A tiny weblog about a tiny idea

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nr05 // Pixel Dailies: Summer Secret Santa Event Gift for ClayTaeto!

So this is not related to anything either but I thought I would share it here, because it was a lot of fun to make~

For those of you hangers-on wondering about my game, I have been working on map generators again lately and I might have something to show for it soon. As always, it is not related to my main project, but it is not as though I have forgotten about or abandoned it.

I am just lousy at project management when the only member of my team is me, and for this, I apologize, once again. Sorry. ._.;

See you next time! :D

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nr04 // I feel bad about not posting.

It has been an eternity since I posted something here, and th reason is that I started taking commissions, because I find that, while money may not buy happiness, you cannot buy happiness with poverty, either. This, plus a few other things, has made it difficult to work on my game.

I did wish to post something, however, and this is it: a doodle I did yesterday night, redrawn for you in FANTASTIC RE-DO-VISION (a technology normally reserved for the high-speed reconstruction of trees and rocks). I am not used to drawing with a tablet and this is my first crack at it in a while, and one of my first ever at using it for pixel art. I would say it turned out fairly well? I have not settled on the colouring and the lines are not finished but who knows if they ever will be. :1

Anyway, none of my projects are “dead” exactly but they will forgive you if you return to your lives and maybe phone the hospital to see how they are doing every so often instead of visiting in person.

If you are curious, the character’s name is Eicheloa “Eloa” Riisilou, 41 years old; academic, cultist, mother of three. She is a character in a story I am writing with one of my fantastic girlfriends. :D

I will post again eventually, but I have no clue when that might be. Thank you for your patience. n_n;

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nr03 // Pixel Dailies, 0180123: “Android”

I suppose if I am going to post the other dailies I have done, I might as well post this one too, from late last month. The theme was “android” although I suppose what I have drawn may actually more properly be “cyborgs.” It took two days to make, so I suppose it is another one of my yesterdailies.

There are 381 frames, eight colours, and zero transparent pixels. There are more details on Twitter, which you can read by clicking here! :y

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nr02 // Pixel Dailies, 0180207: “Set of Monsters”

I spent a couple of days working on this, instead of working on other things. I am pleased with the result! But, Twitter refuses to display it properly, so I will try posting it here. Tumblr does not have a great track record with this stuff but at least it tends to enlarge, rather than crop or compress. :1

The theme for this challenge was to make a set of monsters, with a 16px. on-edge size restriction.

There are eight monsters all together with four moods each, in 24 frames of animation. There are 38 colours; each monster has no more than seven or eight each and there are a few tied up in the layout. A number of monsters share colours. I probably should have worked a bit harder on the layout. u_u;

Also it is my birthday and this means that I have made my annual accomplishment on the first (zeroeth) day and no longer need to worry about it this year. Score! :y

Anyway, I hope you like it! You can see it over on Twitter by clicking here.

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nr01 // Pixel Dailies, 0180112: “Bottle”

28 colours, 202 frames. I am really happy with how this came out~ <3 You can find it on Twitter over here: https://tinyurl.com/bottlejourney

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040 // I am not dead. Just lazy.

Ed.Note: I am not going to lie to you. I recently started a Twitter account and it has been taking up a lot of my time and it is easier to maintain than Tumblr, and I became entirely sidetracked with it. I had actually written this post in December of last year, then saved it as a draft intending to get more images ready for it. 

I forgot and only remembered now, so here they are! Again, sorry for the long delay. u_u;

So I have spent the past few months working alternatingly on a project for/with one of my fantastic girlfriends, making art slides for her project called "Skeleton Planet." These slides have been fun to do, with the mixed challenge/handicap of a four-colour monochrome palette and fixed image size. Here are some of them:

Admittedly, these art pieces have not taken up too much of my time in contrast to the length of time it has been since my last update. The other work I have been alternating back and forth with have been my original project (derailed months ago by the stupid jaywalking game; both still incomplete), a grid maker tool that should help me lay out doodles for landscapes (finished!) and pixel dailies submissions that tend to take a day or two to make (I will show you those later~).

The work I have done on the original project has centered mainly around a complex set piece in an even larger tile-based map for Opark Forest. The set piece has involved a great deal of animation for a number of materials I have never had to animate (properly) before, namely a canvas tent (in a breezy spot) and leaves on large trees (also in that windy location), and while it has required no new elements in terms of my engine (though a few have required revision), the map editor has so far been updated several times to correct flaws and improve its useability. The creation of the animated elements has been painstaking, though rewarding and I will reveal those later.

Matan kids on an incomplete fort!

Besides that, much of my time has gone to laying tiles and trying to make them look good next to one another. I have made a quick time-lapse thing using ASEprite to show the evolution of a part of this current map, although it is not particularly impressive.

Mazarre Ridge: Work-In-Progress. There are some colour palette issues in this .gif related to ASEprite’s palette quantizing that I could not avoid and sorry. :s

Now that you have seen it, maybe you would like to know a little about it? This is the 'Mazarre Ridge' area of Opark Forest. It is a rather unstable formation at the edge of Omalla continent's central plains that did not collapse (as the rest of the plains did) during the initial tectonic conditioning of the planet hundreds of years ago. The ridge is rocky and covered in a thin layer of soil created by the leaves and needles of the shrubs and large conifers the grow on top of it. The soil is quite good once you move away from the ridge where the wind prevents it from accumulating for long. There is a large lake not too far away, separating the ridge from the Matan Terraforming Platform. The terrain below the ridge is riddled with narrow caves and swallowholes that join and link together in Nigran Cavern beneath, and these holes are the primary reason why the road connecting Matan to the platform take the much longer route to the east of the lake, and why the area has only a narrow and seldom-used hiking trail connecting it to the town. The wind and steepness do not recommend it, either. Six years ago, Gustek Radomr constructed a small shack on one of the few stable outcroppings on the edge of the ridge for Celia Roscoe to play in; since then, Celia has expanded it slightly and maintains it to this day. It is quite difficult to reach.

Seedbird, in the woods on Mazarre Ridge.

Anyway, that is all for this update. I will try and be more diligent about adding more to this weblog but realistically, who knows-- I am not good at publicity. u_u;

I have made some new visual effects in the past couple of days. I hope to have a post ready soon, because I realize that it has been entirely too long. Here is a preview for you: a sort of shattered-funhouse-mirror effect for uneven reflective things!

Garbling a reflection was both harder and easier than I thought it would be.

Incidentally, if you were looking forward to more stupid-jaywalking-game updates, they will slow somewhat, but I would like to continue that project in the future. I just did not want to leave my main project on the back burner for any longer, so I picked it up again. The most recent thing I worked on for SJG was a code module that allowed me to make road layouts more easily from sets of locations and road-width data, rather than having to work out the carriageways on paper. The next element is other pedestrians, I think!

That is all for now! Talk to you next time! :y

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039 // What a life.

Distractions X: “Stupid Jaywalking Game, Part IV″

This weblog is still alive, if you could call it living. I apologize once again for not updating, but my reason is at least a good one?

In the past few weeks, I have been able to actually take my jaywalking simulator from being an unattractive and ineffective traffic-themed screensaver and turned it into an actual, playable, though mind-numbingly basic, “game.”

Here is an itemized list of the things I have added since I wrote last: (It is a bit on the long side so I will break the post here for easier scrollin’...)

 - A user-controlled pedestrian with whom players may beat the mean streets of Traffic Town. Players may walk, run, or sneak. Running depletes stamina which only recovers while standing (rapid recovery) or walking (modest recovery). Exhausting your stamina entirely places the player in an.. uh.. exhausted state where they move very slowly, stamina recovery is hampered, and running is not possible until their stamina is fully recovered. 

 - Pop-up objective destinations to travel to. Why? To collect points, of course.

 - Power ups which put a bit more spring in your step. There are several kinds.

 - Map decorations to liven up the city and more importantly get in your way. Some block you, others are just for looks. Still working out the scale of things.

 - Vehicles now have big, bright signals to make it more obvious when they are stopping or turning, because the eight pixel brake and turn lights on the sprite was obviously not going to cut it.

 - Buildings and vehicles now have blocking maps which players cannot pass through. Pedestrians who strike or are struck by vehicles may respond in one of three ways: Repelled, when the Vehicle is moving very slowly or (more likely) the player bumps into one which has stopped, they stop without harm. It is rude though so try not to. Glancing blows occur when the vehicle strikes a pedestrian but at a modest speed and when the pedestrian-vehicle-interface area shallow. The struck pedestrian is knocked back a short way and instantly loses all of their stamina. Do not let this happen in the middle of a busy road. Death occurs when a vehicle strikes a pedestrian clean and true, and at a decidedly non-survivable speed. Next time, cross at the corner.

 - A rather cumbersome heads-up display that I still need to work out some more details with. It includes a stamina bar, life counter for each of up to two players, score readouts for those players, a timer that tells you how much time is left or for how long you have been playing, and a very useful mini map that shows you the city and where you are in it. The map also has a bunch of fancy radar functions that display vehicles, power-ups, and blocked areas. On harder modes, less data is shown. Strangely, the map does not show the streets themselves yet. Hm.

 - Maps now scroll and move with the player, allowing them to be larger than the window the game is played on (which is good because Python is not really built for big windows).

My next goal I think is to make at least two or three decently-sized maps and maybe a level editor. The editor is a bit of a stretch since it represents a lot of work and probably not a huge return, but I still have to revise the way Intersections work and so it may become easy after those revisions. Depending on how that goes, I may even try to make a thing that generates random maps. On this element, breaths should not be held. 

I ought to have an animation for you, of the game itself, in my next post. Please look forward to it! <3

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038 // Distractions IX: “Stupid Jaywalking Game, Part III″

I have done a lot on this the past week or so, including these things:

 - Stop sign AI, which reliably stops vehicles from colliding with each other and admits them to an intersection in an efficient (though currently somewhat hard to easily predict) sequence  - Turn indicators on vehicles, which broadcast to the player which direction a vehicle intends to turn (it is currently very hard to see; I will add an effect that makes it more obvious soon!)  - A motorcycle vehicle with its own unique stats.  - Timer and event object classes, which control scheduled and repeating events.  - Expanded graphics generation options to allow specific roads to have individual surface and curb colours (eventually, maybe, textures).  - Dozens of smaller things which, when taken collectively, are a pretty big deal.  - The automated construction process for intersection transit routes has been improved but there remains room for improvement yet.

You cannot really see the blinkers and brake lights on the cars, so here is a big version. I am working on making these more visible, or perhaps adding some kind of marker to show vehicle turns.

My next goal will probably be to tie up the loose ends with signal timing (as there are still several left) and to work on making a player character and implementing that into the game. Probably the hardest part of that will be actually creating a player sprite that does not look too awkward-- as anybody who has played either of the first two Grand Theft Auto games can tell you, top-down views of humans get bland rather quickly.

I should also like to add other pedestrians to the game, which will no doubt create its own problems related to that (how can players differentiate themselves from NPC pedestrians?) as well as unique ones of their own (how will they navigate and will the player collide with them, or pass through them unimpeded like spooky-ooky ghosts?). As in life, “other people” remain a stretch goal feebly cheering me on from the bottom of a surmountable heap of tasks and a less-surmountable mountain of distractions.

And speaking of distractions, this whole affair is itself just something I find myself led away by when I ought to be working on my primary project. I know I promised I would produce something for you for that soon. I have delayed “soon” somewhat so that I may keep that promise and I am really counting on you guys to have not read this far. <3

Anyway I hope you like this stuff because it was very difficult to make, although the production of it did go far more smoothly than I had thought it might.

Should have more in a week or two, and talk to you then! :D Auf wiedersehen!

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037 // Truth Time:  “I Am Bad At Maintaining Weblogs.”

Distractions VIII: “Stupid Jaywalking Game, Part II”

Okay, so it has been at least three weeks, going on one month, and I have said exactly jack squat. Until today! >:D

The truth is that I have been out of town with another fantastic girlfriend, and my attention has been divided badly between being with her and doing fun things and being in one of the United States’ republics with a reputation for being rather hostile towards no fewer than three of the minorities to which I belong. The former has certainly weighed more heavily on my productivity, but the latter contributed little, as well. In any case, I find myself back in my home now and am gleefully ensconced in my underachievement, staring at reflections in my own river of mediocrity, desperately fighting the urge to dive in and seize the glittering images taunting me from its surface. (Not in a Narcissus sort of way but more like Li Bai*.) Anyway, in the time since my return (it has been three days, more or less), I have managed to complete most of the code in my Stupid Jaywalking Game (and that is its working title, by the way) required for the automatic construction of Intersections and their attendant components, which include entry and egress points (Nodes) for vehicles transiting the intersection, generation of Routes for vehicles to follow between them, and methods which produce graphics which represent the intersection area to the player.

This is what it looks like so far:

The jumble of tabs and characters that creates this mess of pathways looks a little (exactly) like this:

... IXN = { 'center' : (300,300), 'control' : 'SIGN', # currently does nothing.    'edges' : {        'N' : {            'inputs' : {                'n_left' : ('ENTRY', (40, 40), (215, 40), ('B', 265, 40), (265, 90), (265, 220)),                'n_right' : ('ENTRY', (560, 40), (385, 40), ('B', 335, 40), (335, 90), (335, 220))                },            },        120 : {            'outputs' : {                '120_out' : (('A', 110, 120, (300,300)), ('A', 240, 120, (300,300)), ('B', 'A', 300, 120, (300,300), 12), (580, 450))                        },            },        240 : {            'outputs' : {                '240_out' : (('A', 110, 240, (300,300)), ('A', 240, 240, (300,300)), ('B', 'A', 300, 240, (300,300), 12), (20, 450))                        },           },        },    'links' : {        'n_left' : ('240_out','120_out'),        'n_right' : ('120_out',)            }    } ...

I have also reworked the vehicle navigation code, which, previously, was the software engineering equivalent of a Novocaine-addicted dog’s breakfast (”profoundly messy,” I mean). It was a bit of work but I find myself pleased with the results; I am also surprised that it was only a half-day’s work. I am not sure if the code runs faster (the most micro of optimizations, if better at all) but it sure does look better and it ought to be easier to maintain. More significantly, it ought to be able to include and respond to Stoplights and Stop Signs, which are instrumental considering that the whole purpose here is to create a predictable traffic regime for the player to negotiate and not just a busy roadway. All I need to do now is actually write the signal controllers for the intersections and get it working.

Anyway, there remain a few problems with the way vehicles respond to each other, and which may be an issue with their code or may be an issue with the obstacle-detection system entirely, and that still demands my attention, so there is a bit of ground to cover before I can move on to greater things.

I also miss working on my main project. It has been a month or two. Or three. I should like to maybe poke at it soon, as well, if for no other reason than to keep it fresh in my addled little mind. I think I also promised you guys a view of an animation I was working on before I started this whole jaywalking side-project affair, and I ought to make good on that, I suppose.

Anyway, I shall try and be more diligent in my updates, and where have you heard that before, I wonder? :y

See you next time! :D

* If you get this reference, drop me a line so that I may award you your fifteen points!

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036 // Distractions VII: “Stupid Jaywalking Game, Part I”

So I decided to take a break from my normal project to try this new thing that flew into my head that felt like it would be fairly easy to carry out, and this is the result so far.

The basic concept of the game is that the player has to move from their current location to another point on the map-- some point at the side of a road-- as quickly as they can. The challenge is that they will frequently be called upon to cross streets full of cars. Cars which will hit them if they do not time themselves correctly. Being hit by a car concludes the game.

The cars follow a set of predictable rules and broadcast their behaviour in various ways, and the player can respond to that by planning out their trip from their location to their destination accordingly. The sooner they arrive, the more points it is worth to them.

So far, I have been working on the cars’ basic movement and map generation, which has been fairly straightforward. The map in the animation above, for instance, is generated from this list of points: [(50, 50), (200, 50), ('B', 350, 50, 24), ('B', 450, 200), (450, 350), ('B', 450, 500), (580, 500), (660, 500)] The xytuples give fixed points and the 'B'-tuples indicate Bezier curve control points, and some other data for the curve generator. Getting Pygame to make maps from fairly simple strings was not challenging and the Bezier curve generator was pretty easy stuff, too, though having the cars adjust their speed as they navigate sharp (and shallow) corners was a bit troublesome due to a few clumsy mistakes I made with numbers.

The next thing I need to do for it is have the roads connect properly to intersections, which will have a traffic control unit that directs approaching and waiting vehicles. I also need to have vehicles determine complete routes through that intersection and the map at their destination. Some buildings to decorate the map, a mechanism for choosing destinations for the player, and I suppose, the player's representative in the game, as well. A few things; not many. Not bad for three or four days' work. I am looking forward to working more on it, too.

I have been working on my main project as well these past couple of weeks (sorry I missed last week's post, by the way), but I have also found myself sidetracked somewhat. Windows 10, though it has been civil so far, has taking a change of attitude from "Unremarkable but cooperative" to "You are not my father and I will install whatever broken updates I want, and start waking up from hibernation while you are carrying me in your bag." The garbage update was especially jarring because my computer was stuck in a weird deadlock state where it could not boot up. Another surprise update had incapacitated my other laptop at the time, as well. That was at three in the morning. I was less amused. Again, one of my brilliant girlfriends helped bail me out, and now things are more or less back on the rails. But Windows 7 never gave me this kind of obscene trouble. Additionally, I discovered that it was scaling everything on my screen up to 125%, which is great for looking at whatever, but it had been making a huge mess of my art at 1xzoom. I had noticed the problem long ago but did not know what the source of the problem was exactly. I found it and corrected it. A nuisance, but at least this one was understandable.

Anyway, I will try and post more of my artwork from the main project sometime soon; at this point, it is not much to show, but perhaps you will find it entertaining in the time it takes to scroll past it. <3

Thanks for reading all the way to the end! :D See you again next time! :y

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Audio Overload emulates the sound hardware of vintage consoles and computers, allowing you to listen to completely authentic renditions of classic video game tunes.

nr00 // A Chiptune Player (SNES/SPC, and others)

So I guess if you like SNES music and have a bunch of SPC-format songs lying around (like I do) and (somehow) do not have a player for them (as I did not, until recently) but want a good one (and is that not what we all want from life?), then here is my suggestion.

Blasting some old favourites from “Aerobiz,” which other people my age may know as “Air Management: Ozora ni Kakeru,” and from “Super Bowling,” which I do not think anyone has thought about since 1995 (when I rented it last). Or not, maybe? The world is broad.

Anyway. Back to working on maps. Wine is fantastic. That is all for now. <3

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035 // ~ Wow! It’s Made! No.3: “Tree Super Redux”

The tree-drawing-visualization thing seems to be popular right now, so here are some more I made just today! They are not quite as articulate as the usual ones, but should do well for near-backgrounds and views through windows.

The first ‘lumpy’ tree is more of an artistic experiment than a legitimate game asset. I doodled a couple of leaves in with the second set and they are really there more as a mascot than anything. :1

- The first tree is drawn in 125 steps. - The second tree is drawn in 159 steps. - The third tree is drawn in 172 steps. - The last tree is drawn in 238 steps (+2 where I relocate it in the workspace). - All of the trees use five colours, except for the first which has seven, plus a transparency value.

I drew this as another sort of design study, mainly to have a few samples to put into a map to see if they look any good. I will post the results of that experiment later.

I hope thse low-fidelity trees amuse you! They were also fun to draw! :D

Incidentally, I find I have collected quite a set of GIF compression solutions to make up for ASEprite's unfortunate GIF-saving shortfalls. As before, I had to make some revisions to the original LICEcap capture (934kB), and when I went to save the altered version out with ASEprite, the result was 22.4MB! This is not really so horrible considering its size and length of the thing but is hardly internet-friendly and shows some considerable bit of a space for improvement, algorithm-wise. Anyway, I ran it through a sketchy online compression tool (a new one this time; the last one broke!) and got this 1,045kB lossless version back, and hooray!

Anyway, that is that for now, I will also try to put out another post this week, since this one is not really that interesting, game-development-wise.

Please look forward to it~ :D

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034 // Distractions VI: ‘Palette Study’

This is not directly related to my game but I thought I might post it anyway: it is a small doodle I did in order to try and get a better idea of how to use colours properly, instead of guessing my way though it as I have been. My solution was to see what I could do with ASEprite’s default colour set, and this is what I made. There are six colours in all and there is no transparency value. This version is posted at 400% normal size (if Tumblr is not stretching it).

It is a bunch of factories at night, at the edge of a cool summer fog. Probably the coolness does not come through as well as the mistiness does. I am quite happy with how it looks, and I feel like I picked up a couple of things, and found a few other things (linear dithering, for one) where I could still use some (sic: much) improvement. But that is what art is all about, really: putting aside how bad at everything you are on a wager with secret odds that you might be better afterwards. The ante is your time and effort, and you got that for free! Afterwards, compare your work to the people you admire. If you struggle with why you even try this stuff because you think your work is garbage, you have improved and you are on the right path. If you come out of the comparison feeling good about the quality of your work, that means it is time to find better artists to admire!

You can sidestep the entire comparison segment by doing “subject studies” and “doodles” and other things “for fun,” which, for me, is a transparent lie told to myself wherein I unconvincingly say I am not interested in the result, but in evaluating how I get there, and improving that, rather than making a good product.

What you see is the result! :y

Anyway, thanks for reading this to the end! I will try to be more diligent about “weekly” posts, but actually I have not been as productive as I was this time last year, and I need to sort out why. More work.

See you then! :D

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033 // ~ Wow! It’s Made! No.2: “A Tree In 2,023 Steps!”

I captured this from the redo stack of a tree I drew recently as a technique study, and I thought that I might also post a capture of the creation of it. I hope you find this kind of thing as mesmerizing as I do.

Start to finish, it took maybe three hours to do. Slow, but I am becoming better at it, I think.

As if you had missed it, the name is a reference to the plentiful and very useful, if slightly frustrating, tutorial images available online that offer you a lesson on drawing something in six or eight steps, which tend to leave out some critical leap or structure that tells you exactly how to get the details the way you need them (it tends to be around the fourth or fifth). Instead of that, I would like to offer you the complete process, directly from my edit history, from vacant workspace to signed product. Confounding step? Miss something? Need a bit of interpolation? Go back to the exact moment where it happened and study the result in this fun, 108-second animated image, uncluttered by explanations, descriptions, or frame numbers! Tell your friends!

The tree has ten colours, plus a transparency value. 1,971 of the GIF's 2,023 frames are of its construction, and the remainder are just me being fancy, plus a bit of LICEcap being a nuisance at the end.

Anyway, this has been a good week for neither my game nor my health, so I am afraid there is not much to see here. Hopefully, there will be more to see next time.

Until then!

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032 // Garbage Life Hacks: “Peer Review”

Every time I show a piece of artwork to someone, I instantly notice no fewer than five unique problems which I feel compelled to fix.

Therefore, if I keep showing my work to people, eventually, I will perfect it.

This is how it works. I can feel it.

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031 // Not Yet Dead

Before anything, an image, because it has been a very long time without one:

Seedbird, in Nigran Cavern's Depths. The ripple effects are new; I created and implemented them just yesterday!

Hello! Sorry for the long delay; I had been called out of town for all of June and July on family business, and, I suppose, for a long road trip of several thousand kilometers (each way!) with one of my beloved girlfriends. During this time, I was unable to post meaningfully, or work meaningfully, or I suppose really deal with life in general, which, for me, is something of an ordeal, meaningfully.

Kind of a few things happened, and this post is rather long, so I will break it here and you can read it at your leisure~

While I was out of town, I found my old laptop had developed some additional bluescreen-style problems, and I sought to retire it before it died entirely, which I did. Through the help of a friend, I was able to procure for myself a new laptop at a price I could afford, which, for various reasons, actually turned out to be more machine than I need-- a bit of fortune for me on a throughly-mixed-results 'vacation'. The adjustment to Windows Ten has been fairly smooth, although it still does a few things I do not entirely appreciate. Nothing truly problematic; mostly "Who thought this was a good idea and what could their rationale have possibly been?" moments and a bit of wonder why the default photo viewer becomes less and less capable with each new iteration. Reinstalling all of my favourite software took almost no time at all, though I discover things I am missing on a weekly basis. Completely resolvable problems, all.

This situation also allowed me to update my version of Python (a thing I ought to be doing more diligently anyway) and to update my version of Pygame from version 1.9.1 (released August, 2009) to 1.9.3 (released January of this year). There was a version 1.9.2 that I tried to download last year, but which created a number of strange problems for me so I rolled it back. I am pleased with this new version, though; there was a little retooling and a few mysteriousities, but they seem to have been mostly corrected. Being up-to-date is nice, and not just for practical reasons, but for self-satisfaction ones, too.

In any case, I am returned now and I hope to get things back on the rails with this project. The first challenge was settling a number of reasonable, less-reasonable, and outright-idiotic file structure issues I had casually created on my previous workstation, mostly to do with file paths being mapped to absolute, rather than relative, locations. In layman's terms, I had told my engine exactly where each file was on the hard drive, rather than where the files were relative to itself. The significance is that in the first case, for the program to work, each file must be in exactly the right folder, starting at "C:", and every file from the previous laptop must be replaced in that exact location. This, I tell you now, is stupid, and not a thing you should do if you ever plan on taking your programs off of the hardware you create them on. I recall the thought that it was a bad move at the time, even those years ago, but went and did it anyway. It took one or two days to reconfigure my map files so that they were able to draw assets from subfolders (directories contained by whatever folder the program itself is running from); I spent some of that time retooling the loader and editor to handle these new relative locations (directories 'visible' from the one the program is running from) as well. It was all dramatically less work than expected, and finally settling this bit of juvenilia* let me put at least that one element of shame to rest: a piss is removed from the ocean! >:D

Moving on, I returned to the matter of Matan Village, permanent address to many several. Originally, I had planned to draw the entire settlement, buildings, flora, citizens, and all. This, I have determined, is actually neither necessary nor even useful to the game: the town would be enormous by comparison to the other maps, the plot does not focus so heavily on the place, and the player would spend a lot of time walking through an area just to get to another, rather than to see the sights (though I would be flattered if they did) or to meaningfully advance the plot (though I could find a lot of ways to do this, it would not be the 'purest' solution). Instead, I have elected to change the structure of the town somewhat, hopefully in a way that is convenient to the player, practical to develop, consistent with the style of the game, and structurally not-jarring. I have a solution that I am confident can accomplish at least two and a half of these things, which I regard as "pretty good" and please look forward to it! <3

Besides all that, there have been several other modernizations of my old code, including some optimizations and restructuring of old methods and mathematics. One of the somewhat discreet and worrisome issues I have found with this new hardware is that it so broadly outperforms my old machine that I can no longer tell easily when my code is badly inefficient, because this new hardware is perfectly capable of powering through my shitty programming, even with Python's relative (perhaps "objectively") weak performance in graphics processing taken as a handicap. Granted, my old machine was substantially below-average in terms of its processing power: it was an old model when I got it in 2013, and by the time it retired, its thermal problems had become so severe that I was only able to run it comfortably in 'Battery Saving' mode. I was able to maintain thirty(ish) frames-per-second most of the time, though occasionally there were functions it struggled with. No longer is this the case: old hill-climby, chuggy-struggling effects are taken as nothing. With an unlimited framerate, the game slows from 145fps to 102 (a steep decline but not one which would effect normal operation). Previously, this area would slow from 66fps to maybe 22 or 25. Be assured that this module is at the top of my "Do It Better" checklist-- it has to do with realtime image processing and possibly I will just learn how to do it in C and write an extension..? That stuff is entirely new ground for me, though, and I have plenty of things in front of me to do first. Just regaining my momentum is hard enough. :s

Anyway, that is about all I have to report for now. I hope to have more images and information to share soon; I shall try to get back on the wagon with my weekly updates as well and I do apologize for missing so many of them.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end! See you next week! :D

* Fun fact! I had originally typed this word as ‘juvenalia’, which looks correct but is not. The true word I was after was ‘juvenilia’, which refers to the (often embarrassing) work one does in their youth, rather than the former, with an ‘a’: a holiday in classical Rome.

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030 // Garbage Life Hacks: “Pipeline”

Art when you’re sober. Code when you’re drunk. And in between? Dialogue.