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Messages - AaroneusTheGreat
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61
« on: January 09, 2012, 03:16:49 am »
UPDATE:
Very exciting news! As of 2012-01-08 23:09:00 My computers have finished 100 work units! Yay for milestones! 15 work units were finished since my last post! I'm blown away! Pretty awesome to see the cluster working so well considering the age of the machines! I discovered one of my units is 12 years old! Wow. The compaq on the far right in the picture is the one I'm speaking of. 700mhz AMD duron processor. Not quite anywhere as old as my TI-99/4a but quite the dinosaur in it's own right. The TI-99/4a is older than me by about 7 years, if you can feature that. 1981 was the year, when the pterodactyls flew.
62
« on: January 09, 2012, 01:55:30 am »
Progress report reposted from revsoft:
I spent about 5 or 6 hours (maybe more, I wasn't keeping strict track of time, but I worked at least 5 hours total in two long sessions today) first rewriting a pretty important section of code for speed reasons, then tracking down and fixing the stuff I had broken in the process. I have successfully sped the game up a little more. I'm having slight issues still with a couple of things speed wise, nothing that is strictly problematic, but it bugs the crap out of me because I want this thing to be smooth as butter.
Speaking of how crazy this thing makes me sometimes, I am now triple backing up my progress, and I'm considering backing it up in a few more places! lol I'd be pretty upset if I ever lost anything in this process. With nearly 4 years of development and god knows how many hours of work I've put into it, I'd just about lose my mind if I lost this project. Actually... I decided to back it up to my ftp hosting on TIFreakware while I'm at it. :p
Lol the complexity is kind of getting away from me, I'm having to search through my code before writing new code so I don't reinvent the wheel. Them's the brakes with a project like this. I can't imagine what it would be like to program it in assembly. My brains would probably melt out of my ears.
Anyways, DOA's coming along nicely. I'll try and post recent screenshots as soon as I get some working screenshot software! lol I'm having issues with that and Windows 7. (dang non-backwards-compatibility horse-crap. Win 7 has irritated me mucho less than vista ever did (what a joke there, btw nested parentheses ftw) but it's still quite the irritant for sure.)
63
« on: January 07, 2012, 11:28:30 pm »
Update: I'm quickly approaching the 100 work unit completed! As it is, while I'm writing this post, I've completed 85 work units total. I'm averaging about 4 units per 24 hours. They complete at different times, due to the size differences, but that figure is relative to when I started work with 4 running nodes, that weren't acting right. In the last week or so, I've seen about 6 to 7 units done every 24 hours. The cluster is really chugging along.
Speaking of how hard it's working. I've had to turn my air conditioner on in the middle of winter. I came home from a walk, and my house was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 26.6 degrees Celsius for those of you who live in the metric world.
64
« on: January 07, 2012, 11:02:11 pm »
Impressive work! Very nice looking so far! I'm going to have to dust off the 84+ and boot it up for this one when it's released. I haven't played much with any physical calculators in a while, I mostly try out stuff on emulators because I don't always want to buy or charge some batteries, but this warrants the 6 bucks for a pack of AAA's or the search for my charging dock for my rechargeables. This is really coming along quickly.
65
« on: January 07, 2012, 09:19:47 pm »
By the way I still vote for MineCrack for the name. Where's the write-in? -.-
You seem to be chugging along Leafy! Keep up the good work! It's looking good so far. Hopefully you'll be able to get a solution for your memory problem soon. Speaking of, what were we talking about?
66
« on: January 07, 2012, 08:59:27 pm »
I so want one of these Casio Prizm things. Color lcd and such, just amazing. These program packs look pretty awesome as well, I've been wanting to branch out and mess around with Casio and play with the HP50g I bought. It's good to see that some people are putting some real effort into the non-ti calcs, they're under appreciated I think.
67
« on: January 07, 2012, 07:04:58 pm »
Thanks! If you're really itching to try it, you could alpha test for me, if you don't mind telling me in detail about things that go wrong or things you like/dislike that could use more work.
68
« on: January 07, 2012, 04:49:42 pm »
@art of camelot: Wow. I will have to do that.  @nick: you can help with an emulator of your choice, that would be good as well because it would let me know if the emulators run my stuff right or if the bugs that might come up have to do with an emulator, and I may be able to fix them so that the game will run on any compatible platform. Progress Update: I focused on some optimizations and one or two minor bug fixes today, the game is now running quite a bit faster than it did before. I was in the shower thinking about ways I could avoid some more wasted cycles, and I came up with a plan to split the sprites entirely by type, and handle each category individually (sprites that move and sprites that don't) I had a bit of this setup already, but not to the extent that I've done today. I have a couple more tricks up my sleeve for trimming some more wasted cycles. As it is, the game is pretty darn responsive, even when a lot's going on, but now it speeds back up a lot more on it's own when there's less going on. It's almost a little creepy to see it slow and speed up on it's own, but it tells me that I'm getting closer to wasting no cycles with checks. My whole system is an event based system for the most part anyways, so it makes perfect sense why it slows up a tad when there's a bunch going on (when you're being swarmed by enemies in the minigame for instance), but I'm trying to make it not noticeable at all. I'll see what I can get done tomorrow, I'm kind of coded-out today, I spent the last few hours on this. Probably about 3 or so hours of non stop coding, so I feel good about what I accomplished. A good step forward even if it's just tuning up what I've already made.
69
« on: January 07, 2012, 12:06:18 am »
@Nick: Nice. Yeah lol I just thought of that while I was typing because I used the phrase "the game" in the post. The problem with the screenshot is that for some reason, calccapture can't find the window to start taking the feed from. I haven't figured it out, I've tinkered with it quite a bit. I was more thinking if anyone reading this could point me to possibly newer or better software that worked easily, I'd forgo the tinkering and just use that.
@everyone: Thanks for the encouragement, it means a lot. You'll be interested to know I've poked around in the maps quite a bit today, and while I haven't done much of anything today, I did relearn how I implemented some stuff, and kind of got my place in the code again. I was running around a lot today, and saw a movie, so I haven't done much with the project other than fix a moderately annoying menu quirk.
@flyingfisch: If you could point me to a really good set of Casio C tools, I'd be on it in a heartbeat, some of those Casio calculators are pretty powerful in terms of hardware. I got mildly into HP's 50g for a while, and I most likely will start working on something for that at some point here in the not so distant future. No promises yet, but I've gotten so much better at coding than I was when I started messing with it back in the day, that I feel like I could probably handle it better now. I lacked the confidence and knowledge base that I have now to really continue what I built effectively, so I put it on hold. Now that I've got colleagues that I regularly consult at the university, I have more of a quick support base to explain some things that are better explained in person where you can ask questions more quickly.
Anyways, supposing I don't figure out a way to do this soon, and for other reasons, you can expect I'll be calling on one of you to do some screenshots and such for me before too long. I am going to need alpha and beta testers who are willing and have the time to do some stuff like that for me. Also who can make some suggestions when it comes to things they like or don't like that I should put more work into. I could use the direction. I'm kind of darting around between quite a few things in the development, testers help me streamline the focus on the most important things.
70
« on: January 06, 2012, 04:32:32 pm »
For some odd reason I can't get my screenshot software to work despite much effort put forth. Anyone have any suggestions? And yes, DOA is officially under development again. I kept hearing stuff around my college about how people there were playing Doom89 and it kind of stroked my ego enough for me to get some motivation. A couple of my professors know who I am because of my previous work, so I figured it would probably be beneficial to my plan to try to weasel my way into the research department there if I completed this soon.
DOA really doesn't need a whole lot of work to be completed, but I want to implement some things to make it more interesting than just running around killing things. More storyline stuff, tasks, etc. I have a couple half done already, the only thing to do now is chug along and push forward.
I'm glad to see that people are still interested in this project, that's what keeps me going with this, that people will enjoy the game when it's done.
By the way... The game... you lose! haha Oh crap so do I. O.o :p
Oh by the way, If you're curious how many levels there are right now: 16 levels, 8 transport pod cinematic scenes, and 1 minigame level. I'm working on level design right now. I'm planning to add on to the points/purchasing system in the minigame, so you can buy the next level in the minigame with the points you get from killing the enemies. It's an escape plan, and a fun way to explore another level when playing. Each next level will cost more points. I don't know how many levels I'll make for the minigame, but I've got 40-something KB of space left in my mapfile, so I could potentially put a ton of levels for both the story mode and the minigame in there.
71
« on: January 05, 2012, 11:44:43 pm »
Egads! DOA has seen some progress! I just implemented the ability to save and load both the minigame and the storymode, along with the menu stuff for each. I'll post a screenshot when I get a chance.
72
« on: January 05, 2012, 10:40:59 am »
You know it's really not as hard as I expected. I've had some help from the drummer in my band. That's who I mentioned in the previous post. He's a Linux guru, has been using UNIX based systems since the late 90's or so I think. Around the time I got into programming more or less. So between the two of us, it's been pretty straightforward. With the help of some of the guys on here, I'm sure you could set one up in a matter of days. It only took one day of pretty inconsistent work to get my server and the first 3 nodes online. After that, each node only took about an hour to get completely setup. The trick is to get them running the right way. If you want to run something like I am, you really don't need an MPI or any SMP technology ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing_interface if you're curious where to start reading about that). I could run the whole system here as simply a small LAN network and it would be all I needed for running a dedicated Folding at Home farm. That said, I want to use this thing for other projects of my own, so I'm setting up OpenMPI which has a mildly steep learning curve when transitioning from Window$ to Linux to MPI clustering with Linux. I have focused on calculators so much that I've kind of had to catch up with the larger units. I decided to take this on because I knew I would need to learn some things to get into the research department at the college I'm attending.
73
« on: January 05, 2012, 09:20:33 am »
Not at all yet. lol. I haven't figured out a way to benchmark it yet. I've got the hostlist and whatnot setup, and installed OpenMPI on several of the machines, and I'm getting closer to getting it running as a true beowulf, but I'm still having problems getting the machines to talk to each other through the MPI stuff. I keep getting strange errors, I think it's because I don't know which flags to pass the mpiexe program (aside from the most basic things), which runs any MPI program, so I'm probably just invoking it incorrectly, or don't have the right services up on my nodes when the server unit tries to talk to them.
Cluster update:
(reposted from facebook)
I discovered some issues, wouldn't you know it? Nothing in the computer science field seems to be straight forward sometimes. I found out that several of my units have missed their deadlines that folding at home gives for when work units need to be finished, due to my startup scripts. /facepalm
So that said, I've just gone ahead and disabled them for now, and started the programs on all 8 machines individually, some of them got new units, the others seem to be attempting to finish some units, which may be pointless at this point, they might miss the deadlines too, which is okay, they will get new units soon. The deadlines coming up are tomorrow and the next day. We'll see what happens. At this point it's kind of a race against time for some of my units lol.
All of the systems have been switched over (with minor difficulty) to a completely command line based Linux, so as to save resources for the project, which is command line anyways. Initially I used the GUI to kind of ease myself into the more difficult aspects of Linux, but now it's kind of useless, so I just got rid of it, which turned out to be much easier than anticipated. I did have to fix several things that got broken when I removed the packages, but everything seems to be okay right now. I've had no issues getting the clients running or anything like that since.
Many thanks go out to Noah Putman ... yet again... saved my butt when I couldn't figure it out on my own. The guy's a whiz with Linux.
The units that did finish work got a lot done recently though. There have been 53 work units so far that have been completed. The cluster has also jumped into the middle 20th percentile in the rankings now, that's pretty impressive for such old machines.
(The server and the first four units went online in mid December, so it hasn't been very long, but it also hasn't been that long either, a couple of weeks, so if you do the math, that's a few work units a day, which is pretty good for having so many issues so far)
74
« on: January 03, 2012, 03:16:47 pm »
Oooh! We've got ourselves a man on the inside! How exciting! I wasn't aware of this. Too bad confidentiality agreements prevent him from releasing stuff to us sometimes. I bet his programs are amazing! I haven't really looked at any stuff he's written that I know of.
By the way, am I right in thinking that because this is an 84+ SE that it will support assembly natively? Do we know that kind of thing yet?
@DJ_O I wasn't planning on doing any censoring. More like locking from topics or banning if necessary, and I would have consulted a more senior admin before doing anything. Thanks for looking out though.
75
« on: January 03, 2012, 03:08:56 pm »
On topic please everyone! I understand the dilemma here, but it's over and done with now. Continuing to discuss it will only cause continued problems. Moving forward, we'll all try to do our part to not have problems like this, agreed?
In reference to the new calculator, is there an encryption at all on the OS like the encryption that was mentioned in the original post? If so do we know what it is?
Does anyone have the actual dimensions (in centimeters and inches please for those of us who use either or) of the model so we have reference to what the size difference with the new unit is?
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