working. And sometimes the client doesn't always get the packets it needs.

Also, I am trying to keep local and retro working. Both work with the exception of resetting the ships. This is going to take a few more days still. At least it's fun...

Dig Up

So, strangely enough, I cannot figure out how to get the screen which worked almost perfectly to finally be finished. The other event which I am having problems with is  the bullets.

HOWEVER!

You can play an incredibly laggy game of SpaceWars now, up until the upgrade screen. Also, you can't shoot.

In other great news, it seems my proctoring will be accepting and I will be able to take the final. Now I just need to print out everything. Good thing tomorrow is a holiday.

Testing... Testing... 1... 2... 3...

Well, setting up a proctor is turning out to be a bit of a mess, but it seems I found people willing to help. Hopefully that librarian will help and that'll be the end of it. I didn't plan to involve the entire Japanese department. Hopefully it all turns out in the end. I made an appointment for the test. I made it in the Central Time Zone so hopefully that is right. I'm not worried about the test, just setting up the test. Especially since I leave for Amsterdam this weekend right after.

As far as the code is going. It's going well. Brian's not my partner, but he's really helped and now he has more of an idea of how to get his to work, too. Alisa's been too busy to help even a little so Brian is really a life-saver. I hope to do more testing today, I am pretty confident I have it completed. I might need to look into my error-handling a bit more though.

The Internet, The Final Frontier

So, I have made a ton of progress and can guess my game is really close to complete. There's a lot of bugs, but if I work all day tomorrow and have someone to help me test, I think I can get this done. It might even be done! Due to the nature of the testing, I might be introducing bugs that won't exist in the real version. I have to queue up the list and then destroy it and read it back, but I am not doing it in a perfect order so sometimes things get messed up if I clear the list in different places. I hope the online version works. I still need to fix the asteroids though, they don't bounce when they collide. There's also a problem with the weapon select where the annoying thing doesn't flash anymore, but I like to think it's a feature.

If Con Is The Opposite Of Pro, Does That Make Congress The Opposite of Progress?

Through some trickery which wasn't as hard as I thought, I have been able to send myself packets. So I was finally able to do some testing. This technique should allow me to test the game fairly well, but not well enough. At least I can get 90% accuracy or so. I am pretty confident my ship select works now, I did have errors like I thought, now I hope to test it whenever someone will comes on.
I hope I'm allowed to develop in the common folder because that is where I am doing it. I want people to be able to help whenever they can since everyone will be so busy, I'll need a lot of partners.

Programming Without A Monitor

I honestly might as well. I have to assume my code will work and keep going. The only thing I am sure of it is that it builds. And I'm not even sure of that. One of my project that MUST HAVE WORKED suddenly stopped working. There's noooooo way it wasn't. It's giving me errors about not having a default constructor for my struct. That was never a problem before and Alisa's code runs just fine without it. How is that possible?
I can't test my code.
I just can't.
Nothing I try works. Because some jerks couldn't make their textures work on embedded graphics cards, I can't do anything. I brought three computers and an Xbox to Germany and I can't do my final project. Ogren tried to help me last night, but he could not log in. I don't know why. I used the code with my actually XBox Live account and registered it and everything and it works for me. There's no way I can install all this equipment on someone else's computer and they all have tiny netbooks anyway. And the people in the class mostly ignore my existence except Alisa, but she's so busy. Only once this week did she have time to help me and it was three hours I was not here for.
Furthermore, I need to find and convince some professor to sit around  with me for 3 hours while I take a test. And I cannot even give them much forewarning. If I can't find one Monday, I cannot take the final. There's a 48 hour approval time frame and the test must be completed by Friday and so I need to take it Thursday since I won't be here Friday. I guess theoretically, I could take it Wednesday in the late afternoon. But they say they need to be approved 48 hours in advance, not apply to be, so when - I don't even know.
I really wanted to take this class, now it's doing everything in its power to fail me.

Fire Ze Missiles!

Well, that was easier than I thought. I am rapidly converting everything to events without problems. Now bullet creation is done by events. I also gave every bullet a unique identifier so I can figure out which bullet it is.

I have been using a lot of static recently. I hope it's for the best. I moved the EventList out of any screen and made it an entire static class.

I still have a lot left and have to get the networking working more. But I suppose progress is smooth at least.

???? Profit

So I managed to make my way around Microsoft's cruel attempt to charge people to develop on Live and finally got both accounts working. Since I cannot run two computers, I am not sure how helpful that is though. I haven't had much time to program and I am a bit worried. I think I might be ahead of people in terms of work and understanding though. If I can get some time, I can power through it. I wish I had the same finals week everyone else did to relax and focus. This weekend I should have time...

Experiencing Minor Technical Difficulties

So my computer seems to have had it with me, and sometimes it just hardcore crashes. This has me worried that it is going to die permanently, but hopefully that is not the case and it is just tired or something. Right...

The other problem I am having is is that I cannot run the game on my other laptops. This is great call for concern because I have no labs to go to. I have no idea how I will test my homework.

At least though everything seems to be working. I am slowly converting everything to events. Hopefully it works when it is tested. I added some art, too. I spent waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long trying to figure out what font they used on the main menu. I just gave up. Besides they use different fonts throughout.

I want to work on this more, but alas, I must go to other classes, too. At least I should have this weekend to work on it and things seem to be going well now. We'll see what happens when the networking starts.

Pew Pew Lasers

Well, I made progress. I added in some networking and the logging in works. The big problem is, though, that I cannot test without that second profile and my XBox Live account doesn't work either.
The other problem I had was I spent alllllll day trying to figure out what the hell font they used. I simply could not find it and eventually gave up. I did some more art, too. My life would be infinitely easier if they hadn't baked these things in.
I did manage to fix the annoying purchasing screen. Now if you change weapons, you get your money back instead of spending the money and then losing it all if you switch again.

Does Compute

So, while the program was daunting and confusing at first, once I knew what it was supposed to do, it was very easy. We have used similar things many times before. We use this style for queuing up events in our game, except they were read from a Lua file. Needless to say, I find this very fun.
I probably should have broke everything up into separate files, but I just kept adding, thinking it would be the last thing until it got massive. It all works though and I guess they sort of belong together anyway. I have similar set ups in my other project where I am doing this very similar set up as I mentioned.
I am sad I did not use the as -- reference, method, keyword? -- but casting worked with me having to do less work and less editing the test. I wanted to avoid editing the test, but I had to, there was no way around it. Everything works though and it looks pretty so I am happy.
I am still very confused about the dump function. I have an idea of what it is supposed to do, but the method signature provided would make it useless and I don't feel like editing it so I just had every method do its own printing. I hope Keenan doesn't mind. Plus the way the test is set up, it has to be public, and yet it - I don't know, it's just a mess so I didn't use it.
I'm excited to get this final project underway! :D

Bonjour

So, I was a bit worried because I was pretty sure we had homework, but did not check until shortly before I needed to get ready for my vacation to France. I had not started and was intimidated by the assignment. I tried to write some of it on the train, mostly copying the Microsoft tutorial with the patchy T-Mobile Internet while I was within German telephone service. I wasn't able to run it successfully and assumed it was because I didn't have internet on my computer, just my phone. But we had an early night and I was able to use the free Wi-Fi.
I was having problems getting it to connect to each other. Finally, Shervin mentioned something about Keenan's code which I did not understand at first. I eventually tried digging through the files on Perforce and found a sample of the program. It worked much better than the Microsoft tutorial and I used it and the program was mostly done.
I was so happy to see the .sort() function did all the work for me. I had earlier tried to figure out how I would send all the data. For whatever reason, I first thought to put the list into an array and send the one array at once and reassemble the list. I am glad I had time to think about it and use this far superior method.
I finally got the programs sending data, but I was getting random packets of 20s at the beginning so I made packets which came before every packet which said it was a valid packet coming next and that did the trick. I was quite happy. All in all, this program made me very worried and then very satisfied. There are a lot of optimizations I could make, but for now, this will do.

I Feel Like Class Cat Would Have Better Suited With A String

So, I finally finished. I remember Keenan saying something about not using loops or being more imaginative, but I - I just figured it out!

I just fixed it. It looks much better now. I can think of one more optimization, but I don't think I care enough to make it. Also, I should probably comment more, but I have decided against it. I am pretty sure you destroy the object when you serialize it, so that's what I have been doing.

Not too many problems on this project once I learned of memcpy.

Cocky Corbin

Alisa would love this title. At any rate, I originally thought this assignment was easy. Now I know it is, but for a bit I was a bit confused on how to do it right. I tried a few things and after looking through the lectures I believe I finally got it. I'm only halfway done, but I don't think the other two will be a problem.
The biggest problem is the IDE. It seems intent on hiding all the commands I want. Perhaps I have the Express version. I wish the MSNDAA would get back to me on giving me another copy of Ultimate...

Science and Outerspace!

So, setting up was easy and it was fun to get back into programming. I could have probably written a better program, but it gets the job done. I believe Professor Keenan does not like System("Pause"), for good reason I suppose, so I left it out. The Space game was easy to set up.
As far as my thoughts go on the class, I do not think it will be too bad. I really look forward to finally learning multiplayer games, thus why I could not pass up this opportunity. And I know I have a lot of friends in the class to work together with if I really need help. Hopefully it won't get too intense, but I should be fine.

Auf Englisch

So, it seems we have another blog to do. Sweetness. This whole class will be held while I am abroad, hopefully I can keep up. We'll find out when everything finally starts up.