I got to thinking that I’ve not really done enough of my own development lately, and a lot of the work stuff I’ve been doing has been rather niche specific and not really possible to generalize in a meaningful way.

As a result, I’ve decided to start jotting down the ideas I get for programs; be they small utilities or larger projects or even something web based. Then I can add it to this list. The aim is to slowly be able to start linking these to the blog post and/or completed product, adding projects to my “portfolio” as it were since as it is that’s started to get a bit out of date, what with projects like BASeBlock being years old now.

Some of the ideas may be rather specific to some particular purpose rather than generalized, so they might not be useful to many people, but the ideas are usually spurned on because I had issues dealing with something using conventional tools and figured writing my own would be do-able.

• DOOM WAD Editor

  I wrote about this before and I even started a WPF DOOM WAD tool (extract, delete, remove contents from WAD files). I had this idea largely because most t ools for WAD files are rather out-dated or clunky. That and the dichotomy of having a tool for a game written in 1993 using WPF was delicious.

• KGROUP/KEXTRACT UI Tool equivalent

  KGROUP and KEXTRACT are a format used by games like duke3d for their main data files. It’s similar to the WAD format in that it packs together a bunch of files. The format is even more straightforward than the DOOM WAD format, and the BUILD engine games are themselves quite old so it also has the delicious dichotomy I crave.

• Expand “VolumeSlapper”

  I wrote about “VolumeSlapper” previously. It effectively allows batch-control over the volumes of various audio sources (eg the Volume mixer panel). Recent Windows 10 versions have hidden the feature away a bit and clicking the speaker icon no longer shows the Volume Mixer, so a expansion of the tool would be to make a Winforms (or hybrid, as it would need the NotificationIcon from WinForms) tool that attempts to replicate the feature. On the “command-line” side it would be interesting to implement an expanded ability to control the volume via the command line through better filters.

• Redo Updater

  I have an “Updater” that gets attached to a few of my C# programs which itself uses an Update Library. In expanding that Updater for work purposes I’ve found that it can be substantially improved. With a recent move to VPS, it may be possible to do this as a separate server process, but sticking with a PHP interface may be desirable for portability.