The Week That Was; The Week That Will

A work-shorted week, a fun weekend, and now it's Monday again. So, time to summarize the week that was...

As if you couldn't tell, I've been doing a lot of Avatara coding. When I bought Guild Wars, I was worried that it would cut into my valuable personal venture time...and it did for a couple weeks. But now, it's the other way around. :-)

Avatara has sure been fun. In one of the rare times during this project...which began on March 24th, 2005...I actually beat a deadline. I had said just a couple weeks ago that I intended on having a playable game of chess done by Halloween. Well, it's already done, and there's even some neat bells and whistles coded in that I didn't think would be there til much later. :-)

Check out the new screenshot below. You'll see the following:

* A completely playable chess board...with better testing that includes JUnit.

* A customized "skin" for the chess set, which in this case includes a "basic" skin of black and white. Any look-and-feel is supported. Includes rank/file notations.

* Red-lining to denote the last move made.

* Inverted view for Black, so the color you are (the player) always plays from the bottom.

* Sound effects for moves, checks, draws, and checkmates. (Trust me.) Temporarily stolen from Chess.net, but I look forward to recording new sounds down the road. :-)

* Draggable pieces to move. You may only drag pieces that you control.

Michele and I managed to play a couple games, and only ran into one issue, which has been fixed (Pawn promotion). It seems super-solid now, which is exciting, because the last time I did a Java project like this, I never quite got the chess engine working correctly. Luckily, thanks to JUnit and a better history mechanism for the ChessBoard class, I think I got it all straight now. :-)

Very exciting stuff. I have some more features I need to do before the coding downtime hits when Calabro comes to town on the 24th...but I will focus on one major feature: window resizing.

...

This weekend, Michele and I took on some nice relaxation and did a lot of playin'.

We ressurected Animal Crossing, starting a new town and new characters. My goal is to get what I failed to complete last time...an entire chess set, one piece at a time. I'm going for a checkerboard theme, and I WILL attain it! In the meantime, I need to hold off Michele from wiping me on the floor in terms of progress. ;-)

We also enjoyed the Bronco game yesterday, treating ourselves to some yummy-yumm-yummy NY pizza and garlic knots. :-) Delicious! And the Broncos whooped butt, too!

We also had a nice little jaunt to Sonic...we walked there from our house, and then enjoyed lunch sitting on the benches. It was beautiful Saturday, and it was very nice to hang out with the Yog. I want to make this Sonic thing a regular deal. Yummy!

On Friday night, we watched Monty Python's The Meaning of Life which is as funny as I remembered it...

"Is there something else you'd RATHER do than marching up and down the SQUARE?!?!?!?!"

...

And now the new week. Just heard this morning that Al Franken is coming to town November 16th! Gonna try to snag free tickets either today or tomorrow after work. Need to stop by Monaco. Should be fun! I wanted to get his new book which is coming out next week anyway, but now I can wait til November and buy a copy signed by Al! Can't wait to meet him!

OK, signing off for now...Ciao!