weekends are for leisure

Five months ago I started messing around with voxel-engine and it has thoroughly re-kindled my love for measuring and optimizing code. You can see a demo of my project in my previous video post. However, I’ve taken the three.js-based engine as far as it can go. I want to increase the draw distance, want world chunks to load and draw faster, to make changes to the physics engine and reign-in the garbage collection pauses (caused by excessive memory allocation). So I took the plunge, and I’m now 1.5 months into a full re-write of the voxel-engine code. The good news is that I finally have something to show (the image above).

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Wanted to show some of the new features I’ve added to the voxel game: maps and streamlined mouse/keyboard input handling!

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I’ve been writing about an in-browser voxel game project of mine over at voxeling.tumblr.com. The game – if it can actually be called that (probably not) – is built on a JavaScript game engine for building minecraft-like environments. If you want to try it out, contact me.

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I finally got voxeling to work from my linode server! And just in time for Tuesday night’s Meetup.

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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.

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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.

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