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George Schizas Blog

Days in the life of a clone

Gaming rejuvination

Lately I’ve become a bit disinterested in video games. I guess I was feeling a bit guilty about the fact that I didn’t play enough World of Warcraft. I haven’t even maxed my main character with Burning Crusade standards (70), and I have got Wrath of the Lich King as well. This may be a general problem of mine, that, even if I have played a myriad of games, I have completed just a few of them.

So, in order to make myself interested again, I installed steam. That was a big “mistake”… I have now bought a whole lot of games, and I still don’t have the time to play them…

Fallen Sword / Sigma Storm Helper

I’ve made my first (popular) open source project since September, and it has been a very enlightening experience. It’s called Fallen Sword Helper, and it’s hosted by Google Code.

The project started when I started playing an online browser-based RPG game. I registered last April, but I didn’t really play before last summer (2008), as I found the instructions to be a little difficult. Anyhow, the game is (as you can see from the title) Fallen Sword from Hunted Cow Studios. After playing for a bit, there were some things in the game that somewhat annoyed me, which made the game less than enjoyable. After being accepted to a top 250-guild, which had a rule to not attack people of some guilds, I decided that I should enhance the game experience, as it would be very difficult for me to remember who were our “friendly” guilds – the ones I shouldn’t attack. So, I started working on a new Greasemonkey script to make those fixes.

Using a Greasemonkey script for Firefox was really a method I had used in another browser-based game. In fact, I had made a Firefox Extension first, because it would otherwise be impossible to send XMLHTTP requests. Of course Firefox extensions are a lot more difficult to develop, because each change you make means you have to restart your browser. So, since I discovered that Greasemonkey had an internal API that could send XMLHTTP requests (and also a way to persist variables), I decided that Greasemonkey scripts were the way to go.

After a while, I decided to post the Helper script on to userscripts.org, so that other people would benefit from it. I also put in an autoupdate feature, which I felt was a major requirement for me to keep my sanity.

As time progressed, there were many submissions to the userscripts forum, so I felt it was time to upgrade this project to a real collaborative environment – a true source control system, and, if possible a bug tracking tool. Google Code really is very good for all that. It provides a true subversion server, a trac-like (custom Google though) issue tracker, a wiki, and all of these on Google’s infrastructure. The only thing missing (for now) is a way to import/export the whole subversion repository, but I can live with that.

Doing that in a real scale was a new experience for me. From the project itself, I have become a lot more proficient with javascript and Firefox’s DOM, as opposed to mostly IE’s DOM which I used to work with. I also learned a lot about subversion in the process, to the point that I even managed to migrated a very old and very corrupt SourceSafe from work to a subversion repository (even though this was mostly done out of plain fear that the corruption would soon become terminal).

The best part of creating an open source project (even with just 3 active developers right now – but it would seem a lot more users) was finding out about that spirit of cooperation with people from all around the world (literally!). It feels really nice having other people reading and understanding your code, and being able to expand it without the “seams” being visible. By that I mean that they understand the code (I hope it doesn’t go to my head, but it would seem I make somewhat understandable code. Or they are supergeniuses), and what they add has the same “code smell”, you can’t see where my code ends and my collaborators’ code begins.

Another cool thing that has come out of that, is that I finally got to use a proper issue tracking software, and also to manage a project at a higher level than just writing code. Don’t get me wrong, writing code is still my favorite activity, but it’s nice to know that I could also manage a project from higher up. I’ve also started writing technical documentation for all that. All in all, I think I’m doing a more professional and complete job for this project that I’m not getting paid for, than the projects I’m really getting paid for at work 🙂 Of course the fact that for my project I’m the chief developer, project manager and main customer helps.

World Othello Championship

The last three days were a bit hectic, but I was taking part of something very cool: The 31st World Othello Championship! It was a bit unexpected of course, but I was one of the two members of the Greek team. The event took place in Greece, in the center of Athens (which was almost obviously the reason a Greek team, which was just put together, could take part).

All in all, a wonderful experience! I came 66th of 68, but it really was my first time playing for real (as in on a board), with players that obviously have been playing a very long time and were very experienced. My goal was really not coming last, which I very much achieved :).

I just hope there will be a next chapter in all of this, and I can do better next year 🙂

World of Warcraft – Burning Crusade

I’m installing right now the expansion to World of Warcraft. Through a weird sequence of events, I have it in my hands, almost 4 hours before it is officially released to the world! 🙂

Legion of Lunatics Dinner

I’m off for a dinner meeting with my World of Warcraft
guild mates. I hope I’ll find it 🙂

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