General Discussion

The various Printable CEO forms and usage?

2008-03-02T17:29:53-05:00

Hi David,

I love the site, but I'm still a bit confused about the types of available forms, current versions, and how you actually use them in the course of a day, week, month, year. Let's tackle this in two sections:

1) The Printable CEO forms: I know you list the names of most of them on the "main" Printable CEO page (davidseah.com/pceo), but do you keep one page with a list of directly download-able, current versions of all of your forms? I've been browsing your site and it's like a mini game of scavenger hunt ;-) "Click here for the form, read the linked page, click here for history, click here for last year's version...."

2) I've read the history on most of your forms, checked out the various versions over the years, and it's interesting to watch the development. What I'm curious is which forms you actually use on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. I've used FranklinCovey for the last three years - I combine paper and electronic planning - and I'm looking to integrate The Printable CEO into my current setup.

My Current Setup:

FranklinCovey PlanPlus for Outlook v5 - I use the "Home" page so I can see my e-mail, calendar, and daily task list all on one screen.

FranklinCovey PlanPlus utilities for PalmOS - Mainly used to keep my Palm synchronized for appointment reminders, but also somewhat useful for looking at current tasks when in a meeting.

FranklinCovey Monarch Planning Pages - Used to take daily notes, meeting minutes, etc. A notebook would probably do, but I like the "Monthly Index" for keeping track of important notes that happened during the month and the "Monthly Business Expenses" and "Annual Summary of Business Expenses" worksheets - useful for my business travels. Also used to house important phone numbers, service information, etc. in case the Palm stops working for one reason or another. (Read: I don't completely trust electronic devices)

My Proposed Setup:

Everything from my Current Setup

Task Progress Tracker - Used to roughly prototype a project before being transcribed into Microsoft Project (a necessary evil at my place of employment. Just like Outlook...)

Intermittent Task Tracker - Used for the weekly recurring important tasks to which I'm assigned, probably to be posted to my whiteboard

Task Order Up - Created as tasks come in, posted to the whiteboard, and updated in Outlook at the end of the day (boss uses Outlook to delegate tasks, expects employees to update those assigned tasks so he knows what's going on and where we are on our assignments at all times - Outlook handles this automatically when I make an update).

The one thing I'm trying to address is visibility in the workplace - While most of us use Microsoft Project for planning and Outlook for tasks - the boss doesn't do a good job of communicating what he's assigned to various members of the team. Therefore, several of us have inadvertently (so we think) been assigned the same tasks, which can be frustrating because you feel like you've wasted your time on duplicate effort. Using Task Order Up may address some of these issues because we can visibly see what everyone's working on, and address task overlap immediately.

How do you use your forms? What do you think of my existing and proposed setups?

Thanks!

Scott

Architecting Pass 1

2008-02-20T16:24:32-05:00

Now that some basic XNA is in place, I can start to think about architecture. I'm going to use something like the following top-level objects:

HumanPlayer - manages pieces representing entities controlled by human players via the CameraTracker
DenizenPlayer - manages non-player pieces in the world (AI)
WorldPlayer - manages environment pieces like the world grid, buildings, and the like
Simulator - calculates physical interactions with the world and between pieces (physics simulation, such as it is)
GameRef - the state manager for game "logic" (win/lose conditions, turns) based on pieces, simulator results, and game state
GameState - the current state of the game (points per side, etc)
GameController - the XNA Game object, renamed, handling high-level game start/stop/running.
GameHUD - the GUI overlay for the game
PieceWrangler - utility class for handling all the pieces in the game as groups between players
SoundMgr - manages environmental sound from pieces and the world

Player classes manipulate Pieces, which are representations of the various "self-determining" entities in the game. Pieces possess the following kinds of information at minimum:

Physical Properties for use by Simulator: position, direction, velocity, geometry, size
Visual representation (model)
Life state (spawning, alive, dying, dead)
Helper methods for related to managing the above three classes of properties
AI-relevant data: Current "State of Mind" and "Intention" in subclasses
Other "piece type specific" data in subclasses
Update() and Draw() methods

Player classes also implement Update() and Draw(). Each Player class maintain a list of managed pieces.

The GameController class, which is the root-level object, essentially will call the following loop:

Player.Update(gameTime) on each Player class so each Player can update its pieces
Simulator.Update(gameTime) tells all player pieces how to update their physical properties
GameRef.Update(gameTime) examines the state of all Player and Piece classes, and changes their states accordingly. Also sets GameState for inspection by GameHUD and GameController
All players Draw() in order of World, Denizens, and Players
GameHUD.Draw()
Loop

The actual loop may be more complicated than this to handle tricky interdependencies, but this is the basic idea.

How to combine different forms?

2008-01-14T10:07:07-05:00

Hello Folks,

David did a great work with this timers & trackers! Thanks a lot for that.

Since i have heard of this website, i've worked (actually i work with) my filofax. (a5 format)

I need this tool, cause i'm very often out of my home-office, work with different customers and have to fill out different 'trackers' for finished work.

It's very simple to plan meetings and keep me up to date. The only problem is, it makes me crazy to add (on this timetable) done work.

At the end of each day, i have a ... let's say .. very unclear timetable for the finished day. Sometimes, theres about 30 finished topics ... uargs. - it's very unstructured.

There's some great ideas from different companies to solve this problems. (in my opinion, a lot of freelancers have this problem) But in my opinion, there's no solution who is perfect. (at the end for me ;-))

The question is, how to combine a filofax (so, a 'book', who is clear in the struktur of itselfs, cause of no several papers) and this great tools of david.

I feel really happy with this emergent task timer (the wide power user edition). So i can plan every day. But, i need a a5 edition ;-)

But i also have projects beyond two or three month, sometimes half a year long. For this, the progress tracker is a very good tool.

For short projects in the future, i would like to take the task order up! tool.

Now i have three different tools (one for every day) and one for projects and one for short tasks, who are not solved on the same day/week.

Do you have a plan, how to create a a5 version of the day-planer (emergent task timer), combine it with a a progress tracker and mix it up with this great order up! tool? :-)

At my point, it's hard to keep (most of the time) two of the three forms up to date: (e.g): I have a conference call with a customer, i pick up the task order up! and write a new task:

description: tell bob something about the printable ceo due date: jan. 30, 2008

The next few day's are very busy, so i put the task on my task-table (pin) - or in my filofax in the category 'tasks'...

Ok, now i have time to finish the task.

I need half a hour (i paint in to of the time-bubbles) and finished the task by writing the 'hours logged'

But in the same time, i have to fill out my emergent task timer with the same topic - stupid! isn't it? (But i have to fill it out, otherwise it's very hard for me to see what's happend on the day) - it's the redundancy problem.

Ok, thanks a lot for some anwers!

best regards, Max.

Getting Started with XNA

2008-01-07T13:33:37-05:00

I'm not clear on what I need to do to use XNA instead of MDX. If there is a time to do it, I suppose right now is the time. Anyone have some pointers? I would prefer to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for the development; my understanding is that there are betas of XNA Game Studio or whatever it's called, but it's not geared toward professional development. Does that matteR?

Creating a Custom CGT Point List

2008-01-10T17:39:45-05:00

The Concrete Goals Tracker consists of both the bubble tracker and a weighted task list. Creating that task list is pretty important if you want good direction on your day-to-day progress. Post yours here, or ask about a specific application and we might be able to collectively figure something out.

Study Group Announcements

2008-01-07T21:17:52-05:00

First of all, I've started adding my notes to the public wiki: GameDev Study Group. Your forum registration also applies to the public wiki, so you can freely add and edit the information there.

In other news, I'm starting to talk to some other area people who are interested, and we're talking about getting together somewhere.

Getting Started with Managed Direct X 1.1

2008-01-07T13:30:56-05:00

I started with MDX about a month ago, working through the documentation to first get a feel for the architecture of Direct 3D. I don't need ultra high 3D performance, so using C# and managed code would theoretically pay off in the long run. My programming partner is not an experience C++ programmer either and comes from a visual languages background on the Mac, but we did work on a big Actionscript 2 project, so he's familiar with OOP. C# should feel familiar.

Anyway, here's what I got started doing:

Installing Visual Studio 2005 - this is going to be our dev platform for the entire project
Installing DirectX SDK from August 2007, the last stable release version with the MDX 1.1 stuff still in it.
Compiled the sample code to see if it worked.
Created a simple model in Modo, exported to .X format.
Tried to add mesh loading code to EmptyProject sample code, to test if I understood it correctly. It did not work.
Tried loading my .X mesh using a modifed version of "Enhanced Mesh" sample code. This did work.

Currently, I am trying to figure out what I did wrong in importing Mesh loading code from "Enhanced Mesh". I am missing something.

Dave’s Phase 0 Goals

2008-01-07T12:34:31-05:00

I've made a preliminary study of Direct3D 9 concepts, and understand it to comprise of two parts: core rendering, and support utilities. Core rendering is in the directx.direct3d namespace, and the support utilities are in directx.direct3dx namespace.

Direct3D essentially renders lists of triangles, which themselves are collections of vertices in 3D space. Direct3D is a scanline renderer that uses vertex information to help draw the semblance of smoothly-rounded geometry. The concepts are very similar to old 3D polygon modeling programs like 3D Studio (the DOS version).

Each polygon/triangle that's rendered can have a Material applied to it, which is a struct that defines surface properties related to the scanline rendering algorithms being used to draw it. Texturing, which is the application of a bitmap to the polygon based on interpolated texture coordinates (the so-called UVs) between vertices, is a separate operation.

Direct3D programming consists of managing vertex and texture buffers. It also includes enabling/disabling certain features of the core renderer for multiple passes to get the shiny effects we like to see. Closely tied to all this is the notion of Shaders, which are new to me. Shaders are what are used to actually translate the abstract world of polygons and vertices and texture coordinates into what you see on the screen. There is no longer any "fixed function" rendering path (I guess there are default ones). So to make pretty graphics, you must collect a bunch of shaders to actually see something on the screen.

In addition to polygons, there are other entities such as the world space and the camera, light sources, and surface properties of the triangles. The mechanics of drawing to the screen hardware itself are fairly cut and dry...surfaces, flipping, locking memory.

NOW, what's interesting is that there is a WHOLE ARTIST WORKFLOW that I need to work out, from modeling program (I'm using Modo) to importing into a usable format. This is the point I'm at: figuring out how to do it. I was looking for some nice plug and chug code solutions, but I have come to the conclusion that I need to really get a little deeper and learn the innards. Fortunately, the innards are fairly well documented; they are just poorly organized, scattered, and lacking in important supplementary information. There is a huge gap here that I need to fill.

The Goal: Create Realtime Graphics Systems using DirectX and Managed Code

2008-01-04T16:12:59-05:00

Hey y'all!

I just set up this forum so we have a place to discuss what we're doing, coordinate meetups, and share our collective knowledge. I'm planning on taking the best from this and other discussions to put in the site Public Wiki, which as registered members is editable by all.

There are two types of participants I think we'll have: contributors who are actively creating code, documentation, and digestible insights, and subscribers who are maybe not technical but are interested in watching what we do and making a comment every once in a while.

The reason I'm starting this study group is because I need it to maintain momentum on a big interactive project we're putting together for a museum. Game development and systems architecture is familiar to me because of my stint in the game industry, but my knowledge base regarding 3D programming with APIs like DirectX and Windows programming in general will need to be built from scratch. There is a lot of material out there on game programming, but very little of it has the quality of being concise yet comprehensive. In the process of getting this group going, I hope that we can make a contribution of that nature.

I will start outlining what my own development goals are in more detail, and perhaps this will help things start moving along. In the meantime...welcome! Please feel free to introduce yourself here or raise issues.