Plan for Phil Carlisle

This week has been VERY busy.

First of all, the quickie dev stuff.

Air Ace

Kristen is hard at it with Air Ace updating the physics, unfortunately that will have to stop for a week or so while he re-relocates back down to the states for a while (I guess thats life as a roving contractor aint it). So I'll be digging into the network update issue myself to see if I can determine what the issue was.

Grad Games (working group name for now)

The guys have gotten started on looking at the requirements for thier respective games. Both teams of two have gotten themselves together ok, but I'm going to have to keep on at them to communicate properly.

I had a look around for commercial hosting solutions where I get reasonble backup of code and support whilst not requiring a huge amount of bandwidth etc. I ended up settling on Wush.net for hosting, which is 20 dollars for 500 megs of space and unlimited devs easy setup and got that up and running pretty quick. Update of Wush is the integrated TRAC install, so that we now have a wiki for docs, design discussions etc.

Torque AI Pack

We are returning to this with a new vigour, myself and Daryl (Dee on GG) have joined forces to get the pack knocked into shape and we are coordinating this thing using another Wush.net subversion repo.

Dont want to pre-empt the plans for the pack itself, but basically we're aiming to get a 1.4 release compatible AI pack out sooner rather than later. Most of the code is done, so its really just making sure it hits the right spot and doing the docs.

Blogging

So my mate Dan has been posting some interesting stuff at His plan That really got me stirred up a bit. But it also made me sit down and think about the whole blogging thing. Usually I use blogs and plans to rant and rave about things. But what I dont tend to do, is actually analyze why things are the way they are. So maybe in the future when I write a blog, I'll bother to actually back up my rants with a bit of actual information.

Conferences and Work

So this week I was at the GDTW for a day (teaching the first day) and saw a couple of interesting talks. I met Tom Buscaglia again who is a top guy and we went for a chinese and some drinkies. I also bumped into Chris Bateman (pimping his new book 21st Century Game Design and doing talks on game design) and lots of other people.

One of the highlights of this show is meeting up with one of my early dev careers idols in the form of man-god


Dino Dini! who was talking at the conference (and knows about Torque too :))

Of course, a lot of you american guys wont know who that is.. but let me show you..


Kick Off was of course, a soccer game. But it was also the arch nemesis of Sensible's magnum opus Sensible Soccer and both these programs duked it out on the amiga for donkeys years. Dino was the man behind KickOff, although with no disrespect to Dino, I did prefer sensible :)


Sensible Soccer - Ok, so the sprites were tiny, but at least you could track the ball easier.

And Finally

While I was at the conference. I got talking to Jon Wetherall from Onteca about torque. Its amazing who you find uses torque when you speak to all sorts of developers in the UK. So much so, in fact, that I've got plans to form a proper event based here at the University of Bolton and focussing on getting torque devs together and sharing information on how to build games.

Of course, we dont know what will come of it, but plans are definitely afoot.

So all in all, a good conference to visit. Even if it did take me until midnight to get back home on the train.

So next plan, I'll have actually written something a bit more concrete for my latest pet-project which is what I do while not working on Air Ace, or keeping the guys on track with the other games, or doing the AI pack docs. Hmm, does that sound like I'm busy? :)