With all the brouhaha over the new Kindle 2, many are speculating on the future of Amazon’s eBook reader. Yet few people know the secret history of the Kindle. This history must be revaled before people understand the TRUE reasons why the Kindle will fail.
I’ve been working on a reboot of Free Sky, codenamed “Shiny”, and things are coming along nicely. I’ve learned a lot about program structure in the last two years, and I’m finally beginning to understand the MVC (Model-View-Controller) way of making an app with a graphical interface. A lot of problems that seemed unapproachable two years ago now open themselves to solutions. Instead of writing reams of boilerplate code, my new controllers and views are slim and easy to understand. And I am finally beginning to understand and apply the most important design principle of all: You Ain’t Gonna Need It (a.k.a. YAGNI).
I recently mentioned that I had a nifty little dice library and parser sitting around, waiting to get cleaned up and released as open source. Well, thanks to the common cold, I spent a good portion of today sitting around the house.
When I wasn’t sleeping, I was learning how to package a python library for release on PyPI, the Python Package Index, and setting up a Google Code project. Without further ado, behold: Dyce.
This is a part of "Free Sky: Objects in Space".
With my object system prototype, I wanted to explore the possibilities of tagging. An article in AI Game Programming Wisdom 2 (”A Flexible Tagging System for AI Resource Selection”, by Paul Tozor) spurred my imagination: the article poses the scenario of a first-person sneaker. The player sneaks up on two guards and overhears them complaining about the cold. The straightforward way to program this scenario is to assign each guard instance a list of sound files to play through, either randomly or in sequence. However, any time you want to add another sound file to the possibilities, you have to edit that guard’s list, and the lists of any other guards which need that sound file. Mr. Tozor proposes another way.
This is a part of "Free Sky: Objects in Space".
One of the first problems I tackled in my prototype was persistence,
because I foresaw the difficulties of object serialisation, and I
feared them. Because I’ve chosen Python as my language of first
resort, serialisation isn’t as big of an issue as it would be, say, in
C++: it’s built in to the language as the pickle
module. The mechanics of serializing individual objects isn’t
the problem, but capturing the state of a large, complicated system
with lots of little objects running around very well could be. I
needed a strategy.
None
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
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