anyone working on any (major) side projects?

[purbeast0]

just curious if anyone does any pretty serious side projects in their spare time.

over the past 6-7 years i've been doing some indy mobile development. i primarily built this framework that has evolved that i've used to make fighting game mobile guides. it's at a point now where i can basically plug/play new data sets and graphics for a new fighting game, and it just "works" with minimal changes.

i have also made a game in cocos2d (around the flappy bird craze) and started working on an online multiplayer async turn based game with unity, that i never got around to finishing because my son was born and the time just wasn't there.

over the past 2-3 months though, i have hooked up with 2 other guys (only 1 dev, other guy is the business side of things) and we started a company and are working on a more serious idea. it's a lot more involved than the previous stuff i've done but so far it's a lot of fun and learning.

it's in the online dating app sector (which i know there are tons out there already) but we're doing some stuff that none of them do out there. but it incorporates a lot of 3rd party libraries and api's which is where a lot of the fun has been.

so far some cool stuff i've done is sms verification (using sinch api), have an in-app text messaging service (using layer/atlas for that), and we're using parse as the backend with facebook accounts being the way you login and create an account. i've done the work with building galleries (in our app) from your facebook albums so you can pick some pictures to share, which was a fun experience but somewhat more complex than i expected.

oh and this is my first time using swift, along with storyboards, and i like it A LOT more than objective c and the old school nib files that were used for views.

we're currently in the works with a designer who is tasked at making it look pretty with mockups and then we're going to incorporate the look/feel into the app. we are hoping to have it finished and launched in a small targetted market by around april but we're not 100% sure yet if we will make it. realistically i think we can finish it by then, but things always come up in development.

obviously we're hoping this takes off once we finish. i find myself enjoying working on this project much more than my day to day job, and it's actually making me contemplate looking for a mobile development gig professionally.

so curious if anyone is working on any major side projects outside of their day to day. i know most people at my job i tell i am doing a lot of dev on the side, all of them don't have any motivation to do it once they leave work.

 

[KWiklund]

I'm doing a bit of work with a local university. Basically, it's just some an acoustics simulation in CUDA using the image-source method for a microphone array.

 

[clamum]

I've been working on an Android mobile app for a couple years (reason it's taking so long is I don't work on it much). I wish I had the motivation and ambition I once did for things but I haven't for awhile so it's a slow process. It's quite close to being complete though, just a few bugs I want to fix before I upload it to the Play Store. I think I'll charge $0.99 or $1.99 for it, probably the former though. It's an app that shooters can use (competition, hunters, but probably most likely just target shooters) to keep track of things. If more than a couple people actually use it I have plans to expand its capabilities.

I also have a domain where I'd like to host a personal website, and a website for my mobile app, but again it's "under construction." I actually had a fairly complete website done but I don't think I have the code anymore; anyway I'd rather redesign it so it's better.

 

[exdeath]

Investigating making my own console style tile based multi background + hw sprites graphics processor for PC, as in 8 bit ISA card on a 4.77 MHz 8088.

Want to see what PC could have done in the 80s/early 90s with a console style hardware accelerated 2D tile based multi background plane display chip instead of relying on the slow 8088 to manually draw pixels in software every frame with VGA. It's always bothered me that PC's needed 32 bit 33 MHz+ 486's with 32bit+ local buses to do decent 320x240 256 color games in software when 8/16 bit consoles were able to do it with 8 bit buses and 1 Mhz 6502/Z80/etc processors due to having game graphics oriented VDPs. I'd love to see what the original PC could do when you can update 8 x 240 pixel columns with only 30 bytes written for a name table and hardware scrolling with wrap, etc.

Looked at off the shelf solutions like the Yamaha VDP V9990 but even this is sub standard compared to even a Sega Genesis in terms of color palettes, etc.

Need to learn more VHDL. Thinking an Altera DE1 dev board with 62 I/O pins to the ISA slot then start with the basic address decoding and address generators and counters for the display output and go from there.

Should be relatively straight forward as a stand alone card without worrying about CGA/EGA/VGA compatibility. Plenty VHDL examples for driving 15 and 31 Khz television and VGA signals and so on, even CAM table examples that I might use for sprite selection.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have an Ultima Online game server that I run which has tons of custom code, last I did a count there is about 1 million lines of code. (I did not write all of that myself though) Now I do tweaks here and there but due to low population I don't spend as much time on it. One of the most major changes I made was converting the storage system from flat files to MySQL and set it up to be more real time. The old system had "world saves" that would temporary freeze game play for 10 seconds or more to save. Now the saves happen in the background. Added tons of custom content too like automatic events, and all sorts of systems for various content like quests etc... For something I make no money off of, I've put wayyyy too much effort into it, so I kinda slowed down on it.

I've been brainstorming another project now, something I can monetise, and probably brushing up on C++ as well so I can start something from scratch off right. Or I may also just stick to making smaller projects.

 

[smackababy]

I have an Ultima Online game server that I run which has tons of custom code, last I did a count there is about 1 million lines of code. (I did not write all of that myself though) Now I do tweaks here and there but due to low population I don't spend as much time on it. One of the most major changes I made was converting the storage system from flat files to MySQL and set it up to be more real time. The old system had "world saves" that would temporary freeze game play for 10 seconds or more to save. Now the saves happen in the background. Added tons of custom content too like automatic events, and all sorts of systems for various content like quests etc... For something I make no money off of, I've put wayyyy too much effort into it, so I kinda slowed down on it.

I've been brainstorming another project now, something I can monetise, and probably brushing up on C++ as well so I can start something from scratch off right. Or I may also just stick to making smaller projects.

Nice! I did a lot of that years ago. Had a server hosted by a friend that I did the majority of the coding for. Wish I had thought of that save thing though!

 

[debian0001]

I wish I had an idea so I can program. I do a lot of scripting at work as a System Engineer, but I would like to create an App....

 

[JasonCoder]

I have an Ultima Online game server that I run which has tons of custom code, last I did a count there is about 1 million lines of code. (I did not write all of that myself though) Now I do tweaks here and there but due to low population I don't spend as much time on it. One of the most major changes I made was converting the storage system from flat files to MySQL and set it up to be more real time. The old system had "world saves" that would temporary freeze game play for 10 seconds or more to save. Now the saves happen in the background. Added tons of custom content too like automatic events, and all sorts of systems for various content like quests etc... For something I make no money off of, I've put wayyyy too much effort into it, so I kinda slowed down on it.

I've been brainstorming another project now, something I can monetise, and probably brushing up on C++ as well so I can start something from scratch off right. Or I may also just stick to making smaller projects.

I can identify with the $0 profit, high effort projects. Those are the ones that I actually learned the most from and got the best jolt from. If you did everquest, check out my port of the popular emulator over to C# managed code: https://github.com/jasoncoding/EqEmulator-net