Summer game plan

It’s long past time I wrote a little bit in here. Truth be told, I’ve been extremely busy these past 3 weeks, finishing my internship at CRC and writing my research report. But all that is coming to an end now, so let’s talk about what’s coming up, shall we?

• Summer internship: I’ll be doing some web programming this summer for the CHUQ, a high-visibility medical research center affiliated to my university. I’m really happy to have gotten that one, and I’ll most likely be able to work at home for extra convenience.
• Riven X: Work on Riven X has pretty much stalled for the aforementioned reasons. As soon as things have died down a little bit, I’ll pick up the pace again. My first objective is to come up with a solution to the MPEG-2 Audio Layer II decompression problem, which I will discuss in greater detail in an upcoming entry. Beyond that, my mid-term goal is to have first playable done by the time WWDC 2006 comes around. Although I still don’t know whether I’m going or not (it all depends on the WWDC student scholarship), if I do end up going, I want to have as much stuff done as possible to make full use of the expertise that will be available to me there.
• libblp: I’m going to update libblp sometime in the (not too distant) future to clean up its API and add BLP2 support. This is partly motivated by the next item.
• Develop a better DKP system for my World of Warcraft guild: World of Warcraft has been my time killer for a while now, and I’m interested as much in its technology as in its gameplay. My guild, Alexstraza Dragon Riders, uses a somewhat custom-made DKP system which is pretty much entirely manual right now and in my opinion is wholly inadequate. In any case, I’m planning the development of a DKP system that will use the same basic mechanism as the one we’re currently using (DKP auctions, essentially), but is a lot easier to use, both on the raid leader side and on the client side, and has other interesting features like a web component and a useful GUI. I’ve just started the design work, but I expect to have more to say about this project in the future.

Although one is never certain about the future, this is probably the gist of my summer.