keeping you hopeful | Squirrel Alienz

Back on track

alarial — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 23:51:53 +0000

I’ve succerssfully completed my transition over to C++ for the primary implementation of my work, updated repositories, and brought everything in-house to my own NAS because of game size issues. I am still working on testing cross-OS compilation for the game when working on either my Windows machine or my Macbook and getting everything reimplemented.

I have found that I want to approach certain pieces different now that I have had a chance to reevaluate during the transition. So I will inevitably scrap some of what I had done before. But that’s what refactoring is all about, right?

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An update… finally!

alarial — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 05:44:43 +0000

I completely underestimated the time a second child would require in relation to only one child, so I haven’t had much of a chance to really sit down and focus on the game. I have had a bit of time to review some interesting engine updates and be sad that my code needs to come a long way to catch up with the changes. The game development is still on, just delayed. One of the things I am slowly working on is recreating my existing work through primarily C++ rather than entirely Blueprint. I really like Blueprint, but some benchmarks show it can run up to 10x slower than C++ code which does not bode well for computation-heavy situations. On the plus side, I have one less time commitment than before as I have finished my Bachelor’s degree program. It seems as if things have slowed down a bit for both me and my other dev, so hopefully we can get back to churning out some code. More to come!

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Site layout

alarial — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 04:58:18 +0000

I’ve been messing around with the site design here and there over the past few weeks. I don’t know when or if I will be finished. I just don’t have enough dedicated time to devote to website fun. I will probably poke and prod at it here and there until I get it somewhere I enjoy a bit more. Meanwhile, I will work on getting a proper update posted.

I also realized my new theme uses the kind of tracking-based social media icons I hate. I will get rid of them. For those of you running around the internet naked without any protection (figuratively speaking… or is it?), you could at least give Privacy Badger a look. I may also get rid of Google Analytics, despite the interesting information it provides. They just happen to be the exact thing I try to educate people against.

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Finally fixed the site slowness problems!

alarial — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 06:43:20 +0000

I finally had time to sit down and figure out why the site was loading everything so ridiculously slow… and the reason was simple. So simple I don’t even want to tell you. But I will.

When I was first transitioning hosts, I had a problem setting up the database locally. As a temporary workaround, I grabbed the externally accessible URL from my old hosting provider and continued to use that database. Then… I forgot about it and let it sit there and use a remote database for some extended amount of time.

The only reason I found out is because I was about the wipe out the entire site (after making a backup) and start over to see if that would fix any database problems I was experiencing. I grabbed the values from the config and noticed that it didn’t say localhost like it should; it said .com or something.

Anyway, after a quick update of the database location and a restore of the files/database, it appears everything is up and running without any problems and at a speed I don’t want to smash something over.

This is exactly why I make action lists Too bad I started that habit after I made the database workaround decision >.>

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Hey you! Yeah, the one with the eye!

alarial — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 04:36:47 +0000

Welcome to the middle of nowhere! Actually, that is probably what it seems like around here right now. No worries though, that is all about to change. Pretty soon it will feel like the middle of somewhere. I’m not sure where yet, but details have never really stopped me before.

Just focus on the happy things and everything will be alright… or something like that. I am working on several projects right now, so I hope to have more to put up here soon! (even if I am only talking with myself)

*noms*

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