3/18/2010¶

• I have modified the wonderful wiki software we use here at Outbreak Labs to provide more advanced search functionality. I've posted the Screwturn Wiki Search Category Restriction Modification instructions, in the event that other users wish to have the same functionality.
• The fine people over at Screwturn (makers of the wiki) were nice enough to add this feature to their TODO list, so there may be a time in the future when this modification is no longer required.
  

1/31/2010¶

• Progress has been slowed or stalled on all public projects.
• I'm investigating the use of the Reactive Extensions in the Hivemind core. It looks like it could clean up a lot of the event and observation based code.
  

8/30/2009¶

• Hivemind development continues:
  • The "Now Playing" functionality is significantly more useful. Multiple tracks can be queued up, started, stopped, paused, and sequenced.
  • While designing the CD ripping functionality it occured to me that I not only need to rip tracks from a CD, but also to encode them into a compressed format. I have concerns over the legality of including an MP3 encoder, and as such I am inclined to adopt Ogg Vorbis as the official format of Hivemind. This is not to say that Hivemind will not be capable of playing MP3s and other formats, just that given the option it will prefer to use Vorbis.
  • This raises the issue of how exactly Hivemind will play Vorbis and other audio formats. I'm looking into embedding VLC to handle all of Hivemind's audio needs. For that matter, this would open the door to video as well though there are no plans for any such features.
  • Ogg support was not planned for the initial release, however in light of the aformentioned news I feel it will need to be a launch feature, which includes dealing with Ogg tags in addition to the ID3 tags used by MP3.
  • The UI overhaul is nearly complete. I feel that the new interface is both unique to the media player world, yet practical. I hope to release screenshots next month.
    

10/19/2009¶

• After a long hiatus, some minor fixes related to the Outbreak Labs Wiki were completed today. These fixed several problems which arose after having upgraded to the latest version of the Wiki software.
  

02/09/2009¶

• A new project has been started, called Hivemind. Development is still in it's early stages, but is promising. Nearly all of the development has rested on the shoulders of Noah, but I have participated in some of the testing. Being the person with the largest music library, I have an excellent means to load test the program. See the article for more information.
  

10/07/2008¶

• A new module has begun development for the Chess program, which allows for the AI data that is generated internally to be visualised for easier analysis.
• The module, called "Nodealyzer", uses the Windows GDI to generate nodal trees. An attempt was made to use the Windows Presentation Forms framework to develop the visuals, but was quickly abandoned due to WPF's cumbersome nature.
• Hopefully future developments with the WPF framework will be more fruitful, but for now we will wait in lieu of Microsoft's own developments.
  

07/30/2008¶

• Chess has been undergoing some major developments lately.
• First, I created a new AI to battle against our default AI using our Chess engine. The new AI is being referred to as "Ali-Baba", whereas our default AI is known as "Turk".
• "Ali-Baba" and "Turk" both have been upgraded recently to solve the Horizon Effect, by using Quiescence Searching. However, "Ali-Baba" uses a different method of quiescence, that is to say, it implements either an aggressive strategy or a defensive strategy for searching through possible moves, depending on whether it thinks it's winning or not. Initial tests seem promising, as it beat "Turk" on the first run. There is some suspicion as to the fairness of our test environment, however.