[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Midterm Update: libt4k_common

[Brendan Luchen]

Hi everyone,

Tthings have been rather uneventful since my last update. A week in Boston
for the 4th of July didn't leave as much time for coding as I'd hoped, but I
managed to replace most of the relevant function calls in TuxType with calls
to T4K_Functions. I'm now doing the same for TuxMath. There are also now
Doxygen comments in t4k_common.h . Many of these comments are just stubs,
though. By the end of the week, I want to turn my attention to the Mac, then
do another round of testing across the three platforms.

As for the big picture, things are certainly moving along, albeit slowly.
Since the start of coding, I've shaken the dust off of the library, renamed
it and the functions therein, gotten it to build and install as a shared
library and gotten TuxMath and TuxType to use it--all more or less
automatically--on several Linux- and Windows-based computers. Remaining
items include: removing the older built-in versions of functions and
structures, which are effectively dead code in TM and TT; fleshing out the
documentation (I guess this should be posted as HTML somewhere); and
extensive testing in preparation for the two merges back into master.

I haven't hit any enormous brick walls, so far, but there have been plenty
of small ones to impede progress. More than that, because this project is
less about producing code and more about moving things around and gluing
things together across several repositories (and, in this case, several
machines), things tend to get messy quickly, and I find myself often taking
a step back to make sure, e.g. I'm in the right directory, which slows
things down considerably. I underestimated the importance of visible
progress to motivation--my measure of success has been seeing the game
launch and behave as it should during gameplay, which, well, isn't all that
exciting, and leads to distractions. It's one thing to do a less-glorified
job, but it's quite another to find *myself* losing focus when the program
does the same thing for the twentieth time.

So, I'm personally disappointed with how long this is taking, but I'm
clinging to schedule. There's a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm
looking forward to a great benefit to TuxMath, -Type (and -History?) when
this is through.

Best,
Brendan
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