Life has been pretty interesting these past few months.
Besides the Demigod melodrama of having to basically assign my guys to take over Demigod’s multiplayer connectivity and stay there with them into the wee hours, I’m supposed to deliver a manuscript to a major publisher for a fantasy novel by the end of June. I’m hoping to get an extension until the end of July.
Swarms
On Friday, one of my bee hives swarmed. I’d never seen that before. Me and my friend Phil tried to get them but they took off before I could go into the Stardock storage area to pick up some bee hive nucs.
On Saturday, I spent part of the day playing Demigod online. I’m still pretty dissatisfied with v1.0. I don’t trust the stats yet. I look forward to v1.01 being out there so that I can play a bit more competitively. I’m still working with my friends at GPG to make it so that if someone quits, their Demigod is gone and not replaced with a bot. If people quit, they should be gone. AI should only take over if someone loses their connection for some reason.
Trees and Demigods
On Sunday, some of the guys wanted to come in to work on code that we could insert into Demigod to make it smarter on handling proxies but I had to forbid anyone from coming to work. One of the problems of working crazy hours is that it can become addictive. And at this point, the only people who have connection issues with Demigod either have crappy ISPs or crappy routers (or even more commonly, can’t be bothered to turn off fort Knox level firewalls). The proxies are taking care of them but the guys need to take a day off.
I spent Sunday getting more up to speed on a new weird hobby (because bee keeping isn’t weird enough I guess) and that is forestry. I have a property with 13 acres of woods on it and there’s a lot of trees on it. There’s various types of apple trees, yellow poplar, walnut trees, maple trees, and a number of fairly rare trees that certainly don’t seem very impressive but my Forestry friend from the university was very excited about. It’s going to cost an arm and a leg to rehabilitate those trees though. But I think in the long term it’ll be worth it (well not financially but for posterity).
I researched how to try to catch some of the swarms and found out that Lemongrass Essential Oil 2 dram in a box will help. We’ll see. I ordered some and maybe I’ll pick up some bee swarms. I also went ahead and bought a bee keeping veil for my son since social services says it’s “cruel” for me to have one for myself while my son gets stung when he’s helping me at the hives. I try to explain I’m building character or something.
Power tools and police scanners
On Monday I started reading up on power tools. Now, I can’t build anything. When I’ve leveled up in life, I put all my points into increasing my nerd skills. So I’m a level 20 hacker, coder, spread sheet jockey, economic analyst, and flame war artist. But I have no clue how to use the whacker to put spikes into wood. I did some research on electric saws, drills, and nail guns. I didn’t buy any since I should probably up my insurance first.
Also today I ordered a Uniden BCD396XT Handheld TrunkTracker IV Digital Police Scanner as I’m ridiculously nosey and not brave enough yet to get into ham radios. This is what happens if you spend too much time on the Internet. Everyone you know is someone online and so human voices have to come through an expensive box. Plus, having gotten multiple tickets on I-75 up near West Branch I’ve gotten a bit fed up with the speed traps. Yes, I could just go the speed limit but it’s straight, open roads, middle of the day no cars, and the 911 Turbo forces me to do things against my will.
Coding is life
When the book is written, I mean to get back to C#. But first I have to pick up and learn Python since I promised the team and fans that I would put a serious effort to let people mod my future AIs and since Elemental supports Python this is a good opportunity. I’d love to also start modding Demigod, I don’t know LUA but it can’t be very hard. I think its AI could be improved just by having more awareness of damage per second it’s taking and a few triggers to know when to flee to a safe spot to recover.
If I had more time, I’d like to learn how to make Demigods and Demigod maps. While the game’s launch was a total disaster, I feel pretty confident that its sheer excellence (Dota zealots not withstanding) will ensure it has a long-term audience that will only grow as long as we keep supporting it.
Hiring
This is the time of year we usually hire people. Michigan is at its best in the early Spring. But with all the crazy hours lately, we haven’t had a chance to hire. A missed opportunity. We’ll have to revisit it later in the Summer and see where we’re at. There’s so much to do.
