After a lot of hard work and 13 commits, I've finally finished porting my modified version of produce puzzle to the game engine. I also got the game working as an .xo bundle on the xo. Uploading to activities.sugarlabs as soon as I'm able. More fortune hunter polishing coming next, as well as finishing our abstract before Sunday night. ...

So we officially have only three weeks left to finish this project. That seems like a small amount but I think we are pretty much on track for that. Last week we discovered that using the images object type was a bad idea and decided we needed to convert our system to using sprites. Thankfully this does not require too much hard work on our end. I am currently working towards this goal. Today my goal is to make a custom sprite group for updating sprites and stuff. This will allow us to work wit ...

Alright, time for the Thor's Day Blog, also know as Thursday by some nations that don't recognize the day's pagan origins. Ahem, but anyways, today was a day of killing off the tests we started yesterday on using classes, inheriting sprite, in conjunction with dirty lists. In case I'm not making sense, we finished the tests to confirm that we could effectively speed things up by doing A) storing all the relevant information pertaining to the image for easy access B) allowing us to intelligently ...

So today we worked on getting our system working so that we would not have to refresh everything on screen every single frame. We were pretty successful. The problem we were having the past few days was essentially that, since we were using images, there was no built in functionality for having things move in layers. This meant that if you have an object moving on screen and a background image under it, the image will slowly start overwriting the background image until you re-write all of the b ...

Yesterday I completed the meetings and votes tabs of the person widget, which were a cinch with the list of committees successfully scraped by the masterful Geo Pirate. I can now safely say we're nearly done with this widget, save for the calendar tab (which appears to be on the back burner now) and a few minor ordering issues. Our next target is a poly form widget and a location dashboard, parts of which are already working. ...

Today was the weekly storyteller meeting. We laid down plans for the next week - in short: I hope to finish produce puzzle by the end of the day Friday, and if not then, early next week. After that Jlew and I will go back to polishing fortune hunter as our flagship example of what the fortune engine is capable of. We will also be extending help to the Games for Science group and to the animation team. Today I worked further on the product puzzle game: [http://git.fedorahosted.org/git?p=fossri ...

Design was previously thought to be complete and implementation could begin, but wait! There's more! We had previously moved on from dirty blitting content that we fully understood the subtleties therein, full of bravado and confidence that, as you will soon learn why, quickly evaporated. As our plans were attacked by rabid weasels. I carefully chose this metaphor to perfectly illustrate where we are, or course. So today was spent reviewing tutorials on Sprites; sprites are, in essence, surfa ...

So yesterday was primarily successful however towards the end of the end we started running into some problems. Basically as we got to the end of the day we found that some of the methods we were using, or planning on using, were not going to be as successful as we thought. You see, we intended to use a "dirty" update method. This means that instead of updating the whole screen every frame, it only updates the areas covered by objects that actually need to be updated. To do this, we would simply ...

Yesterday, while becoming increasingly frustrated at the NY senate's website as I tried to scrape committee information, Nate suggested a much easier solution. I had been attempting to visit each senator's page and get their committees individually, but naturally, the website is formatted so inconsistently that no two senators list their committees in the same place or manner. I whiled away a number of hours in this direction before Nate had the idea of searching from the other direction - visit ...

So yesterday we finally implemented rotation correctly and it looks great. Once we had that down we also implemented Rendered Transparency so that users could make more complex looking images, and the convert function so that images can be optimized more easily. After we got that working we moved on to determining how we would implement the animation classes into the larger Game Engine. We determined that it would be easiest to take the needed functionality of the Scene class and just make it p ...