Monday, January 24, 2011

Noise, what noise?

I spent a huge chunk of the last few days looking at things like perlin noise and A* pathfinding algorithms.  While I can figure out pathfinding, I'm not real great at the logic behind it, just making it work.  And perlin noise, as well as any triangle type math, is just beyond my mental capacity.  So I gave up, admitting failure.

BUT, I posted a "project" on the freelancer.com site, which is a place you can go to get people all around the world to do your project for you.  I posted all my requirements, and already have a bid of $1200 for it.  I can afford that!  The bidder doesn't have any reviews, and I have another 50 or so days of bidding.  Hopefully I get some other bids, but if not I may still try to go with the $1200 bid for everything.

What does that do for me?  It allows me to pretty immediately put all the code in place to have a 4X type of game, based on the BT universe, with my own perspective on how technology was lost, how production works, and how fasanomics works.  The graphics won't be any better than megamek, and I may support using megamek to play scenarios until I get the low level combat code worked out.  Great news though!  Of course talking the wife out of $1200 when we have another 6-12 months of debt to pay off isn't going to be an easy sell.  Luckily I can use my GI Bill, go back to school, and make +$1000 a month while I attend!

I started entering in all the record sheet data again, its a long and tedious pain, but I need the data to ensure my "builder" applications are functioning correctly, plus its required to generate random tables, build objects for my other games, etc.  I should probably write an OCR type app that can just recognize the record sheets instead and port the data from them, but I've never gone there :(

Today I helped my boss at work with some C# code.  I have never been big on VB.NET vs C# in any way, but to simply split a string in C# was a serious pain, and I came to the conclusion that C# just blows.  C# and VB.NET have nearly exactly the same speed, capabilities, and features, but things are just soooo much more tedious in C#.  I completely gave up the possibility of ever migrating over to it.  If anybody tries to tell you one is better than the other, they are full of it, both are just wrappers for the .NET compiled language, and the C# to VB.NET converters online kind of prove just how similar the languages are.  The syntax in VB.NET is just so much more sensible, and the people less elitists.

This blog thing seems to work ok, though I'm not seeing many people following me :(  I'll continue to post on it for at least a few more months.

I'll probably start another one with political rants, it'll keep me focused for my 2012 congressional campaign ;)

Bad Syntax

2 comments:

  1. One of the nice things about the .NET framework is that you can actually combine VB.NET and C# projects into one solution, interchangeably using classes from each as you need them. This is very nice when you have a library of code in one language that is well-tested and stable, and for whatever reason you are developing in a different one, removing the need to migrate well-formed code and simply just use the classes right out of the box so to speak.

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  2. Yeah, I have linked C# class objects within VB.NET apps, its awesome that way, plus the online converters between those 2 languages are excellent so essentially they are the same code.

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