This last term at University has been pretty busy. That's to be expected I guess since it's now my final year but I've been busy with my final year masters project (a particle physics project in collaboration with BaBar) and a course in high performance computing where I've learned everything from SWIG to OpenMP and MPI. My interest was so piqued by the HPC stuff that I've decided that I am going to focus my PhD on that area, now I just need to find somewhere that will take me :)
Anyway, that's the reason I've been somewhat absent from KDE recently. However, now it's the Christmas break and while I do have some Uni work to do, I've got some time for KDE stuff, particularly for KSquares which has unfortunately been almost unchanged since KDE 4.0.0. I'm just about to start work on a full AI system for it. Up until now, the AI had two modes, one which just moves randomly (hardly fun to play against) and another which only takes moves which are immediately the 'least damaging'. Neither of these modes have any sort of forward planning and so I am planning on implementing a simple decision-tree type design to allow the AI to be perfect (this is possible in squares since it is a very closed game).
In related news, I've started using KDevelop 4 (I have been building it for a while now but had been experiencing crashes - these now have mostly stopped). I remember using KDevelop 3 previously and while it was a very good IDE, I couldn't seem to use it for anything more than automating tasks (configuring, building, searching). KDevelop 4, however is a different story. If any of you have been following David Nolden's blog you'll have seen sime of the nice new features it brings. It's more than just auto-completion, it really does allow you to browse your code like a semantically sensible web-site. Your mouse never has to leave the text-area.
On an unrelated note and for those who care, I've also been doing a small bit of work (mostly minor optimisations, documentation and the CMake buildsystem) on my brother's recent project. It's basically a framework to allow the use of Qt and OGRE in the same application (so that a game could, e.g. use Qt to display the GUI, menus etc.). It's called QtOgre and is now available as an OGRE Addon. It was designed to be used in his game project/voxel rendering system Thermite 3D.
