Some thoughts from last week:
I missed last week’s post
I’ve been so busy with this job I’ve been working on for the past few weeks that I haven’t been paying attention to my writing. The post for last last week’s thoughts is still sitting in my drafts. Missing the third post in what’s supposed to be a weekly series really isn’t a great start. 😐
But while this project has been very difficult to deal with lately, it should be coming to an end soon and I’m actually really excited for it to be finished up and for the client to finally start using it. I’m also both looking forward to and not looking forward to figuring out how to show off the massive amount of backend work this project turned out to be in a visual portfolio here on the website. I didn’t create the design, but I implemented it and the entire CMS backend that powers the website. It’s not very easy to show that off. All that said, it still came together really well so far and I’m happy about it even though I came real close to transitioning off the project at a few very aggravating moments.
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey
First, it started with a pretty bad alpha that didn’t show much improvement as it went on. Then a sloppy release that had the same performance issues from early in development and worse visuals than the alpha somehow. Now, the detailed roadmap the company promised to share to make their upset players feel better turned out to be a forum post from one of the community managers containing couple of bullet points that cover the next few weeks and was mostly a repeated “many improvements and fixes.”
People are not happy. Long time figures in the Elite community are pissed. People who say they’ve been playing since the early 80s are saying they’re done with the series forever. Things really just aren’t going well for them right now.
I’m still playing it though. I was live streaming it earlier today. There are really good parts of a game in there, but it’s obvious that the company has really been struggling with the game development process. Also, the multiplayer is still complete trash. I can’t believe it’s still so fucking buggy after all this time.
Live Streaming
I did a lot of work to set up the live streaming stuff here on this server but I haven’t gotten around to writing a post about it (or actually streaming much) lately since I’ve been busy. But this will change soon. I did try out a test stream this morning though, and the video was stuttery and I noticed some bugs in my user/chat handling code.
I fixed the bugs, but I still have to figure out the best settings for handling the video I’m sending to/from the server. If I do too much video processing on the server to try to provide a smoother video stream, I run up CPU usage and effect general site availability. There’s lots of balancing between video quality and delay/timing that will take time to get right. But I’ll be playing around with it a lot over the next few months.
Web Development on Windows
Speaking of live streaming, I really want to stream myself doing more dev related stuff over time. I mentioned in other posts how I do all my development on macOS but it’s still terrible for streaming, so I want to start moving more of my development over to my gaming PC.
I already started that process last year by setting up a dev environment, Go, git and pulling the website repo. It’s been taking me a while to finish setting everything else up though. 🤷🏾♂️ Soon.