weekends are for leisure

This week I decided to split the chunkDistance setting into horizontalDistance and verticalDistance. The chunk distance setting affects how far the player can see in the world. Technically, it determines how far from the player the world is drawn. With this change I can draw more of the world along the horizontal plane. This gives the player more visual landmarks and makes traveling long distances easier. If the draw distance is only around 100 meters or so it’s easy to get lost. Since there’s a limit on how many chunks I can draw in the world before gameplay starts to stutter, being able to set a shorter verticalDistance is helpful.

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I have an older Dell Inspiron laptop that’s been part of my life since 2007. One of my soft goals is for voxeling to run reasonably well on it, though things aren’t looking good at the moment. The simple voxeljs demos tend to run around 30fps but within my world I’m getting between 8 and 20fps. Not good. I blame the many many more voxels present in my world. I’m considering converting the engine to StackGL/WebGL (kinda like voxel-engine-stackgl), but more on that in a future post.

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If you haven’t already played around with the in-browser voxel game demos on voxeljs.com, check them out. I stumbled across them in April and was blown away. Who knew 3D environments could run so well in the browser? Apparently lots of people did, more than two years ago. Oh well, I’m late to the party again. Regardless, working with those tools looked like great fun, so I forked some repos and began building. My end goal is a multiplayer voxel game that I can host on my linode server. My current iteration works pretty well on a local network, but strange things happen when I try to compile and host on my linode server. I’m betting it’s due to module incompatibilities with newer versions of node.js. So I press on.

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When I saw that shuttle take off at dusk, it was the most unbelievable experience. I got tears in my eyes; my heart pounded. I was proud to be an American, to see that we could do something that awesome.

Quote from William Parsons, Ninth Director of the Kennedy Space Center. From a display at KSC.

I get tears in my eyes, too. Tears of joy. Tears of awe. Tears of pride in what humans are capable of.

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Who is that sharp-dressed man standing in the blazing Florida sun?

It’s Bill Nye, the Science Guy!

Yesterday was the second time I watched a rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center. United Launch Alliance was sending up a rocket. That simple fact was enough to attract me to KSC … I didn’t know what the payload was. The MC informed us that a classified plane was being sent up, along with a Light Sail and a few cubesats. This was the fourth test for the Air Force plane, and the first Light Sail test by the Planetary Society, whose CEO is Bill Nye. I’d seen a headline about the Light Sail test the previous week, but had no clue it was launching so soon. More about the launch here.

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My beagleboard-xM wifi router is almost a year old; old enough to take on more responsibilities. Most recently it became the new home for my installation of tracker, which I migrated from a publicly accessible linode server. Soon I’ll be giving it the task of acting as an iTunes server.

After using tracker in it’s new home for a few months, I realized that disk operations on the beagleboard were quite a bottleneck. After shopping around, I migrated the Arch Linux installation from an Amazon Basics 16GB MicroSD card to this super-fast Samsung card. There’s a night-and-day difference between the two cards. With the Amazon card, saving an item in tracker to an sqlite3 database would take 4 seconds, but with the new card it’s immediate.

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Last week I received my first box of Soylent. It’s a beige-ish shake drink that would be a perfect source of nutrients on a long space voyage. Just add water! Sometimes I refer to it as Shake Weight since you’re supposed to shake it for 30 seconds to mix.

Soylent is now the first thing I eat each day. It’s great for other meals too, but it really solves the “breakfast problem” for me. It’s quick to prepare, consume, and it sustains me from 8am to 12pm without issue. In the past, I’d rarely eat enough for breakfast and would be hungry, distracted, and slightly delirious by around 10:30am. The problem would be worse if I had coffee, which I tend to like to do.

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A month ago, Amazon and Sling TV had a deal for $50 off an Amazon Fire TV box if you paid for 3 months of Sling in advance (the promo is still running). Since I was curious about Amazon’s box and Sling as well, I went for it. Luckily, Amazon was offering an extra $15 off the Fire TV box at the time, so I ended up paying only $35 for the box.

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Recent thoughts to self:

A snazzy-yet-sinister-looking poster for my new office, from a band I continue to love? Gimme! [purchased]

A re-mastered version of The Ugly Organ that includes tracks from 8 Teeth to Eat You that I somehow lost long ago? FUCK YEAH! [purchased]

Much love to Cursive.

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My podcast rotation has expanded a bit lately. Here are the ones I’ve found particularly enjoyable:

Isometric

A gaming podcast featuring 3 ladies and only 1 guy. They discuss games and pay particular attention to:

• Did the game creators lazily fall back on stereotypes or create a well-rounded, believable characters with history, motivations, feelings?
• Are we forced to play as a male lead? Extra points off if we have to rescue a damsel in distress.
• Are women represented less-kindly than men? More kindly?

Straight white men aren’t the only people playing games.

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