Week 1011 (because "Week 11" would just be confusing if you thought in binary)

The eleventh week of my internship has been a lot like the mythological "March" - in like a lion and out like a lamb. Because we had a prototype build due early in the week, the first couple days of the week were relatively busy, even when put up against weeks where I had full capacity. The great part about that relative business was, of course, that the build got in. We had a couple hurdles to overcome in terms of making the mission compatible with all the means the users would use to run the mission, but we sorted them out fairly quickly, giving us enough time to add a tiny bit of polish to an otherwise-scratchwork (as is to be expected for a deliverable of this nature) prototype.

Beyond that, the week was fairly sedate. I had a lot of class this week, which tended to get in the way of putting a lot of time into the lab, and so it was a good thing I front-loaded my lab work, as the last few days of the week had me offering a minimal amount of my time for our projects. But, projects. I don't get a chance to work on it often, but since we entered a short trough following our submission of the NFA build, I got the chance to work on part of a project for Torque. I've done a tiny bit of work for it before, and it was nice to revisit some of that work if for no other reason than to keep my horizons broad.

I also took a look at a new tool we've brought in for building our missions. It expands on the sparse level of tool support the base engine offers and to a degree simplifies the process of scripting out the missions. It's not all-inclusive, and it does seem like there may be some compatibility hurdles to overcome, but I think it will be a relief for our developers to at least be able to toss some kind of GUI over what was previously just a set of .xml files.

Moving in to the next couple of weeks, we'll be taking a look at how the actual missions for the NFA scenario are to play out. Hopefully this will involve some creative brainstorming sessions and some great ideas on maximizing the engine we have. We will see, I suppose.