Polymorph weekly news #8

This will take only 5 minutes.

This is what @frankiezafe and I told each other when starting our weekly meeting about the Polymorph.

Time, whether it’s a good way to evaluate a human activity or not, is always going to be used as a reference. How much time did you spend on this? How long will it take to release a first video game? How much more time do you need to finish implementing Bullet? Do you have 5 minutes to share this article with your friends or read this weekly news? (which by now you have figured out is not even weekly).

With computers it seems, we’re all quickly loosing track of time. Whatever the machine is doing to us, it is sucking it at an incredible pace. And EVERYONE in the business knows it. Let me quote a discussion between Ton Roosendaal and Bart Veldhuizen about development time:

@tonroosendaal one I’ve learned: when a developer gives you an estimation, multiply by two and take to the next timescale

— Bart Veldhuizen (@bartv) September 27, 2015

Our meeting, with the excuse of this post, took almost 2 hours. Of course we talked about other things than Polymorph. Of course this always happens between us two. But in an open structure like Polymorph, on an open source project like PEEL or the Polymorph Engine, how do you track the amount of work being done?

Well, it’s not really a little secret, but within Polymorph, participants are encouraged to log the hours they spend on each project using Kimai. It’s certainly not the best way, but it’s not a bad way either. It’s also mostly a tool for oneself to figure out how much time we’ve spend on something. And believe it or not but @frankiezafe has already spend 350 hours developing the Polymorph Engine. Not bad if you ask me. This is over the course of the last 3 months, full time, or close.

The Polymorph Engine is not finished yet, of course. But François is happy the way it advances. It will help build games faster in the future, as the most common operations for building a game will be immediately available, without hiding the complex process underneath it.

For the technical minded in the audience, François is still working on adding Bullet to Ogre. The illustration of this artcile is from Bullet’s documentation, which François has praised as the best documentation he’s seen so far. Bullet (a physics engine) will be useful for both PEEL and for Tuning Scores. In PEEL, it will help to avoid collisions and discard impossible moves in the puzzle, while in Tuning Scores, the whole game play is based on the physical properties of the objects in the virtual world.

This news took me 53 minutes to write. I better close now. I still have to post it on Twitter, Facebook and Diaspora*. You’d be so kind to give us a minute too and share it with your friends.

Peace.