A little more work on that map generator while dinner was cooking and now I have a hideous Voronoi tessellation of what was intended to be tectonic plates. I’m clearly going to have to rethink how I’m selecting the plate “centers” because I’m not getting the effect I want. Next up, Lloyd’s relaxation.
So after a couple weeks of futzing around with voronoi tessellations, locating implementations, rewriting chunks of those implementations to fit my needs, not being happy with the results, ripping it all out and starting over etc I decided I’d stick with what I Know and use a radial hex map.
One cup of coffee, about an hour of coding (about half of which was sorting out an error in mapping Hex coordinates to Vector3s) and viola, one randomly colored hex grid (green tinted because, omg, random color selection is an aesthetic nightmare).
The mesh isn’t optimal but I’ll deal with that if it becomes a problem later.
Next up, plate tectonics and heightmaps.
It’s been a long week so I only have the basic WASD controller set up with a proper state machine. Now I can run around the featureless checkerboard plain with a few amenities like
I’ll add jumping on a featureless checkerboard plain a little later once I decide how to pass the collision detection to the state machine as well as a few other movement states:
No point in either of those yet since there’s no falling off or sliding down this which is good since the “player” has no rigidbody and only translates along the (x,z) plane. Baby steps.
Since running around a featureless plain isn’t particularly fun, it’s time to add some features to the environment. I could hand edit the Unity Terrain assets but since the goal is to go full Dwarf Fortress on the world generation (well maybe half-assed Dwarf Fortress) we’ll be starting with plate tectonics and building the terrain up starting with geologic time.
I spend a lot of time tinkering with various software projects, going at problems the wrong way, and generally making stupid decisions that a professional or more formally trained person would cringe to look at. Herein begins my cautionary tale as I learn painful lessons the hard way so you, dear reader, don’t have to. This is not a self promotion journal intended to demonstrate success or competency but rather the dev blog version of Ow, My Balls!
I’ve been fooling around with Unity3D for a while now so what’s the first project any burgeoning game developer should start with? That’s right, time to build my own MMORPG! I mean, a few orcs, a little hack and slash, how hard could it be?
In honor of my entrance to role playing games and as an homage to the first RPG sandbox I’ve ever played in I’ve named the project Hommlet and set up source control for it because I’m not a complete savage. I don’t really feel like mucking about with the network code or data storage model so in the spirit of Doing It Wrong, I’ll be starting with a basic character controller and will move forward from there based on the immortal words of Alex DeLarge
Thinking was for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends
So tonight I’ll raise a glass to old Bog and see what inspiration comes.
Coming away from the first class on the Bodhisattva Precepts at Buddha Eye Temple I have the following to roll around in my head for a while.
The Bodhisattva Precepts used in the Soto Zen tradition encompass and expand on the ethics / sila encompassed in the Noble Eightfold Path. The sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts include multiple precepts in three groups following the tradition of Buddhism as a list of lists. For the householder rather than the monastic, sila i.e. morality or virtue should be based on an inquiry into what advances oneself and others towards realization rather than simply an adherence to a set of rules. (more…)
I don’t know why I continue to use Windows. Every single god damned thing feels like pushing a giant rock up a hill. I’ll admit that the fact that I’ve been doing most of my work on Linux for the past twenty years inclines me to use the linux idiom for getting things done and I’m likely just not thinking like a Windows user but my god does MSFT make doing things other than what they want to you to do in the way they want you to do it a massive pain in the ass.
I started using computers with nothing but a command prompt and while I appreciate some of the amenities of modern computing, I’d still like a marginally functional command prompt with a reasonable set of tools. I swear it takes me ten times as long to get basic work done in Windows than it does in Linux.
I think the only thing that is keeping me from just installing Ubuntu on my desktop is my recollection of how clunky desktop linux was a decade ago and my continuing vice of playing MMOs.
Also, I’m back from training people in what can only be described as a suburban Hellscape. How do you politely tell someone that you’d rather put a gun in your mouth than live in the same community they’ve chosen to make their home?