Status Update; New Version of RomTerraria Incoming

It's been a few weeks, so let's do a quick infodump.

I've managed to purge all of my personal code that I wrote while I was at Amazon that wasn't grandfathered in, so all code going forward should be clean, unencumbered, and most importantly, mine to do with as I please.

Work is going well.  I'm about two weeks away from being (mostly) done with my first major project at Netflix.

I'll be in Los Angeles this March participating in the World Series of Poker Circuit at the Bicycle Casino.  Specifically, I'll be playing in event #6 or #7 and event #8.

I'm rewriting the code I had written for Leadwerks to take advantage of some 3.3 features, as well as ensure that my early code is consistent with the code I wrote later on.

Oh, and I'm almost done with the new version of RomTerraria.  New features that will be out this week are:

• Admin rights no longer required if you installed the game in the Program Files folder on your machine.  The RomTerraria executable and supporting DLLs will be put in a subfolder of your Terraria folder in your Documents folder.
• Support for the GOG.com version as well as the Steam version.
• Code cleanup to prepare for the coming 1.3 version of Terraria.

(Update: New version out.)

Small Progress Update

Friday, October 31, was my last day at Amazon.

Yesterday, November 1, I flew down to Los Gatos, CA, and moved into temporary housing while my wife stayed behind in Seattle, WA to close out the condo and work with the movers.

Tomorrow, November 3, will be my first day at Netflix where I'll be working as a Senior Software Engineer in Test.

What does this all mean?

• I can now resume working on and publishing code and updates for things like RomTerraria and Leadwerks stuff.
• I'm limited in what I can do for the next six weeks because I'm working on a laptop and I won't have my main gaming rig until the movers get down here to my permanent home in mid-December.

I'm going to shoot for a minimum of a weekly post cadence for the next few weeks to try to get myself back into the swing of posting regularly, but needless to say, it's good to be back.

Mini-Review: Kill la Kill

Wut?

Don't get me wrong. The animation, characters, music, and storyline are all excellent, but after it was done, all I could think was "wut?"

5/5 - Will Watch Again

Watch it on Netflix or buy it on Amazon Instant Video.

The (Terse) Announcement

October 31, 2014 will be my last day at Amazon.

November is going to be sketchy as I'm going to be moving.

Once I'm settled, I can start releasing code en masse.

That is all.

Where Have I Been? What's Going On?

Good questions.  Let's see if I can give a decent answer.

Since January 2012, I've been working on Firefly for the Amazon Fire Phone.  I was hired specifically to figure out how to test it and to ensure that it met a high quality bar for customers, and I'd like to think I did a good job.  That, as well as some related work with the Dynamic Perspective and Camera teams, has taken the majority of my free time.

Now that the Fire Phone is out, we've been working on trying to improve things further and we've also been trying to figure out what's next.  Can't talk about any of that stuff, though.

Long story short, I'm doing great professionally.  Not so much personally, though.

I'm officially past being middle-aged now.  My diabetes, which had been in remission, is no longer in remission.  I've found out I've been banned from the Ritualistic forums, which would make me only the second former tribe member to have that "honor."  I'm stone sober although there are plenty of evenings where I wish I wasn't.  Efforts to try to stretch my personal boundaries led to two extremely humiliating experiences over the summer within 48 hours.  My personal life is in tatters.

I have a lot of code done for Leadwerks, XNA, and other items, and all of it in a releasable state, but can't release anything outside of two small projects without getting legal approval due to my non-compete.  Legal approval takes a long time, but is in the works.  I'm working on something that may get rid of this legal approval requirement, but it will be at least another two months before anything comes of it.

I'm officially stopping all work on anything related to the SiN and SiN Episodes intellectual property.  The only reason I was doing work towards that was that I felt an obligation to the community that believed in SiN Episodes and wanted to see it continue, and if the community has banned me, then there is no reason for me to continue that work.  If I can get approval to release the code and assets I've built so they can be picked up by another team, I'll happily do so, but this will be my last word on the subject until or if that approval comes.

Finally, I had a bit of a setback on a personal goal.  I had been saving money to go indie.  I had a fairly modest investment goal set for myself that would have had me starting my own indie game development studio next year, but a situation came up today that pretty much ended that possibility.  An issue had been kept from me by my significant other that had severe financial repercussions for me, I found out about those penalties via mail today, and as a result, I'm stuck working for others until 2017 at the earliest.

However, I'm trying to look at the positive side of all this.  It gives me more time to come to grips with C++ 11/14, C# 5+, Lua, and some work I've been doing on the side with ANTLR.  It gives me a chance to try to whittle my idea down to a barebones core that I can actually deliver on in a reasonable time.  It gives me a chance to prove to myself I'm making the right choice.

And with that, I need to vanish for just a bit longer.  Sorry.