World Wide Sandbox

With the large variety of projects that are on the go, it makes sense to have a page where all of my projects are organized and kept up to date. There will be no code here, only descriptions of projects and possibly some links to their source packages. This will be the first place that is updated when there is a significant advancement or change in a project, anywhere from programming, to writing to beta testing.

Java Video Game Project
This is a project that I have been working on for several years now as an aside to my learning, and it is finally becoming feature complete. The latest build available of the game includes both the server and server toolkit for preparing and editing campaign maps, as well as hosting the server. The server is dedicated and thus will run in its own console window outside of the game. The client is a graphics enriched 2D world that now has support for double and triple buffering, animations and chatting.

The next release of the game will include an update to enable audio, the client updater software to download new tilesets and campaign maps from the server, as well as the first preview for smooth animations. The smooth animations will make use of the double buffering feature in the previous build, allowing for animated tiles, smooth walking and attack animations as well as text effects during battle (such as damage information). Expect this release to be up sometime in February, though it might be just an alpha view.

Movie Planet
This is my first attempt at designing a fully scalable web application and will be my first attempt at designing a mainstream product. The site will allow users to rate movies that they have watched, build top movies lists, watch trailers and share reviews. This site will be designed fully with the user in mind with intuitive menus and navigation. Expect an early demo sometime in late February, and possibly a beta in March.

Mini-Projects
Along with my larger scale projects, I’m developping some libraries for personal use. They may not benefit everyone, and they may not independently be available (will be included in a larger project for example), but the ones listed below are in active development and will have full support.

• Java Object Management Library (Status – In Debugging and Testing): This Java library will allow for easy object manipulation within a program. Instead of managing your own libraries, you will be able to ask this class to store them for you, either in memory, on disk or both, and it will act as a lookup system for your objects. Whenever you insert an object into the manager, it will return a unique ID to you which is used to access your object in storage. This will allow for things such as quick save and quick resume on disk, and it will also allow for beginners to easily be able to do some IO exploration. You can also specify the write/read type of your objects, including using a particular function within the object to handle the dumping (such as writing a text file, you would specify to save its toString() method rather than its object data). This is a relatively compact library, and I expect to release it in mid February at the latest.
• Java BigMath Library (Status – In Development): This Java library will allow for some fancy math functions to be used that aren’t included in the default Java Math library. Things such as fast cube roots, nth-root calculators, fast inverse square roots and a variety of other useful but often overlooked math functions. This will be an extension of the java.lang.Math library, and will allow for further subclassing.