Finger info for icculus@icculus.org...



(Seen my glasses? I'm a dork.)

If you want a specific section of my plan, you can use the web interface
 like this:

  http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&section=intro
  http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&section=proj
  http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&section=general
  http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&section=ssam
  http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&section=todo

Or directly through port 79, if your finger client will let you get away with:
  finger icculus?section=ssam@icculus.org

This is part of the new, improved IcculusFinger. Yay.

Thanks,
  --The McManagement.



Currently Active Projects:
(This is in no particular order)


 - The icculus.org open source incubator.
 - SDL_sound.
 - PhysicsFS.
 - The Build Engine.
 - Toby.
 - Serious Sam.
 - IcculusFinger.
 - Unrealty.
 - IcculusNews.
 - Other stuff.

I have projects on icculus.org (some are even mine) that are already
 abandoned. I will have to figure out what to do with them. If you want to
 peek around, look at The CVS Tree.



General stuff:


 I'm a militant feminist. There's no way around it. I've got ticket stubs
  from an Ani Difranco concert and The Vagina Monologues in my wallet.

 To keep my status as "honorary cunt", I've picked up some new grrl music.
  First, the latest from The Jennifer Nettles Band. This album is good:
  definitely worth hearing. "Gravity: Drag Me Down" is more backwaters than
  Jennifer's first release, but I like the fact that she's branching out. The
  jazzy, bluesy, soulsy sound is still there (reference "Cold Sweat Scream"),
  but listen to "El Camino" and you'll understand why I call this
  "backwaters". I mean, she actually gets away with using the phrase, "why
  don't we go sugar-footin'?" No shit.

 Sadly, neither this, nor "Story of Your Bones," has that dripping erotic
  appeal of her work with Soul Miner's Daughter, but I still like the new
  album.

 I also got Alanis Morrisette's new disc. It sounds just like the second
  CD she put out. I don't understand how Jagged Little Pill can be so well
  done (fuck you, you liked it too in 1995), and her next two offerings be
  so...lackluster. I need to listen to it a few more times, but even
  "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" had one or two songs that were catchy,
  like "Joining You"...this one, is, well...(*shrug*).

 I'll stop acting like I know what I'm talking about now.



Serious Sam:

 Yes, I'm porting it. No, there's no timeframe right now. Email me with
 questions, and I'll start a FAQ or something.

Current Status:

 I occasionally get an email saying, "hey, where the hell is Serious Sam
  for Linux? It's been months, and your .plan has been collecting dust!"

 My current favourite response:

  Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the
  tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the
  blessed sun himself a fair, hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see
  no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of
  the day. I wasted time and now doth time waste me.

  -- William Shakespeare

 That being said, it's still being worked on. I'm so far behind schedule,
  it's not even funny, but this is the danger of free work. I need to eat,
  so when paying contracts come along, they will always take priority
  over charity ports. In the past few months, a lot of Linux and MacOS
  game porting work has come my way. Candy Cruncher was one such beast
  (which, if you haven't tried it, then you are missing out on an
  addictive little game). Other games, plus open source contributions to
  SDL and friends, maintaining and improving icculus.org, etc...I'm a
  mover and a shaker, apparently...but I'm still plugging away at the code
  when I've got time. I can't thank you Linux gamers enough for your patience,
  and hope it pays off for you shortly.

 In related news, I squashed that motherfucker of a rendering issue. I moved
  over to the Intel C++ compiler, since their 6.0 release doesn't suck ass
  like version 5.0 did. I might stick with GCC for the final builds, but Intel
  C++ has one thing going for it that makes it a great porting tool: it can
  grok both GNU and Visual C style inline assembly
. This was a godsend,
  and fixed at least three major rendering problems. For example, there's
  code that looks something like this in the original source base:

  __asm
  {
  fld dword ptr [f]
  fist dword ptr [slTmp]
  fisubr dword ptr [slTmp]
  fstp dword ptr [fDiff]
  // ...some other stuff ...
  }


  I had this for the Linux build:

  __asm__ __volatile__
  (
  flds dword ptr [f]
  fists dword ptr [slTmp]
  fisubrs dword ptr [slTmp]
  fstps dword ptr [fDiff]
  // ...some other stuff ...
  );

  (okay, the operands aren't right in the GNU one, but follow me here...)

  Apparently, this is wrong, and created a very subtle rounding error in
  the Linux version. I didn't discover this until I got the Intel compiler
  to generate an ELF binary with the MSVC inline, and the bug mysteriously
  vanished. At that point it was just a matter of compiling each source file
  with inline assembly (there's about 10 to 15 of them) with Intel C++,
  trying both the GNU and MSVC inline until I found the file that had the
  buggy code. When I narrowed it down to that code fragment, I used gdb to
  disassemble the MSVC inline version...this spits out assembly in AT&T (GNU
  inline) format, and I could compare.

  Here's the difference:

  What I had: What I should have had:
  flds (%%eax) flds (%%eax)
  fists (%%ebx) fistl (%%ebx)
  fisubrs (%%ebx) fisubrl (%%ebx)
  fstps (%%ecx) fstps (%%ecx)

  Why I was supposed to know that I needed to specify a different precision
  to two of the opcodes and not the other two is beyond me. This is why
  everyone thinks inline floating point assembly is broken in gcc. It's not.
  Inline assembly in general is broken in gcc. Or rather, it's
  braindead. I'm sure there will be people that disagree, but they don't
  port games to Linux for a living. I think I'll send Michael Abrash a
  love letter and send the Free Software Foundation a photocopy of my ass.

  Anyhow, next hurdle is networking, then some polishing, and then (dear
  lord), The First Encounter might be ready. Thankfully, the Second
  Encounter should be a much smoother ride, since I just need to get the
  entities (many of them cut-and-pasted from The First Encounter) compiling.

  Again, thank you for sticking around. I'll keep this .plan more updated
  in the future.

 Those old Screenies.
 Keep me and icculus.org going.

--ryan.

  (FAQ snipped. Check the archives.)



My never ending TODO list:


Somewhat immediate TODOs:
 - Unicode support in UT2k3.
 - Look at SDL audio conversion code.
 - Check for zlib 1.1.3 remnants on icculus.org.
 - Yuri's Revenge support in csmhax0r.
 - Have csmhax0r flip read-only flag.
 - Reburn damaged music disc.
 - Finalize text for Bernd.
 - Read Bernd's Gamasutra article.
 - Send zakk his stuff.
 - Sort out icculus.org hardware donations.
 - Get more RAM in the iMac.
 - Nag Kent about MindRover again.
 - Nag Vince about dedicated server stuff.
 - Shut down legacy OpenAL mailing list.
 - Report compiler issues to Intel.
 - Reply to Sam.
 - Add a "noarchive" tag to IcculusFinger.

Ongoing TODOs:
 - Port Serious Sam. ( 8%)
 - Rewrite IcculusNews. ( 50%)
 - Get Duke3D/COMMIT net API implemented for modern platforms. ( 0%)
 - Release SDL_sound v1.0. ( 90%)
 - Release PhysicsFS v1.0. ( 90%)
 - SDL_mixer rewrite, using non-existant SDL_sound library. ( 0%)
 - Toby rewrite #4. Way overdue. ( 20%)
 - Documentation for Toby. YEARS overdue. ( 0%)
 - Major SMPEG updates. ( 0%)
 - Rewrite web interface to mailing list archives. ( 0%)
 - Write The Hook Book. ( 0%)
 - Read A Beautiful Mind. ( 1%)

Backburnered, but reasonable TODOs: (in no specific order):
 - Make the logs rotate automatically.
 - Hook up CVS to IcculusNews.
 - Let people submit to IcculusNews via email.
 - Figure out how to monitor exactly how much bandwidth we've used per month.
 - Hook up mailing list software to IcculusNews.
 - Hook up Bugzilla to IcculusNews.
 - Rewrite Toby's parser.
 - Finish writing Punk Ass Comedy.
 - Finish writing The Street.
 - Finish reading The Dragon Book.
 - MBOX support in PhysicsFS.
 - Increase memory/swapspace.
 - Remove http://icculus.org/sysinfo/todo.html
 - Clean up room.
 - Clean up home dir.
 - Set up meldrew.
 - Get nerf updated for SSL support.

Blue sky:
 - Get Dreamcast Linux working.
 - SDL OS/2.
 - SDL LightPen/tablet support.
 - SDL MsgBox API.
 - Make BUILD Engine support OpenGL.
 - Fix the Linux Realtek drivers.
 - Write scratchware.
 - Physics engine.
 - BuildX.
 - Get BUILD engine ready for Matt Saettler.
 - Get Duke3D sound API implemented for modern platforms.
 - Beat Zork III. I will someday, I swear.


--ryan. (icculus@clutteredmind.org)

(icculus.org icon goes here)


When this .plan was written: 2002-05-03 04:52:39
.plan archives for this user are here (RSS here).
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