Welcome once more to my weekly progress update. You must be wondering what is it that afflicts me so much as to make me randomly murder people. It turns out that my roommates decided it would be awesome if we moved to another flat for the next year. And it turns out that they went straight ahead and looked for our new place without even asking me first. This would surely piss off the average man, but I myself hate switching places with such a deep passion that I’m starting to feel homicidal instincts towards my roommates or the humanity in general. So that’s basically it. If I trash my 24′ LCD or my computer rig while moving you’ll probably see me on the newspapers.
Let’s talk now about more interesting stuff: from the coding front I’ve got bad news and good news. The good news is that this week I’ve made massive progress. Actually, I wouldn’t call it massive, but I have finished several things which I expected to take much, much longer.
The overall integration of the new Graphical User Interface system in the current code base, for example, was one of my biggest concerns. Fortunately I did have many chances to spam my mentor with questions, and with a deeper understanding of ScummVM’s code comes a much more mature design for the new GUI, which can already be seen in my SVN branch and in my mind. Actually, I don’t think you could read my mind, but whatever.
My second concern was the parser: I was afraid that the format for Theme Description files was so complicated that I would be unable to parse it without an external parser generator, but I ended up making a good (I hope) design choice and changed theme descriptions to use a clean, XML-like syntax. It turned out to be a breeze to parse, and in fact theme description files are already being parsed in the SVN branch; this last week I implemented the parser for description files from scratch and so far it’s passing the few unit tests I have prepared.
…and this leads me to the next due point in this update and, oh dear, the bad news: What’s coming up next week? Basically, very little coding-wise. My realistic goal would be to finish the parser and write all the documentation on the new Theme Description file format together with a healthy suite of unit tests. That’s because the real life front, on the other hand, will be extremely busy. Next week I have the 2 most important exams of this semester -and by important I mean hard as fuck, so you unluckily you won’t see me much online.
Now the question is: how does this leave my schedule? Right, so you must be thinking “what schedule, you moron have no schedules”, which is not completely true. According to my mental schedule soon-to-be-written-in-paper, thanks to this last week of work I’m all good and on track for the first evaluation.
However, after this following (and last) week and a half of exams, I’ll obviously fall a tad behind. Fortunately, I’m 100% confident I’ll be able to catch up in less than 4 days after my exams are over -right in time for another weekly update. You still haven’t seen me coding seriously, when I don’t even bother on changing my underwear.
Yes, I know what you are thinking now. “What underwear?”