Hello everyone! It has been a long time, but I just felt like dropping in and seeing all of you again. I'm not sure how many of you remember me, but personally I've missed all of you guys and am glad to finally post here again. The reason I've been gone so long is because since I graduated Highschool, my life has been very busy, and after being gone for that long I didn't feel like I could come back again unless I had something to show for my absence... but I'm getting ahead of myself a bit there.

What I've been up to since a year and a half ago

A lot has happened to me since I last posted here. As I already mentioned, I graduated Highschool over a year ago and have been very active since then at my university as I apply myself in various ways. But more importantly, I think I've also grown up a bit more since then. Having been exposed more to the world during the time that I've been at uni, I've grown much more acceptive and tolerant of other people in general. I'm more reserved in my judgment and I'm no longer politically naive. I don't believe my inclination was ever to get too riled up over world politics in general... but perhaps now I'm less prone to saying things that are patently stupid. So there's that.

On a related note, some of you might recall me having been egotistical and contentious in the past, and for that, I'd like to apologize. At the time I was carrying a lot of personal baggage, and though I was fairly well contained emotionally, I was still pretty immature and let loose on you guys on numerous occasions. That was not good, and I'm sorry, but insofar as you all accepted me anyway and supported me in my little projects, I have a lot of thanks to give for that. You're all great guys. Except Sid. He's a jackass. C:

What I've been up to recently

So I've already been at uni for a year, and tomorrow is my first day as a second year student, so here are my very objective observations of life as a computer science major at Indiana University (where I study):

As I suspected, I have been rather ahead of the curve coming into all of my CS classes with a decade of prior experience in programming. It is fun being able to complete all of the assignments that I am given within a matter of hours, but on the other hand, it is not so fun to be moving at a slow pace for everyone else's sake. That's not to say I haven't learned some things, however: in my studies, for instance, I was forced to pick up Java, and I've also become familiar with nice things such as code repositories. It's just part of the process of rounding out your abilities, I suppose.

At any rate, since I've been having a fairly easy time completing my core studies, I've been using a considerable portion of my free time on various projects. My latest project, a game I've been working on for just over two months, has been the center of my attention recently. It's based on a concept that I've been thinking about for years, but have held back on due to the complexity and overall ambitiousness of the design. But I'm pleased to say that since I started working on it, everything has been coming together very nicely - so nicely, that I believe it may be the most significant thing I could hope to be working on right now.

The game is called Barony, and it is a first-person multiplayer action RPG with many rogue-like elements, including (mostly) random dungeons, easy death, and discovery mechanics. If you imagine a multiplayer Ultima Underworld with lots of randomness, that's quite a lot what the game both looks and plays like.

The game engine that I'm using was invented by me and is being written simultaneously to the game. Graphically it is not much more than a simple raycaster, though there are textures on all surfaces and 3D voxel models to represent entities, so although the graphics are simplistic, the pipeline for developing content is very simple and it's been quite easy for me to design dozens and dozens of models to represent potions, weapons, armor, food, humans, trolls, etc. for the game. There are about 10k lines of code to the project, not to mention plenty of game data to go with it, so now that I've got the ball rolling I might start looking for a colleague or two to help put everything together eventually... though right now, that's not quite a priority.

I could go on about the details of my project for a long time, but I worry about boring the lot of you with inordinate amounts of text, so I'll stop here for now. If you've read this far, thanks -- and let me know how you're doing!

I love you all and wish you the best. Peace...

PS: I suppose I should mention that thanks to you guys, I've started minoring in the German language at my university and have already completed a couple of courses in it. So far I've managed to excel in my studies of it academically, but having very little experience using it in a practical scenario I think I'd make a fool of myself if I tried to show off right now, so I won't make a priority out of doing that just yet. Nonetheless, I've greatly enjoyed studying your language so far and am determined to not die before I've become proficient in something other than English, so we'll see how well this goes over the next few years.