Blogs

So I've recieved my apparently mandated CIVX nickname, despite it possibly being inaccurate in a week or two. I, along with Pixel Ninja and Python Princess, have been hacking away at our various tasks together for over a week now, and despite the seemingly constant moving from place to place, it's a pretty sweet gig.

This is my first posting despite having been here for a week, because the zaniness that was my first week did not allow for such silly things as intorductions. Now I finally have some of the infrastructure things worked out, and can report on my findings.

The past week has been very busy with conferences and meetings, but I still managed to get some quality stuff done. I learned how to actually make a widget in TurboGears, as opposed to the somewhat brute force way I have been doing things, so hopefully soon the mess that is my tabs demo will be looking much cleaner. I've added a couple interesting bits of jQuery, including the HeatColor widget Rebecca posted about earlier.

Fairly uneventful day; helped man the sugar/olpc booth.

So as I said with previous entries, JT is working on making an all encompassing test for file types. Essentially the test will allow us to run all of our previous tests from one executable file. While he does that, I am moving on to trying to create a test that will allow us to test various different animation styles. What I mean by this, is we will be comparing having each frame as a separate image, multiple different types of sprite sheets, etc. Our goal is to know not only which image format will work best, but also what the best way to use that image format is.

Greece just scored its second ever goal in the World Cup; thanks to RIT's impressive hospitality I enjoyed watching this historical event happen on a screen taller than myself while sitting ten feet away.

Today begins the production of the last test before we the art team move into animation territory; I'm running benchmarks on how quickly the system responds when loading sprites with pygame to compare the information to our tests of a similar type where we used pygame's image class.

Yesterday I developed the new battleengine further, and fixed a bug on trac pertaining to clearing text. The ticket can be found here https://fedorahosted.org/fortune_hunter/ticket/21 and the git commit is here http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=fortune_hunter.git;a=commit;h=f5bf0bb... . Today I've been looking at what needs to be done in order for MAFH to become a core sugar activity. Later I plan on working more on porting the game engine.

Edit: Helped JT get the test aggregator up and running.

So today's Image Scaling test is complete and it gave us a whole lot of really good data. Basically we found out that scaling images within the code is definitely not a viable option. This means that if a developer wanted to make their program function in multiple resolutions, they would most likely need multiple image sets. With that in mind JT and I are currently thinking that GIFs are the most viable, all around, option. It has the smallest file size and has a very capable frame rate that is only beaten out by the BMP files.

So JT and I spent today making a new testing file that is specific to scalability testing. First we ditched JPGs, and 32 bit BMPs because they were having problems and were just overall not viable formats.

Today started out with a round of meetings and some time at POSSE. In the middle of all this, I got my first glimpse at the actual code for CIVX... exciting! With help from Luke, I edited the tabs demo to get bill information from the senate API, replacing the hard-coded text. The JSON data for bills by senator is strangely inconsistent depending on how the number of results per page, so I hope to figure that out soon. In any case, it makes the widget look that much more slick. :)