An Aimless Development

I intend to become a bit more serious and focused about my article writing. This blog has been nice for just dumping my thoughts, but not so much for actually presenting them. So I’m starting fresh with a more dedicated site:

www.aimlessdevelopment.com

It’s currently bare of content, but I’m in the process of writing the first article. Since I’ve finally got a spot of spare time in the near future, I should be able to post my first article soon: a detailed overview of 2D skeletal animations and my own design decisions in that regard. Hopefully, it’ll be a better read than my contributions on this blog were.

I may still occasionally update this blog with topics well off-topic in the Aimless Development blog. I’m not sure yet precisely how focused I want that blog to become on game and software development. However, my attention will be swinging almost totally towards my new site.

With luck, this won’t explode in my face. That’d be nice.

Verdict on the everyman sleep schedule

Okay, haven’t posted for a while. Animation editor was finished (totally feature complete and user friendly!) by September 30th and if I can find a way to show it off that does it justice I’ll do so here. I can’t do that at the moment, but I figured I’d wrap up this polyphasic sleep thing!

To sum it up:

• The benefits of waking up early and at a specific time each day are great independent of the sleep schedule. This depends on actually waking up at the specified time… which has proven to be my biggest problem.
• The extra hours in my day take a lot of time pressure off my back. I’ve found that my productivity is variable from 1-3am, however… sometimes I’m alert enough to be useful, other times I just need to drop into unconsciousness.
• Naps, once you acclimate to using them (which happens quickly) give a great energy boost in the middle of the day. The only downside is that you need to remember to have them on this schedule, or you’ll suffer for it later.
• Managing the core sleep section has proven the most difficult to me, since my brain does not function properly immediately after waking up. Adjusting my schedule to coincide with that of others helped a great deal, but it remains the biggest potential problem going forward.
• It’s all surprisingly flexible. Sleep and nap times can be changed easily, and you can swap in and out of monophasic sleep without much trouble as the situation demands.

My verdict: I like it, and I’m gonna keep on it! I might monkey with the amount of core sleep, but this is actually working very well for me. For a more disciplined individual (or perhaps one more aware of their surroundings!) adapting to this schedule would be much less problematic. Going forward, I won’t be following it strictly, instead occasionally going back to monophasic sleep as needed. Tonight, for instance, I’m considering a full nights rest due to the intense workout from my Taekwondo class.

I’m calling this experiment a success.

Crazy Stupid Sleep Schedule: Weeks 5 & 6

 

I wish I had good news here, but I pulled another 50/50 adherence to the schedule over these last two weeks. I’m not giving up yet, and will be looking for was to improve my discipline at 2:30am, but at least for tonight I won’t be trying any of it. I’ve started to come down with something, so my body will need the sleep.

So, what do I do if this doesn’t work out?

Well, I like waking up early, I like the naps, and I’ve had good results in terms of alertness and productivity. And even if I end up waking up at 6:00am instead of 2:30am every second day I’m still waking way earlier than I ever did before. So continuing the way I’m going, warts and all, still seems like a great idea to me.

Another option is to go all the way and try out the Uberman, since I’m able to consistently manage the 20 minute naps. My class schedule actually lines up with it pretty well, so this is a distinct possibility.

The fact that I’m even considering the possibility is cast-iron proof that I’m batshit crazy, by the way.

Plans for JSmith going forward

Work on my animation editor is going well. I’m well on track to my goal of having all major functionality in by the end of the month. All that remains are skin animation and the ability for animations to provide a spatial displacement. Once that’s in, it’s pretty much good to go.

This, of course, raises the question of “where do I go from there?” The first element of that is what I do with the animation editor and system. I’m inclined to put it in the public domain, and I plan to dig through my options in that regard. More than a few people have already come up to me asking for help implementing their own 2D animation systems, and being able to give this to them for their own uses or reference would be great.

Of course, I designed this with the intent of using it in a game, so I’ll have to start working on my game engine once more. Initial integration shouldn’t be too difficult, since it’s all been designed to port nicely, so the real difficulty will be managing a data driven way to drive these animations in a useful manner. That means that I need to have a working scheme for managing behaviour trees (my current editor may prove too unstable/unfriendly, though I certainly hope it holds up to extended usage), and the logic for them must work in-game.

After that we get to the fun stuff.

 

Crazy Stupid Sleep Schedule: Weeks 3 & 4

The following things have become quite clear to me in the last couple weeks:

1. I really like rising early and having more time in my day.
2. The schedule, when it works, really works
3. Midday naps are awesome
4. I can’t keep the schedule for shit.

Okay, that last one requires some explanation.

I possess the necessary self discipline to go to bed or nap at all the correct times, and I very rarely oversleep on naps. In fact, I’ll quite often wake up from naps just before the alarm would go off. However, where I’m failing is waking up from my 3 hour core sleep, and I’m failing hard. Only 6 of the last 13 days have avoided falling back asleep after the alarm goes off or missing the alarm entirely. That’s more than a 50% failure rate. As a result, I don’t think my data is accurate in terms of how well the schedule works is sufficiently accurate. I’m not sure I’ve been able to correctly fall into REM sleep during 20 minute naps.

So the obvious course of action is to chalk this up as a failed, if informative, experiment and return to a sane sleep schedule.

Ahahahahah. No.

The obstacle I’ve run into is that I’ll wake up and then neglect to get out of bed before I fall asleep. This very irritating: I’ll wake up, hit my alarm, and lie down, and then I’m DONE. At 2:30 immediately upon waking up, I am NOT thinking straight, so it’s not a matter of willpower. However, this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.

I found this article, and like most of the advice on this guy’s site, it strikes me as very sound advice. In general, I’d recommend reading the articles on StevePavlina.com, since they’re free and he got good, common sense advice and nothing really sets off my bullshit detector.

The gist of this particular piece of advise is that since you can’t trust yourself at the moment of waking to make the right decision, you instead make it a habituated response. The moment the alarm goes off, you pop out of bed by habit. The way to do this is simple: practise.

So I’m going to be making a conscious effort to change how I wake up. This means more than just practising in the mornings, though that’ll happen too, but to practise throughout the day as well. Since I’m already scheduling 20 minute naps throughout the day, that provides me an excellent opportunity. For the most part, nothing will change, except that I’m now going to be trying to simulate real sleeping conditions when possible (same alarms, lighting, etc) and to bolt up and get moving the moment that alarm rings! Again, since I’m already on the Everyman, this shouldn’t be quite so difficult as it sounds.

So lets see if I can’t get this thing on track.

Crazy Stupid Sleep Schedule: Week 2

Another week has gone by, not quite as smoothly as the first. I’ve overslept during my core sleep fairly often, missed naps, and generally not kept to the schedule like I should. Missing naps isn’t as harmful as I thought it’d be, but oversleeping during the core sleep seems to be the death knell for being lucid during the day.

Of course, it’s all too easy to oversleep. Even if I DO hear the alarm, which isn’t guaranteed at all, I need to find the willpower to get out of my comfortable, warm bed and get moving. This’ll become easier with practise, I imagine, but I’ll still be increasing the volume of my alarm anyways!

Other things of note include an increased appetite. Waking up early means I’m hungry early, which means by the time 9:00am rolls around I am STARVING. I’m going to need to develop better eating habits, since my old tendency to miss meals altogether if something shiney distracts me will get me in trouble here.

I’ve also slightly tweaked my schedule for naps: my third nap has been moved forward to about 6:00pm to coincide with my ride home. Since I’m either hitching a ride with someone else or taking public transit, this’ll mean I’m making good use of a great deal of wasted time each day that would otherwise just be spent twiddling my thumbs. All I’d ever do on the bus is think, anyways, and I can do that with my eyes closed, too!

Crazy Stupid Sleep Schedule: Week 1

 

So.

It’s been a week since I started sleeping on the Everyman schedule. So, what’ve I noticed? How have I felt? How well does it work?

My initial impressions of it are quite positive. I’ve remained alert… and people have commented that I’m more alert than usual, even. The extra time is well spent and the nap schedule is easy to maintain.

On the other hand, while keeping time for the naps is easy I’m still not actually going unconscious. I’m just lying there getting bored for 20 minutes… though I admit I feel well rested at the end of them! The 3 hour sleep, though, is another story… I’m getting knocked right out, but I’ve been having trouble setting up an adequate alarm that will wake me up without waking anyone else in the house up. Several night in the last week I’ve woken up at my “old” time, or slept in a couple hours. I’m not sure if that invalidates my results so far, but it certainly isn’t ideal.

What I’ve eventually settled on is the alarm on my phone, which is surprisingly effective. It’s disruptive and persistent enough to rouse me from sleep, but quiet enough not to wake up someone in the other room. If I place the damned thing out of reach from my bed, I should have no trouble keeping the schedule from here on out.

I’m enjoying it so far. No major ill effects so far, but I’m seeing longer days. I’ll keep you posted.

Further Escapades of a Crazy Person

So I’ve always been a little on the loony side of things, it’s true. However, I’m about to dial it up a notch. I’ve been reading into polyphasic sleep schedules, and I’m about to start trying out the “Everyman”.

Most people I’ve run this past (including my friend Matt, who has declared me a “crazy bugger”) aren’t really sold on the idea, but I was sold on “cut your sleep in half”. I’ve never been a fan of sleeping taking up a third of my life… there’s always so much to do! So a sleep schedule that allows me to cut that down and still be able to operate is immediately appealing to me. Besides, I’ll be keeping a log (details forthcoming). That means that it’s FOR SCIENCE.

The schedule I’m going to attempt involves a core sleep of 3 hours, with three 20 minutes naps throughout the day. The idea is that the body adapts to more quickly fall into REM sleep, especially in those 20 minute naps. A more extreme version (the “Uberman”) is a 20 minute nap every four hours, though that schedule makes you completely out of line with everyone else and is very vulnerable to even slight disruption. The everyman, in contrast, gives you about an hours flexibility in either direction on the timing of any given nap, which seems like a more reasonable way to manage it and still not characterize yourself overmuch as a crazy anti-social nut.

Not saying that it wouldn’t be accurate, but let’s try to keep up appearances here!

So the schedule I’m going to try to manage goes like this:

1. Sleep from 12:00am – 3:00am. Go to bed late, get up early.
2. Nap around 8:00am. This coincides with the lengthier bus ride in my transit schedule.
3. Nap around 1:00pm. This coincides with my lunch break.
4. Nap again at 8:00pm. The one hour of flexibility I have means that if I have Taekwondo practice from 6:30-7:45, I can delay the nap. If I’m heading out to meet friends at 8:00, I can have the nap early.

This appears to be minimally disruptive. The main question is whether Bioware will accept me messing about with my sleep schedule like this. It’s a pretty permissive workplace, so I’m not too worried, but if my boss isn’t up for the idea of me adjusting to my new, crazy sleep schedule, or napping midday during my lunch break, then I’ll back off. If the sleep deprivation ends up being too severe and impairs my functioning normally, then I might stop it myself.

Otherwise, FOR SCIENCE.

I’ve got an animation editor to sell you…

Work continues on my animation editor. I’m considering the skeleton editing component of it finished (barring bug fixes and usability tweaks based on extended usage) and I’ve moved on to the real meat of the program: the animation editing. I’ve got a pretty slick interface for managing the animations tied to the skeleton rigged up, and now the most difficult part is ahead of me: getting actual animations running.

A Battlestar Galactica rant

Taking a break from game development related postings (mainly because there’s nothing interesting to report), I figured I’d talk about the new Battlestar Galactica series. It’s been a few weeks since the series finale, and I’ve had a lot of time to think it over. Considering the way that BSG has captivated my imagination for the last year (a friend who shall remain unnamed *cough*MATT*cough* managed to addict me to the damned thing last summer, and I blew through the first two seasons in about three days), that’s more substantial than it sounds. That is to say that I’ve been obsessing over the damned thing.

FYI, if you haven’t figured it out already, this is going to be spoiler-TASTIC. If you haven’t seen the series finale yet, or heaven forbid, have never seen the series, I encourage you to ignore the rest of this post. Seriously.