Sculpting Your Own Entertainment

YouTube is great. My favorite feature is the Watch Later playlist. This coupled with suggested videos and subscriptions can result in what amounts to your own television channel. If you have a TV with a YouTube app on it you can even watch your channel on the 'big screen'. On a daily basis I plow through my nearly 100 queued up videos, using the shuffle button. When I'm done, I can click to remove the watched videos. Some are keepers so I can move those to other playlists or bookmark them.

It is entertainment you can't really get with TV or cable etc. They are typically under a half hour long and most videos are very well done. In time you come to enjoy the hosts even more than the topics at hand. It becomes like listening to old friends talking to you.

Redundant

I am still plugging away at the NetSplit IntFiction game in the WorldWeaver engine. This time around I'm doing a bit of planning as I go, hoping I don't hit a wall like previous attempts. One thing I'm noticing is a lot of redundancy in the commands and events to accommodate logic cases.

For example, if an event is checking an attribute and then changing that attribute it seems to result in both cases firing. One workaround is to use the fail_event attribute and this is most likely sufficient I just need to remember to use it, otherwise I end up with one node for each logic result, and I have to be careful bout where I do the logic check.

Maybe I need to add a case statement logic eval. And I need to double check the order in which I process logic and messages. Logic should be done first, then the messages. This will hopefully make logic cases more intuitive and less redundant.

Blending In

So. Now I'm inspired and intrigued by 3D digital, abstract, art. Mainly close up images of single objects or a cluster of objects. They are typically floating in a void or sitting on a surface that is barren, or itself, within a void. These pieces are showcases of both creative and incredible modelling and texturing/lighting, so they are not simple by any means.

Actually, since my personal favorites are the spherical themed images, it's frustratingly difficult (If you're a noob like me). I like to use boolean operations to build and carve meshes into the shapes I am after. With spheres this often results in missing faces and edges that need to be built - as far as I know - by hand. I'm going to attempt to avoid boolean operations as much as possible, and mess with the faces, vertices, edges to get what I want. Hopefully that will result in cleaner meshes and less headaches.

I have found some neat tricks that have a lot of potential for creating cool abstract meshes etc. I'm currently toying with some of those to see what I come up with. Then I will dig into lighting and textures etc.

Big World

I am making another attempt at an endless world system for my Galaxynet arcade game. I am using panels that are 2x the screen size. Up to three will be loaded at a time. The center panel will be the active one, and any neighboring panels the player is approaching will be loaded and ready to display. If the current panel moves far enough a neighboring panel becomes the active one and its relevant neighbors are loaded.

Each panel has its own GUID and its data is stored in text files. The panels are arranged relative to each other so there are no massive x and y values. For save and restore, the active panel's GUID is stored in the saved game state. The background texture is an exception, it is either random stars or a grid of textures. All other elements will be stored and loaded - as ling as they have non-blank GUIDs. So to create elements like display screens etc, give them blank string GUIDs and they will not be saved to data files.

I know from past attempts, loading ad positioning neighboring panels will be a challenge. Hopefully this new means of handling it will work far more seamlessly than my earlier attempt.

Taking Subprojects to the Extreme

I am still amazed by Reaper's 'move tracks to subproject' feature. It is absolutely amazing. Tracks with a ton of processing on them can be moved to their own projects and any time those are saved they are rendered as wav's within their parent project. And it is a reference to the wav so every instance of it gets updated with each save.

But it gets better! A subproject can have any of its tracks also moved t subprojects. So if you need multiple tracks of a VST that crashes when you have more than one in a project can have the duplicate tracks move into a subproject of the subproject. I imagine this could be repeated down any number of levels. I personally have gone three deep.

In my case I took a big lead and moved it to a subproject and worked with it there. Then I duplicated its track and moved that to a subproject, just to avoid crashes. Then I EQ'd that one and gave it different FX etc.

I've also done subprojects with multiple tracks etc to get even crazier sounds. I'm pretty sure I am barely even scratching the surface.

Nix On Droid

I am back in business. Gnuroot has been broken for a ling time, so my non-rooted phone has been Linux-less. No headless Linux console for me. But every now and then I look around to see what new offerings there are out there. I just found UserlAnd.

Once more I have a Linux console, with apt capability. I've installed the JDK/JRE and can run my Java notes app I built. That means I can also run my IntFiction engine also! It feels so good to have nix back.

Sadly UserlAnd is not quite as good as Gnuroot. Gnuroot was as painless as possible on a phone. The only pain points were keyboard related. It really needed a full keyboard with easily accessible arrow keys and key combinations. A readily available tab key would be nice. Although keyboards like the hacker keyboard can have these buttons right there all the time, the layout that allows for that is just unusable on a phone. The keys are way too small. UserlAnd, however, has a much more serious issue - scrolling. At least on my Pixel2 when the console output gets to the bottom of the screen it gets hidden behind the keyboard. So the bottom of the screen is useless. I have to close the keyboard, see what I typed, then pop the keyboard up and type some more. True, I can clear the screen, but sometimes that isn't possible. How could one even use VIM?

If the scrolling gets resolved UserlAnd would be a very strong offering.