I started working again. Yay! It has been almost a year since I had time to devote to my little prototype/game project. I’m not entirely sure how I lost my motivation (it all started with work), but once it was gone, it was very hard to get it back again. Ironically, I’m also not entirely sure what caused it to come back again, but hey, when its here, run with it right?
A couple weeks ago, the desire to pick it back up again hit me. I’ve had the desire before, but what stopped me was knowing what I was going to have to hurdle to get the ball actually working again. It was like the restitution coefficient (physics on the brain again …) was so high, I couldn’t even get the thing going. I knew I was going to have to figure out all my problems that I was having with the physics, etc. When I loaded the solution back up into Visual Studio, I knew I was going to have to update my middleware libs (Farseer Physics from 2.01 to 2.1.3 and Mercury Particle Engine from 3.0.0 to 3.1.0) and XNA itself (from 3 to 3.1). That didn’t seem like a very exciting prospect, but I bit the bullet and gave it a go.
As it turns out, it only took me 1 day (a few hours), to update all 3 of those things and get my project compiling the same way it had in the past. Then I had to take time to read through all my code again and try and figure out what the heck it was that I was doing. That ended up taking much more time than the new integrations. Once I had a handle on what I was trying to do, I started looking into the problems I had previously (see last year’s final posts on the prototype to see).
The physics just didn’t want to cooperate entirely, and the blocks didn’t really want to stack. At that time, one of the developers of Farseer Physics (FP) told me to look into their method, which they called inactivity. I tried using it and it did not do what I needed, no matter how much I tweaked. I then looked into Box2DX, a csharp port of Box2D, and found that it had what I wanted, which it called sleep. Essentially, it kept a list of bodies that are directly in contact with one another. If all those bodies weren’t moving, it would put them to sleep. Otherwise, they would wake up. I decided that that was what I needed, so I was going to add it to FP myself. Before doing so, I decided to post on FP’s forum and ask if there was any progress to my previous issues with the Inactivity Controller. I was pointed to their development version (FP3), which is still being developed. They also pointed out to me that there was a new Box2D port to XNA, which they, in turn, ported into FP3. This was very fortuitous, since it already had the sleeping bodies that I was after.
This then led me to then upgrade the FP lib again, but this time, it broke everything. This was different, though, because I knew that it was going to lead to some light at the end of the tunnel. Now, here I am about 3 nights later, and I decided its about time to rewrite my whole prototype while I’m redoing the code, to get it more ready for a game. That sounds like a setback, but I’ve already made more progress in a few hours than I had made in weeks before stopping. I think this means I am now officially pumped, and anyone who still reads this (probably nobody) can expect the videos to start up again very soon.
Congrats on getting back into the flow of developing.
One thing that I found when developing something, is that motivation is never enough. Motivation will always come and go, and there will always be tasks that are unpleasant. There will always be a long stretch of coding, or creating resources, or doing whatever that just isn’t fun, that just has to be done, and if we’re relying on motivation, will block the project.
Instead, use determination. Say that you will absolutely get the project done… Pull up that part of yourself that forces you to change dirty diapers, and apply it to the blocking tasks.
Otherwise, distractions will always come up… the code will get more and more stale, libraries will change and update, and the fits and starts of refactoring the code will become habit and never lead to a finished product.
Thanks Adam. I totally agree. With PW, I was the jack of all trades, so when I would get burned out doing one task (modeling for example), I could always go do the website. I was able to jump between things to avoid burnout. The other thing that really kept me going so long on that project was knowing that there were others relying on me. That was enough to keep me determined to keep going, no matter what happened. This time around, its only me.
I would say discipline is what I lacked a year ago. Habit wasn’t enough to get me over the hurdle of running into problems. I think determination and discipline go hand in hand, so more or less, its the same thing.
Anyways, enough about me, what have you been up to over the last year?