What are y'all up to these days?

[Omega]

Haven't had a lot of off topic discussion in a while (and I know, I've been mostly just monitoring the forum myself), so figured I'd kick up an icebreaker topic: what kinds of things are you guys doing these days? Work, hobbies, personally projects, etc.

To kick it off, I've mostly been very busy with my job. I've basically got my dream dev job and work with cloud computing (cluster management, namely). I moved across the country for that and love my work. I'm very, very good at what I do! I get lots of responsibility, get to lead designs, get to travel for work, and get to work on interesting things that people actually want. I don't do much personal projects these days because I find the 8+ hours a day tends to leave me all "coded out" (and I have a bad habit of working late because I get very into what I'm doing). Every now and then I can contribute to open source through my work, which is a perk I really love. Hoping to get to do more OSS contributing in the future (but my todo list at work is an ever growing one ).

I do have a bajillion side projects I want to do, though. I've learned the hard way that game dev doesn't really interest me. I think mostly because I have no artistic talent and it's hard to make much without that. And also I loooove my automated tests and games are notoriously difficult to test. My real passion project is programming languages. My last job, one of my final big tasks was extending their parser for multiple other languages. We parsed circuit simulation languages; which are truly horrendous, BTW (I could rant for ages on how poorly they're designed). That was actually a C++ thing since our parser was performance critical. I'm kinda glad to not work with C++ anymore, though. Core dumps are nice, but god the language is like juggling chainsaws. These days I'm mostly Go and Python. I did start writing an interpreter in Scala for a novel language I was designing, but like many of my projects, I kinda just stopped working on it after a while, haha.

My partner got me into Pokemon Go and Wizards Unite, so been playing that a ton lately. I love it. It's great to get out and take loooong walks and explore areas I haven't before. Walks are suddenly fun even solo. Fellow players feel free to add me in PoGo if you want. I usually have excess gifts to send anyway . Friend code 6926 5429 2450.

Oh, and I got married... and soon to be divorced (oops). Married an American and kinda rushed that marriage so we could live together. Though currently in a long distance relationship with an amazing person.

Okay, let's stop there. What have y'all been up to?

[MoLAoS]

After changing my low paying service jobs and sort of flip flopping between politics and EVE Online for hobbies I'm mostly back to working on my post Mandate turn based fantasy politics simulator project. Politics was incredibly frustrating. After finally connecting with the political campaign I was supporting and working with some awesome people like Michael Sayman, of Facebook fame, on various volunteer projects, I realized the candidate I was supporting had a terrible dumpster fire campaign, for a variety of reasons and that the roughly 2 years I spent being involved in politics over multiple elections was all a waste of time. Also, the country, and the planet, are screwed especially for non-wealthy people. I had fun in EVE but I ended up having to stop for real life reasons just as I was about to become one of the top 20 richest players in the game. Which sucked. It was cool to see the devs actually implement a galactic invasion storyline recently, because while I don't play anymore I had worked with people who had plans to do a player run event in the same style. Michael offered to get me an interview at Google but realistically I wouldn't be able to hold down a knowledge job doing something I wasn't into so I had to decline.

Working on my own game really makes me miss Mandate for one specific reason. I could implement a major feature pretty easily. And there was an already working game so I could see new features in action. On my own project there is still a long stretch where its not a functioning game so the payoff of adding a feature is quite a bit reduced. Grinding through adding UI elements and AI, and other non-gameplay aspects of the game is pretty tedious also. A lot of that is my own fault for doing a game with a substantial scope increase over most other turn based 4x/grand strategy games, though. With Mandate it was mostly Majesty TFKS ++. So it was much easier to stay on target on top of the shorter conception to function time for game features. Downside of course was not being able to make a living off a FOSS game whereas if I ever do finish my current game I could theoretically pay bills and not have a day job.

[Ayrin Greenflag]

Hello Omega, hello to you all guys. After i finished revising my second book, i'm working a bit on my rpg game again that uses some modified glest model, working on some magical weapon actually. I would need some help making female players models for the races (humans, dwarves, elves and half-orcs) or models for weapons. Some help with textures for models would be nice too https://playcanv.as/p/rjC13fWv/