July in review

I've been playing around with a few side projects last month. I'm trying to rebuild a small game prototyping application I have in a cleaner, more efficient way. The goal is rapid prototyping, easy distribution and to not be intolerably slow. I've submitted the starting steps of this under Git

1. https://github.com/balaam/1-GameLoop
2. https://github.com/balaam/2-LuaGameLoop
3. https://github.com/balaam/3-CGGameLoop

It started to get a little messing when I came to automatically reloading assets (not quite as messy as my current "complete" version though). Anyway half way through this I decided Lua intergration would go a lot smoother with nice a reflection system. I remember working on kjAPI (which unfortunately doesn't seem to be being updated publicly anymore.) there was a cool reflection system, Classes and their properties could be registered and without any additional code you could interact with the object in the game editor. Very cool.

I looked at kjAPI's reflection code at the time but I definitely didn't understand it and didn't take the time to break it apart, so I was a bit of loss how to start. I found some excellent articles by Don Williamson ‏(@Donzanoid) over here: http://altdevblogaday.com/2011/09/25/reflection-in-c-part-1-introduction/ which gave a nice overview. Then I spent some time getting back up to speed with templates and member function pointers and was able to get some proof of concepts up and running.

1. https://github.com/balaam/CppReflect

I intend to come back to that but in the meantime I've been trying to focus on programming that actually brings in some cash. So my current side project is more profit focused and at the moment involves some very basic natural language processing in Python. I don't think I'll be publishing this code publicly for the time being. One reason being; each time I come back to the code, I rewrite how it works from the ground up. I think this third iteration is here to stay for a while though. It's currently parsing text with a 35%(ish) accuracy and I want to bring that up to 80%. My aim is to complete this asap.