Turkeys and marshmallows

I’m back!! There sure has been a lot going on in my world recently. As many of you know, I’ve been using Perforce as my source control software for a while now…well, it’s now working on a larger scale with multiple people getting updates. The server is just running on my machine right now, but once the projects get larger I’ll be switching it over to a dedicated server.

I also spent some time last week making some improvements to my workflow. Since my last reinstall, I hadn’t installed Cygwin, so was missing some missing some tools that I’ve really grown to love. So, I got that installed, and set up all my tools. Vim, emacs, and bash are now back to full operation…w00t! I personally feel that if you do a lot of cross-platform development, then you should really try to use as many cross-platform tools as possible in your everyday workflow so that switching back and forth between platforms isn’t so painful.

Also setup cross-compiling so that I can compile my projects to Linux from Windows. Still need to get my engine set up for that and create the jam files necessary for that, but I won’t do that until the first release as things are changing a lot right now.

I’m glad one of my classes has forced me to use Haskell. Ever since I was introduced to functional languages many years back, I’ve really enjoyed using them and have found them excellent for some of the work I do. Lisp (and its derivatives like Scheme), however, are not suited to some tasks. By their very definition, a functional language allows you to do induction proofs on your functions, but when you have super-late binding like Lisp, it’s still very easy to run into cases you hadn’t anticipated. With haskell, you have such strong type inference and safety, that you are forced to think through your functions and data types, which can be great. Haskell has made me actually get excited about F#…the only .NET I might actually start using. I’ve used C# a bit, but there’s nothing revolutionary enough to make me want to use it.

Lets see…oh yeah, it was my birthday Wednesday, so now I’m the big 21…feel so old. O_o Been eating lots of good food to celebrate, and got a cool game development t-shirt. Life is good. :)

Released a little rendering engine demo last week to test it out. It’s a bit slow right now as it’s not using any of the recent features on video cards. Once I get it faster, I’ll post it here so that my faithful readers can have something to look at. :p

Alright, enough rambling. I’m back for good now, so you’ll be seeing lots more rambling. If you read all this, post a comment…I want to know who’s reading it. :)