A few weeks ago I tried out ‘elance.com’. Yes, I could design an own logo, yes, I could invest many many hours, but why not do what I can do best, earn more money per hour concentrating on something else and hire someone experienced instead? The result is the new logo you see at the top and the new design (the latter being my own work, further adapting the wordpress ‘Pixel’ theme).
What did I have learned from this? It’s a great way to get your own thoughts straight. You have to define the project and all steps. It’s a great way to put your own thoughts into action and keep being motivated until the project is finished – because there is (hopefully) a motivated worker at the other end I already have plans for new projects, this time letting someone do some programming for my new database project.

I finished my work on the tabs, buttons and windows of the GUI, now I’m thinking about the next project. While there are still about about 6-8 months of work ahead for EF2 I find it important to plan the next steps. This is an important lesson from project management / marketing. People who find your product great want something to look forward to. If you can already present the next product a few months after the first you can ride on the momentum of public interest the release of your first product has generated. Otherwise people will simply forget about you and move on.
I did a lot of work in the Java2EE / Web UI field in the last year at work so I will program the “EF2 premium” version in Java. While the EF2 user interface looks great it lacks many of the advanced features that Java2EE in connection with GWT provides (a dynamic grid with SQL connection, authentication features, RPC client/server communication, browser integration). Thus I have split the project into two parts: An optimized main module in C++ that does the actual calculations and that runs locally on your computer to display the colorful graphical user interface and a more complex configuration interface in your web browser to individually configure the 30 interconnected tables required to run Evolution Forge 2. It gets more exciting every month, stay tuned!

Banging my keyboard against the -Wall I took up the challenge to cut down all warnings. My motivation / coding strategy usually is that whenever I’m stuck with some programming issue I try to beautify the code. Most of the times I find a number of bugs I will encounter sooner or later, so every hour invested is worth it! Plus the statistics look good I still have a bug to fix but the menu bar and the window handling is already working. I’m looking forward to a full working base application (well, it starts, shows buttons, hides/displays windows) at the end of the months.

After lots of tweaking and fixing the graphic engine is finally done! All the GUI elements (windows, buttons etc.) are also complete, now the main task is to add them all to the user interface. A few features of the engine:

• Platform independent (based on SDL)
• On the fly changes of language/background/bit depth possible (no restart of the program necessary)
• Super fast (even without OpenGL), only necessary parts are redrawn each frame (sounds simple but quite a lot of geometric algorithms and logic is needed for that)
• Dynamic placement of objects (all objects slide over the screen to their target position)
• Fully configurable via XML files

Next I will add some basic windows and complete the sound/music part of the engine. After adding some settings windows I will finally include the middle ware for the core algorithms you all waiting for

(Wallpaper (c) Blizzard Entertainment)

This is a very first draft of a software company, a lot of things are missing but I found the idea intriguing to make a picture. One way or the other all (software) companies need to look like this, although very often multiple positions are held by a single team member. This might be ok sometimes, but might cause conflicts in certain situations. I think it is important to put all connections in detail down to paper and analyze them. And that is basically the job of one of the missing entities in the graph – the entrepreneur

A little insight into EF2s structure:

Currently the ‘Test’ seems a little small compared to the rest of the program, that’s because the old code I took over from EF1 was untested. I’m still amazed how it was possible for me to develop EF1 without test driven development

I’ve just noticed that a few projects have been started to use genetic algorithms to calculate build orders for SC2. Great!
But judging from their coding ‘Evolution Forge 2′ is light years ahead Still, I will put up my efforts one notch. You can look forward seeing an “Evolution Forge 2″ this year!

I attended GECCO (conference about evolutionary computing) in Portland two weeks ago, very interesting experience. Firstly it was my first trip to the US, secondly I got some great input from various talks, sessions and speakers which I am currently processing. I have also decided to go the first steps of the long journey to building an own company and talk to many people about possibilities to make this dream come true The most important step was to put that long-term idea into my head and believe in it and write down a plan for the next 12-24 months. This way my brain works subconsciously day and night creating new ideas

Technology-wise I’ve already decided on a set of tools I will use the next few months. Most importantly is the new hardware coming next week, switching from a netbook to a real PC with SSD and 8GB RAM will hopefully improve my situation I got some new ideas about how to improve my code and code stability (i.e. improving my unit tests), with >50k LOC this becomes important.

Take care and be happy

My paper about multi-agent systems was accepted by the GECCO 2010 conference in July and I will be the designated speaker I’m preparing now my trip to the US :>
Also I’ve switched my development to Visual C++ 2010. Finally some continuous integration… The first prototype of the core of EF2 is nearly finished, I’m currently thinking about some datatypes (map locations, unit lists etc.). In June I will get a new PC, from there on development will be much faster
Be happy and stay tuned…

This week I started at my new working place, a local CRM company. I still have to sleep over the new impressions and experiences I got from there and recover from the first (expected) “shock” that it’s something completely new. But the most important thing (and the source from which I derive my endurance) is that one can succeed anywhere if one just put one’s mind into it. There is no such thing as magic in the world, anything can be explored by one’s mind!
So I welcome the new challenge to get acquainted with new technologies, new people and new concepts! And being now able to support a new (bigger) appartment is a plus