I have been saying I wanted to make programs myself to replace stuff I did not like. Or as a way to transition away from my current job. I know I can do it but I have always derailed myself thinking I needed something else to be able to do it right. And I am continuing to frustrate myself for not moving forward.
Lately, I gave up on some things.
Thing 1: Needing a better bug tracking system. I thought I could make a simple and good enough system myself. And I had. Unfortunately new versions of Python or some other thing ruined it. So I though I would use something like Click Up. It worked. But I find it didn’t really help me move any faster and input and editing tickets ended up being just as slow as without. In the end, gave up on that and moved back to text files. Recently using VSCode and MD files now. At least it is faster and good enough for what I need.
Thing 2: Needing a better WordPress. This was a bit tied to Think 1 as my own work was suppose to also address my web site as well. Nah. WordPress is it. I’m not moving from it. I do not really like WordPress but I am not going to be making something better than this. If the web site gets hacked and goes tits up. I will just recreate it. I has actually happened before. I did not really lose much of anything of value from that incident. Plus all this consternation about this project was keeping me from the project that I really wanted to persue.
Thing 3: User Interface libraries, web UIs, different languages… I have been trying to find a good UI library and/or language pairing for way too long. I could have written something myself that will address my need. Now this is sounding a lot like what I am arguing against above. But I have to say that my own programming, I want to be developing in C. Not C++, not C#, not Java, not Javascript/TypeScript/Go/Rust/etc. I do not want to deal with UI libraries like Qt which I have tried and struggled to get something ‘simple’ to display correctly. I do not want to deal with React/React.Native/Vue/Angular/or whatever garbage Web UI solution there is out there. All of them have a really huge learning curve to get all the details right for a properly running application. You do not believe me? Try tabbing in your favourite web UI. Does it work? I will bet it sucks. No web ui application works well with keyboard navigation. I have even looked at a lib like Dear ImgUI and fealt, nah.
So I am in the process of doing something myself here. At least I have decided to just stop with the pfaffing about trying to find the best solution. I do not need the best. I just need something that will work for me. And I know what I want. I have seen too many people tout the benefits of MVVM, and whatever tech du jour and then I look at the code. The goals are one thing but the ‘magic’ code that is needed is another. Most devs do not know how the computer flows through the code anymore because of all the nonsense from these stratospheric architects has proposed. It is no wonder programs are so massively bloated, slow, and barely functioning. I hate the current state of development. Keep it stupidly simple and you will have a product that will be solid and works.
I am ranting. Basically, I am working on a program. Or a couple of programs.
Program 1: Is a game. Using SDL3 as a library to deal with the OS layer for windows, OpenGL setup and all that. I thought about going Vulkan but I want to get something going first. Vulkan can come later. Single window game so my UI library does not need to be massive. Which means, this is a stepping stone for the next program. 2D board game that I do not see many have done out there. And hopefully see if I can sell it on Steam or Epic Game Store.
Program 2: Is a simple music player. I do not know if I will be able to sell this. Mainly because I really do not care so much about all the tech around music. I just know I dislike all the music players out there. WinAmp was good up to a point. Where it fails is in its skinnable UI. A lot of other tools try to control your library too much. Maybe that is what some people want. I know how I want my music to be organized on my hard drive. Stop monkeying with it. Do not modify the MP3s, oh you noticed there are no images INSIDE the MP3, so you helpfully added an image to it making the mp3 file larger. You do that to every file and you are going to eat up a couple of GBs of HD data. It will not fit on my phone anymore. Stuff like that I hate. Do not touch! Often I just want to take everything in my library, and jukebox it. How many programs can do that? And then an ability to rate the songs so that I can jukebox all the 4 and 5 starred songs. I have a program that I started in C# that does the jukebox thing reasonably well but C#, WPF, … It is not fun to program. There are parts of working with WPF (or Winforms) which just does not work. And things that should be simple are not really. At any rate this will flesh out the UI library a bit. I will probably just release this for free because I will probably use FMOD library for the music related stuff and I cannot afford that library. They offer it for free if you do not charge.
Program 3: Is a drawing, ray tracing program. So definitely need to beef up the UI library as well as the OpenGL/3D stuff. Used to use Carrara for my 3D rendering but it has always caused me problems. Blender is very capable but very steep learning curve. I am more looking for a blend of paint program and 3D rendering. More for artists and not for game studios, animation studios, or movie special effects. I want to get back into drawing and art again. Using my program.
So current state for Program 1. If you look up Quirkle board game, that is the game I am looking to mimic. It will not be 1-1 because I do not want to worry about licencing. There will be differences. Plus different rules as well are planned. Meaning, I have an idea for a Poker variant, Sudoku variant, even a Tic Tac Toe variant. Single player only, doing anything multiplayer adds a huge amount of work and I do not want to have to deal with setting up the infrastructure for match making and stuff like that. Steam has a simple solution to make a single player game to be played online by two players. It streams the video and the user input for the second player. Which is brilliant. You just need to allow for multiple input options like keyboard and joypad and things just work. What has been done? Not much yet. Got a window to display in OpenGL. Got a sprite framework done and that is about it. Slowly, marching along. I probably should mention, I was pfaffing about with Vulkan first. Gave up on that. I know OpenGL better and so far none of the 3 programs really need super duper frame rates like a First Person Shooter needs.
Now I also need to get off my doom scrolling habit. $*#(@&$ a certain president.