As I proceed farther into wannabe, I find I need more content to test and validate the work I’m doing. That is the purpose for the vignette milestones over in the issue tracker. So, I’ve finally started on one: Rain. In it, the plan is to have a house, a yard, some background terrain, and ultimately some animated rain falling silently. Read through the end for some fun videos! Continue reading
At least part of the problem Wannabe has with rendering is that we’re blindly drawing every voxel in a somewhat arbitrary manner. Right now, it’s sorted only by Z, the rest stays in the order added to the initial grid. We can trick the various RenderTypes to show the wrong thing pretty easily then, just by crafting the data properly. Only reason things have been reasonably decent is because I’ve tended to add voxels from left to right, top to bottom, and the best looking renderer is up-and-to-the-left. Any mistakes will get drawn over. Continue reading
I’ve not not been working on wannabe — in fact I have significant code and written content that I haven’t posted. I’ll try to get somewhere more this weekend. In a nutshell, there’s at least two problems: I use a pretty naive neighbor data structure, and I ended up conflating hidden surface removal with hidden voxel removal. And I’m not sure I can quite tease those apart.
Small diversion: What I didn’t really mention in the last post was that I had actually gotten the PsuedoPerspective working a bit better. Let’s see what that looks like! Continue reading
Continuing the Cabinet projection effort from the last post let’s see if we can close out issue #1 on github. We need to add sides and make sure things look good under different circumstances. Continue reading
I’ve copied several of the issues from the last post into the github project’s issues list. Herein, I work on issue #1: A Cabinet (Projection). Read on to see how we can make these little squares a little more cubey. Continue reading
In the first article, I described the basics of wannabe: a simple graphics engine. I haven’t been letting it sit, I’ve added some small features to it and have been making plans.
On github: wannabe: Multiplatform low-resolution 3d engine. For losers, by losers. Continue reading
Someone on the Internet is wrong. IGN recently made an ordering of the Muppet movies from worst to best. It’s almost entirely wrong.
Here’s my list, from best to worst:
And here’s the Miasma. I just don’t remember anything remarkable about these Muppet films; I should re-watch so I can insert in the above list. And isn’t there another one? I’m almost positive that in the opening act of Muppets Most Wanted they said that this was the eighth sequel.
Three interesting (but not short) economic documents came across my desk over the last couple of months. Sort of natural, I guess, given that I work for Square, but I think they are all worth reading. That said, I’m about halfway through each. 😉
The debate over gendered pronouns popped up in computer-science-land over a couple of commits for node.js. There are serious problems with the male-dominated culture in CS (and video games, for that matter), and this blog post by the corporate maintainers of node.js was really the wrong reaction on a couple of points. Continue reading
After recently getting an Ouya device, I got inspired to make a game.  Then I realized two things: I don’t have any skill with 3d, and I learn by doing.
Here’s a quick guide to what I’ve done so far: wannabe, a multiplatform 3d engine, for losers, by losers. Continue reading
I’m not in the business of writing web browsers, but my HTC One X has a problem: HtcLinkify. Due to an annoying lawsuit from Apple, HTC changed the behavior of web links on their devices. Instead of jumping right into a specific app, the web browser just dumbly follows the link itself. There is a way to fix, but you have to root your phone. Continue reading
I have a large mix of games, many of the recent additions from yon Humble Indie Bundle. The great thing about Humble is you always get access to game soundtracks, so there’s a lot of top-quality music available. Here’s some of my favorites. Continue reading
What’s it like to be smart? Some quick thoughts, with a twist that surprised even me.
Tried to boot up my macbook after a long weekend. Got the inscrutable flashing folder with a question mark. Tried a couple of tips from the internet, like holding option or ‘c’ down, neither of which worked.
Then, hooked up my TimeMachine backup and the recovery console came up on its own, and allowed me to fix the disk (partition table reported the wrong size). Everything was happy.
Kudos, then, Mr. Mac. If you have a time machine handy, it works pretty well. The opposite of kudos for not really telling me that before or after, and for crashing in the first place!
This was way harder than it needs to be, because MacOS X Lion ships with git 1.7.4.4 in /usr/bin. Here’s a quick sequence of steps:
export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH
Several utilities that make life bearable on the mac:
No real editorial here, just capturing some metrics. Number of keys lost when coming out of screensaver or sleep to the unlock password prompt:
This gallery contains 9 photos.
As promised, some photos of the fun at the Supercross: And for your viewing pleasure, a moving picture, starting 10 seconds before the final race. Here you can see the insane fireballs and what-not.
