Gentle alarm

One of my problems is that I enjoy staying up extremely late.  With friends in Chicago, Tennessee, and Alaska, I have a tendency to be up til the wee hours of the morning playing Left 4 Dead 2.  I also have a full time job and have to be up early enough to drive the 40 minutes to get there.  This is a recipe for disaster and I have been getting hit pretty hard lately not wanting to get out of bed.  Gentle Alarm changed this.

Gentle alarm has a built in pre-alarm that plays an alarm 10 minutes before your normal alarm by default.  By playing this alarm set at a low volume, the idea is that it will wake your body out of its deep sleep.  I was skeptical at first so I downloaded the trial (which has a humorous limitation of not playing on Wednesdays.)  So far everyday this week Ive had no problem getting out of bed in the morning.  Another really cool feature it has is the ability play a random song from an artist or an album.  I have found that listening to the same alarm over and over makes my body quickly learn to ignore it and continue sleeping; therefore, this should help immensely.  Finally I will say that the UI is a bit lacking.  It is not the most aesthetically pleasing interface but for something that I primarily use while sleeping I think I can live with that.

In order to accomplish this I made the decision that rather than try to come up with a project on my own I would attempt to clone a game that I had enjoyed many years ago.  That game was Crash Bandicoot.  This decision made designing the game more of a focus on technical skills rather than artistic creativity.  Before I would look at this as a way of giving up, not doing the entire thing by myself but I believe now that this allows someone who is not very experience in the field to make a fun game while building their abilities for future projects.

Build the first model of the game seems to be coming along just fine.  In fact the only real hurdle I have had so far is now that it is finished an animated when I export the model the animation gets squirrelly.  This could be an issue with my mesh but I will continue to play and see if I cant find something that works.  Here are some of the first pictures of my model in blender:

The next step was picking a 3d game engine.  For this I ended up going with Panda3d thanks to the suggestion of a friend of mine who is also a developer.  He was mostly interested in using the python interface; however, I decided that I wanted to do it in c++.  This would have been fine until I found out that the gnu compiler is not supported by the library and I would have to do some major hacking to get it to where it would compile.  Instead I decided that this would provide me with the perfect opportunity to learn python.  This makes life extremely easy with code as simples as:

for loading a model.

Over the next few weeks I hope to have a running demo so keep your eyes peeled.

One of the biggest projects that I have wanted to dedicate my time to since the time I started programming was a game.  Gaming was something Ive done my entire life and most likely one of my first memories.  Because of this, Ive always wanted to make a game.  I lack any 3d modelling skills and or time to spend sitting down and writing an entire game.  Recently Ive decided that I would make time.  Not only because I want to make a game but also because Id like to keep my skills in application development in tip top shape.  More will come from the game but currently it is in the early stages of development which I will save for another post.

Please feel free to keep an eye on this blog as I am hoping to provide recent news on any programming projects Im working on and also tidbits that Ive found useful at my place of work.