It’s almost unbelievable that half the year is over. Yes, I always start these blog posts with unbelievable remarks. It’s been three months since my last post, which is both unsurprising but also utterly disappointing. I had promised myself that this year I will step up the “self marketing” with my blog and social network posts. Sad to say, that was , and still is, a disaster. Except for a few weeks at the beginning of the year, I had barely made any significant posts anywhere. My last blog post was at the end of the first quarter. Even worse, last FOSS/KDE related post was back in 2012. It’s beyond embarrassing.
That said, the past three months weren’t a complete failure as far as personal goals go. In fact, I could say it was quite productive in that single aspect.
Adventures in OpenGL land
This year, I set myself up to make substantial progress in two major personal coding projects. The first one was primarily the focus of the first quarter and I showed a glimpse of it here and there for the keen of sight. One day I’ll talk about it probably. Or even show my terrible code. But that’s the subject of another post.
The other project had to do with a long time dream of mine. I am not what most gamers would consider a gamer, though I’ve had my fair share of games under my belt. Or fingers and thumbs. But I’ve always dreamed of developing and designing these virtual worlds and even my own game. With so many tools available today for wannabe game developers, it’s almost too easy to get the ball rolling there.
Of course, I had to take the hard path.
I do have ideas for games. Lots of them. But while I love thinking about those aspects that would fall under “game design”, I fancy myself more to be on the “game development” side of the fence. Particularly, the programming parts. Sure, game engines like the ridiculously popular Unity or the likes of Unreal do lend themselves to programming as much as design, but my interests went deeper than just making the games. I wanted to make the things that make the games. In other words, the game engine. So contrary to sage advice and common sense, I started in the very place where gurus tell beginners NOT to start: developing the game engine, particularly the graphics engine.
I’ve always had a thing for computer graphics programming. I have now aged but unused books for evidence. That later gave way to a somewhat related GUI programming (yay Qt!) but putting 3D models on a screen has always been a great interest. I’ve dabbled in OpenGL here and there before, but, for the first time, I’ve really sunk my teeth into it.
Image may be NSFW.
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Of course, I can’t claim I’ve grokked even the tip of the iceberg at this point. Three months isn’t enough time to really understand things. Especially with matrices involved. But I’ve gotten enough to be able to display things. And on both Linux and Windows even! MinGW AND Visual Studio, mind you. So yes, an accomplishment. It’s far from over. It’s only just begun. There’s a lot of work left to do. But that will have to wait a bit. To prevent burnout and/or getting bored, I’m switching gears a bit for the next two months or so. Hopefully, I’ll ramble about that too.
Moving forward
Despite the project productivity, I’m still depressed about my written output, especially on this blog. I have thought that redesigning it would have given me some inspiration, but I guess I’m just totally lazy. Or unmotivated. Or both. The problem isn’t about not having anything to write about. I have tons! The problem is really getting down to business and writing it.
Thinking about it, maybe I’ve set myself up to fail. I have all these ideas and these thoughts or writing so much about them. I can go and on, if you haven’t noticed. So, naturally, the thought of having to write all that becomes daunting. So, naturally, I procrastinate. Until the day comes when I can simply think of the words to write and the words magically appear, I’ll have to figure ways to short circuit my laziness.
Again, going against advice not to publicize one’s goals, here are some of the steps I’ve thought of:
- I put up a blog post every week to develop a habit. Blogging more than once a week is already overwhelming at this point, so let’s set the minimum a bit lower.
- I write short. Very short. Resist the temptation to ramble and set limits. If it goes beyond those limits, split ‘em up! Just so that my brain will get used to the idea that blogging isn’t going to be like writing a novella.
- Have a topic ready per week. I have quite the backlog, so that’s not going to be hard at first. But it might be eventually. Preparing something beforehand that my brain can chew on for days would help get over writer’s block.
- Most importantly, set aside a “sacred time” for writing. Something that can’t be moved no matter what. Except in real emergencies of course.
Let’s see if this strategy works out. If you see more posts in the coming days, you’ll definitely know it did. :)