Career: Mad Elite Skillz

So every day this week, I've tried to hit up these video tutorials on MSDN so I can brush up on my C#. Little did I know I would be doing more than brush up. My GUI skills are weak. The videos I've been watching have been quite useful. Continue I will, yess.

Hobby: What hobby?

I'm soo damn fickle. Well, this past weekend I didn't do anything on the hobby front. I think I'm going to put on my career tunnel vision glasses as I can't see myself doing testing for long periods of time. So, there's my update. Expect to see more career related posts from now on. Though I really do want to get back to making a game. I just have to be sensible right now (indefinitely).

Career: DB Tables are done

So, as far as I know, the tables and relationships are done for the DB. Everything seems to look good. Hopefully I won't need to change anything down the road. If I do, well I'll learn something from it.

I think now I can go ahead with figuring out how it all will look now. Tis will be a grand 'ol time! ^_^

Hobby: Quest for the holy tutorial

Not much going on over the weekend on the hobby front. I found another tutorial on C# game programming which gives me headaches in the second part of it. Is it really that hard to do up a tutorial, posted on a Microsoft website no less, that can compile without errors? I mean COME ON!!!!

Anyway, I will trudge through it next weekend to see if I can make it work. Though I'm still keen on doing up a 2D thing before moving on to 3D.

Career: Busy week

Yeah, didn't do anything on the career front this past week. Well, programming wise. I am reading Code Complete at work on my spare moments. It's going slow but I think it will be worth it in the end. I'm thinking of picking up a book on design patterns here in the near future. That's an area I should probably read up on. I did read an article about the Singleton pattern today. It was a good read but probably just hit the highlights. I hope to do more stuff on my front end this week. I'll probably sit down to design some forms or stuff. Though really I should flesh out what it all should do before thinking of the forms. Anyway, so that's that.

Career: Of Tables and Relations

So, I added a couple of tables to the ol database last night. Though I hit a problem. It's not a big problem, but it's an issue I'll have to solve because Vanilla Ice isn't here to. Because if I had a problem, yo he'd solve it...never mind.

I guess a bit more background info is needed now. As I stated last post, I am in the mists of creating a database with a front end to store my job contacts. The only user was going to be me. Personal information wasn't important. A little bit later, I decided it would be cool to expand it to include all my employment history, jobs, job contacts, references, the whole kabob so to speak. So, that's all good. I had a central contact table with pretty much everything else spoking off it. Then, I thought it would be cool if I had a person table which would include personal stuff. Then I was thinking if I'm gonna have a table with personal info, why not bust it out and make my DB good for multiple users. So I add those tables last night.

I was looking at the ER diagram and noticed a data flaw. See, I had intended to my contact table to own resumes and cover letters and what not. Which makes sense, kind of. But if you think about it, a person has a resume and cover letter, not a contact. But a person might have multiple versions as well. So now I'm thinking how to resolve this.

It will probably be better to have a person own zero or more contacts and each contact can have zero or one resumes and cover letters associated with it. Then a person can have zero or more resumes and cover letters. If that makes sense. If it doesn't, there's a nice MIS program taught at WSU Tri-Cities. ^_^ Damn..I just looked at their course listing for Fall 2006. Game development as a course. Oh...the rage......though I'm kind of happy to see it there. Sort of...

So, that's career right now. I realize that I should make these posts shorter so I can focus on the problems at hand. Need to learn how to avoid the long posts. o_O

Career: C# and SQL Server

Ahh, a post about what I'm working on during the week. So, a few weeks back, I was unemployed for just about three weeks. Typically when one is unemployed, one applies for unemployment benefits through your local state offices and/or internet related website. I did the latter. One of the thing you had to do was to do some sort of job search activity 3 times a week. They had a nice little form that let you record who you contacted and whatnot as they may want to see who you talked to at any given time. I didn't use the form. I used Excel. Using a spreadsheet was good enough for what kind of information they wanted, but I wanted a far more complex and cryptic way of doing it. Ok, not really. I actually thought that this form would translate well to a small database. And you got to have a front end for that database.

So, I went forth getting what I needed to make said database. There were several options available to me. On the free side, database engines that I could have used include MySQL, Firebird, MS SQL Server Express, or the MS JET engine which is included with Excel. I knew of MySQL from some past work I did with it. I also have a book on it, Learning SQL. I read about Firebird in a magazine many months ago and didn't really have any hands on experience with it. SQL Server Express is the free, stripped down version of SQL Server 2005. I've used SQL Server in the past at one internship. I just "threw-up" the JET engine up there cause I'm kind of kicking its tires at work. I actually had no intentions of using JET.

I eventually went with SQL Server as it included a nice GUI for making tables and all that good stuff. I'm sure MySQL has something similar and I have no doubt in my mind that it's a very capable engine. Since I'm into C#, which is pretty much a MS product, and I was planning to do the front end in it I thought it would be good keep it all...umm...native. I guess. Though I do have plans of making another front end in maybe Java (because I like torture and there always seems to be some demand for java devs) or even a web interface in AJAX (because I'm a sheep in the herd of AJAX).

So I went to work designing the database in SQL Server Express. It's not to terribly complicated with maybe 15 tables. It's probably good enough for my needs and that's all I really need. The backend is mostly done, with just a few more tables to add. When I say mostly, I just realize that there's more than just tables I could put in. Things like stored procedures and triggers and..and...I dunno. Other stuff. I know I may not need that but I think it will be good practice to have a little of that in.

Next up is to start designing the frontend and all that goodness. I frankly have no idea what it should look like. I have been reading a book, Windows Forms Programming in C#, which I just noticed that a new version is out on Friday. Snap. Oh well. I will have to pick that up in the future. Anyway, so I've been reading through that to get an idea on how to do forms and dialogs and other graphical related things. It's been a good read so far. I hope the next version has more goodness.

That's where I am at right now. Reading and thinking how the app will look. It shouldn't be too complicated but I'm doing this to learn now as I really don't have a need now to record my job contacts at the moment. ^_^

Hobby: Games in C#

So I believe in my first post I mentioned I liked the C# programming language. I also mentioned that game development is my currently hobby activity. It only seems natural that they come together into a ball of happy-happy joy-joy goodness and that's what I did.

Some time ago, I purchase a book called "Beginning 3D Game Programming" by Tom Miller. It used Managed DirectX to build some simple games from a 3D point of view. It appears that I'm halfway through. I stopped reading it because the code the author was using was based on a version of the DirectX SDK (Software Development Kit) from a year and a half ago. Some of his code samples were broken because of it. Also, it seemed that I might have been beyond what I should be doing. The book seemed to give you the how but not the why of the games. I might return to the book someday.

Since then, I've only really done C# at work and with no graphics. So it's been kind of ho-hum. Though earlier this year, I ran across a set of video tutorials for a 2D game using C#. This game is pretty low key with only the bare minimum to be classified as a game. I just finished the last tutorial a few days ago. It was pretty useful. Each video came with the source code to compile what was done during the video. But since I have the source code, I've decided to try my hand at augmenting it.

So the first change I did was to produce a spread fireball. In the standard game, you shot a fireball up the screen. I managed to produce a firing where three fireballs come out in a spread fashion.

Beautiful, eh? So that didn't take to long to do up. There are a few things I want to add to it to see if I can. One is a menu. When you first start the game, it start playing it right away. That's a little annoying.

While I was working on the spread fireball thing, I was thinking of a weapon object and some sort of weapon select. I'm thinking of ways to do the weapon select currently. I know what I want it to do and how it should look, but I'm having issues with how to code it. I'm wondering if I can shoe horn it in or if the the game engine needs an overhaul to allow my idea in.

So that's where I am at right now. Fun times, I know. The weapon selector I want to do first as I can fudge the weapon objects. Ideally, I'll do it all. It's not hard, it just knowing how/where to start.

The working

So here's another spot in the blogspere that I'm using to speak my mind. Well, this is going to be more of what I'm doing while I'm wearing my developer hat. I keep on reading some good diaries of projects so I thought why not have one myself.

So I'll just get right down to it. Here's what I'm looking at right now.

I'm currently into C# programming. It's a good language to get things working quickly in a Windows environment. You can also get quick results in the console arena as well. The language features lots of constructs pre-made for you so you can spend more time doing the stuff you want to do and not the little details that all projects must have. I like it. I've been using Visual C# Express and wished I had a regular copy of Visual Studio. I had a chance to get one while working at Microsoft, but I never bothered to follow through. The express version is good enough for what I'm doing now. And what am I doing now?

I've created two groups of projects and times when I work on them. One group is career related projects that should help out my career path. I try to stick to these projects doing the weekdays. Currently this is good cause I'm not doing any dev work. Keeps my mind in some sort of shape. ^_^

The second group is the hobby related group. The hobby group consists mostly of game programming projects. I tend to keep the hobby stuff to the weekends as I have more time available to sink into it. Ideally, I'd sink all my time into these projects, but this whole "having a job to pay rent thing" gets in my way. Though really I've been interested in game development since high school. I've just never had the drive to make it any more than a hobby despite a couple of failed attempts and many, many more wannabe tries. So, I think it's a good idea to push my dream of getting a job in the game industry to the back burner.

So, you'll probably find those two types of posts here. I'll probably put up some other stuff like the tools I use and stuff. I have a goal in mind of posting on each group once a week. There could be more, but I think 1 each is good for the time being.

I guess the first post this week will be from the hobby group. I've got some ideas and I'm stuck, not surprisingly.

Well, I hope you'll become inspired by my work here. I love to hear about tricks from the masses as well.