Been a little while since I updated the site as I've been on holiday for almost three weeks.
I've been home to Reading, taking time out in Dundee and touring Fife with my mum, so its all been very busy.
I've finally finished Research Proposal so my next job is to apply to universities, all very scary. As excited as my proposal makes me, I really hope I'm able to get across why this is such a great idea.
I'm also carrying on with the development of Martian Railway Toolkit, but I'm renaming it Transport Network Toolkit (or TNT) which I aim to have finished before September.
Lastly, I still plan to add Comments and Galleries to the site, but this is a secondary priority to my research.
Feels a bit like I'm running up against a wall lately. Twitter feed is currently totally knackered, not sure if its my code or the twitter search API, but nothing is getting returned and I just sent the code off as an example of my work too (epic fail). Martian Railway Toolkit is currently crashing my graphics card on resize, though that should be easily fixed. And I'm having some pretty difficult motivational problems with my Research Proposal just now.
But its not all bad. Apart from the resize problem, MRT is making some progress forward, and should easily be ready by September if I were to start a PhD then. The proposal for that is almost done, I just need a few more references for my literature review and to tidy it up a little. Also, even if I don't get the job I'm currently applying for, it has given me the confidence to apply else where. I have some good demos, and I really am a skilled programmer. And, perhaps best of all, I'm more inspired than ever to make a game of my own.
For the later there are two possibilities. The first is a very basic facebook game I would develop with two friends who are in similar situations to me. I'm very excited about this as its an absurdly simple idea, but would work well within the Facebook Ecosystem. The second possibility is to get back to work on GravRT, my Real Time Gravity Wars clone in XNA and C#. I still have the code for this however I was thinking of starting again with it and making it a little more like a dual stick shooter.
Fingers crossed anyway.
Update: Resizing MRT works again. Now just need to find a faster way than restarting the whole device. Maybe resetting just the viewport and swapchain will work.
I finished off my twitter code so it now (sort of) works with an SQL Database.
The script now checks twitter for any tweets by or to to the user (set in at the top of the script). If it can get the feed it then tries to update the database with the collection of tweets, and anything with a duplicate Twitter ID gets ignored.
Then, whether getting the feed was successful or not, it will get tweets from the database matching the criteria all, from or to the user, and up to a predefined limit, again set at the top of the script.
If for any reason it can't get tweets from the database, it will fall back to the original twitter feed, and filter it by the search criteria and limit.
If in the unlikely circumstance that it can't get the twitter feed (or it returns no results) and it can't get tweets from the database, it will generate a single 'fake' tweet to give a user friendly message reporting a problem.
The script supports multiple users in the same database, and formats with either HTML5 or HTML4 tags. Because each tweet uses a special object, and all the functions return arrays of this object, its easy to make your own formatting.
The last niggle (that I know of) is for some reason it isn't recording the tweets when I use this script on Martian Railway. Once I've resolved this I'll add the scripts, and an example of how to use it to the Tools Section of the website.
Still to do:
- Ability to for users to Add Comments
- Non-blog areas of the site to use Wordpress Pages (to allow comments and content control).
