Sunday, March 13, 2011

Things are looking good.

Scholastic Art and Writing Awards
On Thursday, I got a letter in the mail stating that I won a Regional Gold Medal In the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards! WHooooo! This was awesome, and also meant that I got to advance to the National judging level. Then, Last Friday(the day after) I was notified that I won a National Silver Medal in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in the Video Game category!@#!@#!@#!@#!!!@$!%$^&U#$^*!$#%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. This is the contest that I talked about way back in January. And I am super excited about how it went. I guess I also get to go to a big awards ceremony in New York!

Summer Internships
I am trying to set up some summer internships and It looks pretty good so far. At this point I will have from one to three. So something should work out. One guy makes mobile phone games. Another programs servers (using python) and the last guy does some kind of thing with programming (I can't remember :S)
I think It will be a really good experience for me. And I'm excited about it!

My Game Server
As you may know, Ive been trying to get a server working for my next game. I've been having issues because I don't know how to use twisted. But this week I got a little closer. At this point, I can connect a client to the server. And the Client has a main loop which is run every frame with     
     
reactor.callLater((1 / self.FPS)self.loop)

Here is my client code so far. 

It's a lot farther than it was before, but at this point, the server and client are not actually sending anything back and forth. (I still need to figure that out)

If anyone knows If i'm doing this whole thing wrong (maybe i need to put everything from my Game class into the ClientProtocol class???) or other pointers, that would really help me out.

Pyweek
Pyweek is coming up in about 20 days. Im not currently going to be taking part in any projects. But I think I may want to do something for it. If anyone wants some help on their team, I would love to talk about it.


So thats all I can think of talking about. Have a nice day everybody!

Oh, Im also considering publishing some of my music on this blog. So that may happen..

Cya!

- Josh 

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Twisted for Multiplayer Game Development

First off, Twisted is a library that helps you make networking/online software. It can also be used to make multiplayer games.



So...
Im not feeling so good about what i've been able to accomplish lately. I really want to get started on my new multiplayer game but i've been running into so many issues with Twisted.

Its not that Twisted is bad, its just that I don't know how to use it.
I have been doing some research into it and I cant find any examples that use it in games. And it doesn't help that most of my time recently has been spent on school and work.
I think I am going to have to spend a few days to get it working. Its really not something that you can sit down for 20 minutes every day and work on. It takes a lot of time. And it also happens that I cannot work on any other part of my game until the multiplayer is all set up.

Im going to try to get twisted all figured out this week. I REALLY want to understand it.
My plan is to go around to some irc rooms and see if anyone will help me one on one to learn Twisted.

If anyone reading this knows how to use twisted to make games, I could really use your help!