PubComp Mod RSS Feed

State of the Project: Week 30

Grubxyxy — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:36:33 +0000

Hey All,
I would love to be able to start one of these without feeling the urge to apologize, but I'm sorry for the time inbetween SOTPs :). Between starting a new company and the holiday season, it's been a busy month. I've been doing a bit of work on PubComp each day, and am working on getting a feature map laid down and everything up onto GitHub now that I'm at the point where the architecture won't change.

In other news, I'd like to thank and welcome Dranairean to the PubComp team. Hawkeye has been having computer troubles, and Dran has stepped up to help us make an awesome CvP. Thanks to everyone who signed up!

I received the news today that ESL and Cadred both dropped support for TF2. I realize that makes a good PubComp system more important than ever, and hope the community will continue to support the development as we move forward. Thanks again for your patience, and I'll talk to you next week.

Happy Holidays,
Parable

State of the Project: Week 26

Grubxyxy — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:19:30 +0000

Hey everyone, some mixed news today. As some of you know, I've been heavily involved programming for a startup that's been taking up much of my time. This past week, my client and friend who was the founder and visionary behind the project passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Along with my personal sorrow at his loss, it's certainly shaken up my business a bit, so this past week has been quite topsy-turvey.

The upside to this tragedy is that this coming week I'll be able to devote most of my time to finishing PubComp's long overdue release. Although I haven't had any time to play TF2 recently, I'm hearing that a system like PubComp is increasingly in demand, and I look forward to connecting with community once again to make sure it grows into the best system it can be. Other than time for a few social commitments (Turkey Day is coming up, after all), my door will be completely open for anyone who has questions or wants to help, all week long. Just contact me on Steam or Skype.

- Parable

State of the Project: Week 25

Grubxyxy — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:33:39 +0000

Whew! Feels good to get some time again. I was finally able to crack open my dusty dev environment and get back to it this weekend, making some progress on fixing some pesky login/session sharing related bugs, as well as furthering my goal of getting the dev environment ready to go. I've got two things left to do: secure the realtime environment, and get Barncow's logging system triggering the correct rcon commands to the server. After that, I'll push up the dev environment and we can get testing started on the real servers.

That means that this week, we're going to start moving forward again. Devs, I'll be contacting you individually to start gathering info on your availability, as my time will still be somewhat limited, and I will absolutely need some help to push PubComp to launch. I will be making a couple hours available every day I can over the next couple of weeks for those who would like some one on one tutoring/assistance in getting their own development environments set up.

I'm going to get back to it, feels good to be back :)

<3,
Parable

State of the Project: Week 24

Grubxyxy — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:24:51 +0000

Hi all! Hope everyone had a Happy Halloween. I just wanted to post and say we are still on, my work has dragged on another week, but things should be calming down by next Friday, at which point PubComp will be reorganizing and meeting to move forward.

All the best,
Parable

State of the Project: Week 22

Grubxyxy — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 14:09:24 +0000

Hi Everyone,
This week, same as last week, I'm still in the middle of a time consuming code sprint for my consulting business. Thank you so much for your patience, we'll be rockin' and rollin' again soon.

- Parable

State of the Project: Week 21

Grubxyxy — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 01:16:50 +0000

Hi everyone, gotta keep this week brief (it sure went by fast) as I'm in the middle of a code sprint (not for PubComp, unfortunately). Last week I ran into some showstopping problems relating to sessions getting overwritten somewhere weird, that turned into a very, very slow debugging session, so I didn't get the Play app into the state I wanted. But we'll get there, I promise! Anyway, hope everyone is doing awesome and having fun desptite the delays. I'll put some more time in this weekend, and get another update out there soon.

-Parable

State of the Project: Week 20

Grubxyxy — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:00:19 +0000

As Trent (Daystar) so helpfully reminded me today, I said I was releasing on September 17th, and here we are, weeks later! All my fault, I'm afraid, although behind the scenes progress is being made on stuff that would have had to get done anyway. I did make time to get stuff done this week, and we are still almoooost there ("Almost There: Part 4").

However, my most glaring error has been not making the work I've done available sooner so the other infinetely more timely developers could help me knock out those last details. So here's my plan for this weekend. Tonight, I'll be finishing up the integration of Barncow's TF2LogParser (what I've been working on for the past few sessions). Tomorrow, I'll be documenting everything so that the developers have something to go off of, and setting up the main pubcomp account on GitHub that will contain the CMS, Play, Messenger, and Game servers. After that, I'll be uploading the Developer VM with instructions on how developers can hook up their own GitHub accounts, and how to submit feature changes. On Monday, I've got a 3 week code sprint on one of my contracts that will be taking up as much time as I can give, but I will be available to help the devs get launched. We're 90% there, but that 90% often seems to take 50% of the time to get finished.

This week saw some renewed activity on the TeamLab discussion boards. Community Organizers, now is the time to get involved with those rule discussions. Oh, and if I haven't officially announced it yet, Trent will be our official Community Leader for the European PubComp section. And if I have officially announced, it's now doubly official.

- Parable

State of the Project: Week 19

Grubxyxy — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 05:28:26 +0000

Howdy all. Here's the State of the Project for Week 19. Everything is still on, but I had literally 0 time to work on PubComp last week. It's Friday night, 1 am, and I'm still trying to clear out my "urgent" queue of client work (another one down tonight, woohoo!).

I have promised myself that I will clear my schedule to work on the last bits of the prototype all day on Sunday. I've been contemplating simply releasing my entire development environment, and letting our other amazing coders (several of whom are rearing to get a chance to work), but my fear is that if I don't take the time to organize and document it, there will be more questions than I can handle and code will get messed up in the shuffle. Still, if I don't get enough done to launch this week, I'll just release it in it's current state so we can get some momentum.

Ok, so now for some happy news. Phife, our completely brilliant, probably handsome, certainly deadly Italian designer, has shown me his redone PubComp logo.

http://i.imgur.com/84Z0p.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/qBYVz.png
http://i.imgur.com/TZyvx.png

There has been some talk on TeamLab about getting a PubComp t-shirt. After the first prototype is out, we'll probably hold a vote for which logo people want, as there has been logos done by myself, Bear, Final Light, and Phife, all of which are awesome except the first.

- Parable

Premature Announciation

Grubxyxy — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 03:09:50 +0000

Many coders suffer from it, but don't like to talk about it.

I'm afraid that I got a little worked up this weekend, what with that sexy ESEA LAN happening, and was SURE that I could get this thing pumped out. Turned out a piece I thought I could do without for the launch (namely Barncow's spectacular tf2logs parser) is required after all for us to go live.

The good news is that I put over 20 hours of coding in this weekend, and with all those little cleanups out of the way, we're damn sure gonna get a release out soon.

To avoid any further embarassment from Premature Announciation (this never happens to me, I swear!), I'm going to refrain from specifying a date.

Sheepishly yours,
Parable

Release might be a bit late...

Grubxyxy — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:59:57 +0000

As usual ;) My apologies, I'm looking at what's left to be done and it looks like I'll be working furiously to get this launched late into the night. I underestimated the time some for some of the messaging server functionality, and also got started on it later than expected.

Big thanks to Vincenator and Speedhaxx for giving up their Sunday to help me get the last things taken care of.