Lately I've been having a hard time deciding which side project to work on at home. Of course, having a seven month old has severely limited how much time I have for side projects, but I find it's still important to work out some "work-suppressed" creativity. A coworker from my IGT days has been wanting to work on a game for a few weeks now. He's been working with Unity and probably wants to work out some of his own work-suppressed creativity. This guy is an awesome 3D artist / modeler. I really enjoyed working with him at IGT. We worked together on the last large project I did at IGT before joining Microsoft and I had a lot of fun. He taught me about skeletal animation and we worked together to extend an existing toolchain to support it. That was some of the most fun I've had in a job.
However, I'm also becoming extremely interested in operations systems. I've taken my "OS" to the point where I really need to start making decisions about early boot environment and handoff to the kernel. Lately, I've been working on a FAT32 format utility specific to my OS. I need a custom format utility so I can add my own boot sector code and lay out the supplemental sectors accordingly. FAT32 is surprisingly simple, but also not all that interesting so the project has stalled here for a bit. Perhaps I'll just skip this and use the same 10MB "chunk" for booting as I have been. The problem is I want to start adding executable image and loader support, along with other things, so I figure I might as well have a real filesystem to work against.
There's a few other smaller projects I've been thinking about as well. The diff utility based on a "rolling hash" function. I had a beta of this working in C# with WPF rendering and it worked well. My next step is to turn it into a C library / DLL which I can use in multiple other utilities I'd like to create. I've also looked at making a code editor a few times. I'll usually get hung up on Unicode support because it's one of those things you really kind of need to plan for up front. While this may not have resulted in much of a code editor, I certainly learned a bunch about Unicode and also thought up the concept of an index tree. I've also thought about starting up work on my fractal terrain generation and perlin noise algorithms again. I was using XNA and there was some limitation on the type of integer calculations I perform efficiently in the shader. I can't remember the details since it was a couple years ago, but I'd definitely like to revisit using newer DirectX or OpenGL shaders which may not have the same limitation I encountered.
Yep... A lot of choices. I also had the beginnings of 3D graphics rendering engine in the works -- it was using Blender as the creation framework and I had python scripts to export into the engine formats. It was coming along. What I'd really like would be to have a job where I could work on one of these things to the point it's useful.
