Extracurriculars

I figured another great place to start with this blogging thing is to introduce people to the other projects I'm working on/helping with as well as a couple places I'm frequently found online.

Excluding my research I am currently helping with the engineering and development of the following projects:

Project Link (website currently down) - This project was inspired a good friend of mine that goes by the name of Xemberad (some Furcadia nuts out there might recognize the name :p). The goal is to create a game engine/platform that we will use to re-create the fun and feel of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as an immersive MMOG. The project has been through some ups and downs but we're working on redesigning the architecture of the engine (we first started this project when we weren't quite as capable as we are now) and we're really excited about the ideas being mapped out.

XFighter (website coming soon) - If anybody has ever played M.U.G.E.N. you know how awesome and fun it is to be able to set up dream matches in a customizable 2d fighting engine. Well my beastly Athlon 64x2 with 2GB Dual Channel DDR and dual GeForce 7600GT cards was struggling to run it recently; based on the animation frame timing patterns (since sometimes it runs slow enough to see them) as well as how input processing seems to work and a minor hint from the process manager it seems M.U.G.E.N. is not only no longer (if ever) open source, but it seems to be a single threaded application with nested loops. Our goal is to make a much more modern 2d fighting engine that will be completely extensible (note the use of extensible instead of customizable, this application will be designed using provider style design patterns and dynamic extension loading in mind). We've got a lot of ideas but the project is still in it's early stages, keep your eye out for updates :p

with my ever apparent shortage of time these days that's all I can really invest my time in right now, but I have a tendency to troll around several IRC channels (some I visit most weekdays, others I drop in from time to time); if you're ever interested in discussing any ideas about the above projects or anything else for that matter drop by for a bit :). These are the channels I frequent:

Server: Americhat (irc.americhat.net)
Channel: #genscripts Link
#genscripts is my home on the internet, it's full of great thinkers and skilled coders of all shapes and sizes and they're just generally fun people too. There's a lot of mIRC development that occurs in there, but really there's everything from PHP developers to realtime concurrent systems developers and everybody brings something worthwhile to the table.

Server: DALNet (irc.dal.net)
Channel: #partyhouse Link
#partyhouse is the very first IRC channel I ever entered back in the mid-'90s and, while I've taken a few hiatuses from it I always go back when I get the chance. To enjoy chilling in #partyhouse I recommend you remain open minded and bring your sense of humor, it's not all developers but there's some intellect present if you need it :).

Server GIMPNet (irc.gimp.net)
Channel: #mono-winforms Link
#mono-winforms is home of the Mono Windows Forms team. These guys are working hard to make it so that rich UI applications written against the Microsoft-designed .NET Framework can be run on Linux and Mac operating systems without the stress of using third party toolkits. They're not done but they get my respect; if I had enough time to choose another project to contribute to, this would be it. Just trolling in the channel I have become a part of many intellectual and thought provoking conversations and I enjoy all of the people who spend time there.

That's all for today folks :p - if you have any interest in any of the projects I'm on let me know, either by commenting or by finding me in one of the IRC channels mentioned above. Help is always appreciated :)

-TheXenocide