Greetings. I missed one day of MoHM because I was kicking so much arse yesterday. I even forgot what I did. But I found out. And today's lesson is how to find out how much arse you kicked. It's not a perfect method, but it gets it done almost every time. Let's say I forgot what I did yesterday. I know that you did a lot of work on the computer (in fact, I didn't leave your chair 15 hours of the day). I can guess what directory I worked in. See below:

jvoss@ASLinWS01:~/AS3D/HackMars/hm4/tech/portal2$ ls -l --sort=time
total 652
i-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     9227 Jan 22 16:40 hab6.asd
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers    10421 Jan 22 16:36 hab6v1r2.asd
-rwxr--r--    1 jvoss    developers    17415 Jan 21 23:12 hab6v1r2.ms3d*
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     7001 Jan 21 21:06 portal2.cpp
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      890 Jan 21 20:56 portal2c.txt
-rwxr-xr-x    1 jvoss    developers    80433 Jan 21 20:56 portal2*
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers    84032 Jan 21 20:56 portal2.o
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      610 Jan 21 20:54 portal2b.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     4352 Jan 21 20:48 portal2a.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      767 Jan 21 20:40 portal2.h
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     3334 Jan 21 17:00 portal3ex10.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     3283 Jan 21 16:59 portal3e9.txt
-rwxr-xr-x    1 jvoss    developers    95576 Jan 21 16:59 portal3*
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers   112296 Jan 21 16:59 portal3.o
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers    11488 Jan 21 16:59 portal3.cpp
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     5679 Jan 21 16:58 portal3e8.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     5679 Jan 21 16:54 portal3e7.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     1685 Jan 21 16:51 portal3.h
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     5679 Jan 21 16:48 portal3e6.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     4991 Jan 21 16:30 portal3e5.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     1416 Jan 21 16:26 portal3e4.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     1311 Jan 21 16:15 portal3e3.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      936 Jan 21 16:13 portal3e2.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      472 Jan 21 16:12 portal3e.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers    11242 Jan 21 16:07 portal3_cull2.cpp
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      633 Jan 21 16:02 portal3d.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      684 Jan 21 15:40 portal3c2.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      633 Jan 21 15:14 portal3c.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      417 Jan 21 15:04 Makefile
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      417 Jan 21 15:04 Makefile~
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     8643 Jan 20 19:30 output1.asd
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     9902 Jan 20 18:09 test2.asd
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     9828 Jan 20 17:45 portal2.asd
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     1303 Jan 20 16:23 portal3b2.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      784 Jan 20 16:20 portal3b.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      334 Jan 20 15:09 portal3a.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers      235 Jan 20 14:31 portal3.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers     9947 Dec  8 17:35 test1.asd
-rw-r--r--    1 jvoss    developers    21470 Mar 10  2003 portal2.ms3d

---

So there you have it. Or do you? Well, I do. I sorted ls -l by time and that gives me a list of dates. Jan 22 is today. Those are things I most recently edited today. They are asd (AltSci Data) files which I created for use later. Yesterday, I did a lot of stuff. The last thing I did in this directory yesterday was: create hab6*.ms3d. I actually did that in Windows 98 using Milkshape 3D. It was the first time I was in Windows 98 for such a long time that a bunch of my drivers crapped out. I thought it was funny. Not as funny as when I hadn't been in Windows XP for so long that I forgot the admin password. Funny as hell. And then, not so funny. Anyway, before I went into Windows, I did some amazing programming. portal2.cpp is my second demo for my portal engine. It is collision loading demo. The first thing edited yesterday was Makefile at 15:04. But you can safely assume that I did start work before 3 PM. I started at 1 PM. Why isn't there a file with 1 PM on it? Because every file I worked on was modified after that. I mostly worked on portal3.cpp and portal2.cpp. Portal3 is the third portal demo. It is portal logic demo. Two technologies are: 1) room depth culling and 2) optimized tree search pathfinding. Now you're thinking: these two are very hard, complex topics that take good AI/graphics people months to code. They take thousands of lines of code. Nope. Knowing the theory inside and out it took me one short day from start to finish to write these two technologies that work amazingly well. portal3 (Linux executable file) was finished at 5 PM. The first sign of portal3 is portal3.txt, a tiny file started at 5 PM Tuesday explaining logic. I left my house to go to a techno club at 9 PM (4 hours later). I started work on portal3 the next day at 1 PM and finished at 5 PM (4 hours later). 8 hours gave me two technologies that are highly valuable. I am a programming fool. From 5 PM to 9 PM (4 hours), I worked on Portal2. I developed an enhanced collision loading algorithm (based on one that already worked months ago). Today, I worked on level of detail from 2 PM (after I got back from a PSBC lucheon at the Westin Hotel) to 6:30 PM (4.5 hours). I plan to hang* this work until it is dead. ^_^

* "hang onto" may be correct English, but it doesn't make contextual sense. (The state hereby sentences you to hang until you are dead.) ^_^

For the past 6 days I have been working tirelessly on the new programming technologies that Hack Mars requires:

• portal: started wednesday and finished wednesday.
• level of detail: started and finished today.
• mouselook: started a long time ago, but needs a lot of debugging.
• 3d pick: finished a while back, needs additions.
• python scripting: mostly finished.
• pathfinding: theorized a long time ago, coded on wednesday.
• hardware optimized skinning: started, not finished.
• ramp physics: idea done, programming buggy.
• collision: mostly finished.
• audio: theorized, demoed, not implemented.
• lighting: started, much work to go.

Looking at this list, you can see that most of my technologies are going very well, but very few of them are done. In fact, if you look at Hack mars, it is bare of most of these. It has Python, 3d pick, accelerated motion, collision, a bit of lighting, and bad (working) animated models. It is more than enough to do Javantea's Fate (all JF needs is animated models, motion, 3d pick, and lighting). But it certainly lacks what HM needs. Of course, HM has enough to make a good looking demo if it only had content. So here I am doing a bunch of programming to the exclusion of content. 5 days ago I was doing content to the exclusion of programming. So what is the rhythm of Hack Mars? Work! Do this, do that, get anything and everything done. I thrive on variety, so I am quite happy doing both content and programming as long as I'm getting things done and am not stuck. Once I envisioned: if I only get something good enough to pitch to someone, I can hire help on those things I can't do. So I worked on programming. But I couldn't get any help, so I worked on modelling for a year. But I couldn't get any help, so I went back to programming. By that time, I had three scenes of JF done. Now wtf? I kept working on it hoping that my skills would improve enough for someone to see what I was planning: 5 people doing the jobs I was doing poorly by myself. But no one saw and no one gave me money to hire 5 people. So I kept working.

Last March I had a brilliant idea: what if I forget the 5 people and work on an easy video game that is within my bounds: BikeIM. It would involve 3d bicycle messenger game arcade style 3rd person driving. There would be a small town with very simple traffic engine. There would be hills, but they don't add any difficulty to a super-simplified physics engine. Then I would have missions: point a to point b in 3 minutes or less, $10 + $1 per second under limit. I would give it a plot that involved 4 screens. I would have gameplay include an upgrade/maintenence engine. Then I would sell it Indy for $10 a piece. I would make $5 each and sell 1000 copies. I'd have enough money to pay rent/food for 6 months. It would take me just 3 weeks to write this game. I was set. But then I came to my senses: if I could make $5,000 off such a game, it would not take 3 weeks to create. I tried. 3 weeks went by and I had zilch. So I decided I would make a reasonable plan: write a game I really like, Hack Mars (similar complexity, more weight in the plot department for free) in 3 months. I worked 2 weeks straight and my computer exploded. Motherboard failure. I lost 2 weeks before I was up and running again. I worked 2 weeks straight. Then I had a slack attack for two weeks. Then I got a job! I worked full time and got paid my rent each month (not exactly perfect, but who cares). I worked doubletime and slacked on HM down to 1 week in 1 month. I didn't get paid the first month of my job. I did another week in 1 month. I didn't get paid the second month of my job. I prepared a bill for my boss. He paid half my rent for the third month. The third month, I got 1 week of work done on HM. The fourth month, my job took overtime but paid nothing. The fifth month (December) I was fired from my job without pay. I went to Spokane where I worked for my father's company making a bundle of cash and doing 1 week worth of work on JF content (invaluable). So now the month of January comes. *sigh* I have worked 1 very good week out of three. The fourth hopefully will be very productive. February, March, April, and May, I plan to go fricking nuts on HM, but I still need a job. So I'll probably spend half of next week and half of next month looking for work. But that isn't bad. I can spend half of my day looking for work and still get a full day work on HM. You see 4 hours job searching plus 8 hours HM plus 4 hours other plus 8 hours sleep equals 24 hour day. How is it possible? Do the math. What do you do with your 24 hours? If you don't think that 16 hours of awake time can be used each day, you probably chew your time up fucking off. Focus your mind on what you really want and do it ALL DAY. I have worked 15 hour days 5 days in a row now. I do 90 hour weeks 2 weeks per month on average. Those 90 hours are spent coding, thinking, and writing Hack Mars. And by golly I wouldn't be able to do it without good techno music.

June 1, I will release Hack Mars. Until then, I will work hard. When I get depressed, I will write cyberpunk manifestos, watch anime, and punch trees (big thick trees, not little saplings or bushes). That is what I will do and there is nothing you can do to stop me. Please cheer me, Yoroshiku.

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