BigCalm : SWOS Java : Development Diary

SWOS Java Development Diary


11th April 2002
Aaaaaagh. Big heavy stressful problems at work. Payroll problems, AIX upgrades, and all my attempts at contingency planning is going horribly horribly wrong. I'm probably going to have to work the weekend as well :-( ! In other news, I did a bit more hacking on the pitch class which is slowly coming up to scratch
8th April 2002
I'm encouraged by postings on the Sensible Soccer newsgroup - it seems there's a lot of interest. Also, there's a couple of people who seem willing to help, especially Ludo, who's sent me some code - and I was most impressed - he's done a player running around the pitch thing, and the code is excellent - dare I say much better than mine :-). I did a little work on Friday the Pitch class - trying to get decent scrolling without having to allocate a huge chunk of memory for the pitch graphic, and is looking promising, though incorporating the proper football pitch dimensions may have to wait until later. Saturday I had to work (AIX upgrade that went horribly wrong. Ick.), and Saturday night I went clubbing. Unsurprisingly, as a result of this, I did no work on SWOS on Sunday. Such is life :-)
5th April 2002
Stage 1 complete!! I've had to host it elsewhere from tripod because of the nazis that run it. Sigh. Get it here and the source is available too.
4th April 2002
Partly I've been disillusioned with the size of the project. But mainly, I think, I've just been really lazy and would rather spend my time doing other stuff than hacking in my spare time. Please, I get enough of it at work! However, I've just been given a nice relaxing project at work that I can spend months on without making any real progress. Cool!
26th October 2001
Been to Barbados for two weeks, and started to learn Perl (which is remarkably similar to shell script programming and awk) but I'm getting narked off with the way tripod seems to handle its cgi-bin. I'm thinking about starting an awards system for impossible to navigate websites, with tripod having the first award. I'm a bit bogged down with emergency upgrades at work at the moment to have any enthusiasm for Java SWOS, but I should have a (little) bit of free time at the weekend to work on this.
28th September 2001
Much too much dossing, not enough Java-swosing. In the meantime I've swallowed a couple of manuals-worth of information about HTML. My SWOS CD has finally given up the ghost and decided not to let me finish the season any more too :-( . Fantastic two player games against my brother however, before he moved down to Bournemouth - DIY leagues: Play each other * 2, "Hero" teams where you choose your favourite players using PCSWOSFFF , swapping between keys and joypad. First two attempts at this, and the leagues ended up equal. I beat him in the end though!
9th September 2001
More input stream hacking, this time with more success. I see now, get the relative filename path, create an InputStream, create a ByteArrayInputStream from that, and then read the values from the file into a byte array. And pray you don't get an IOException thrown. Then, once this was done, spent most of the day fuming about the fact that this piece of code doesn't work:

int i,j;
j = 633;
i = (33.97 / 633 ) * j; // ok
i += (89 / 633) * j; // value of right hand is ALWAYS zero. And this compiles too.

I wouldn't mind, but this is very basic logic. (For those of you interested, you have to put an (int) cast at the beginning and pray). It seems strange that this will work in any other programming language, and it's not as if the solution (or problem!) is obvious either. Only the most defensive of C/C++ coders would think of this solution immediately. It's too easy to do. Rant Rave Rant Rave.

Still, got it working, opened the tactics file, mangled the tactics file data into something looking like roughly decent co-ordinates and I was about to start looking at how to manage ball-quadrants when I accidentally (oops) watched Empire Strikes Back and then went to the pub.
8th September 2001
Due to socialising and general avoidance of all things programming, I've not had a chance to start the project until today. Onwards and er, downwards. Created a mini-applet which will load the pitch and blit a player on to it. Then proceeded to get extremely annoyed by java.io.InputStreams. Eventually gave up and watched GI Jane instead. (Good film)
3rd September 2001
Downloaded the JDK off the sun site. Only took 3 hours...
Also managed to grab various docs that should be useful. Java 2D demo looks mighty good.

8th April 2002 Jonathan Daniel 2002