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Work:
- a webgl-based menu system for someone’s website (it’s flash time, all over again!)
- a phone app to help kids track and manage/monitor their medical condition
- a Zombie shooter/puzzle game in VR
Home:
- finishing up my old-school retro arcade shooter game (coding is done, just setting up for online sales. I’m aiming to sell the latest version, with the previous version under GPL.)
- writing a browser extension to detect and flag up sponsored content in news articles
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Job hunting. Not the most creative and spiritually-uplifting way to spend my time - I’d rather be coding.
Need a coder? My CV/github/various project links are here: http://scumways.com
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code
1 year ago
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link
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Single-file C/C++ public-domain/open source libraries with minimal dependencies
I really like this list!
Sometimes, you have a small problem, and you just want a small solution. Some might argue that these libraries shouldn’t be used for production because they’re too small, or not enterprise strength, or whatever. I completely disagree. I think that too much code is often a liability. Having just enough simple code to solve your problem and nothing else can be a great benefit.
Shameless plug: three of my projects are on this list: Genann, TinyExpr, and Minctest.
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Oddly enough, the N64 version was 3D. There were a couple of places where corridors crossed, at different heights. I’ve no idea why they bothered - the original 2D level layouts were great.
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It needed to be a totally different engine in any case - the N64 had something that was starting to be a modern GPU, with a real depth-buffer rendering pipeline. In the three years between the original Doom release and the N64’s release, that kind of specialized hardware had started to be a thing. The original Doom was doing everything in software.
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If your primitive is triangles, drawing only scaled lines is wasting at least two vertices (xy and uv) for every column / row
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That’s why I thought the N64 version was really odd: why bother storing the extra coordinate for all your map data, and doing all your player movement in full 3D when 2D would be just fine (as evidenced by the original PC version)? From memory there were very very few places where corridors crossed over, so it wasn’t exactly a core gameplay enhancement…
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But obviously it was all a cunning ploy by @DefuseSec to obtain peoples bitcoin/paypal details ;-)
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$work: ongoing work on my news-collection-and-analysis set of tools. Feel a bit like a duck - not much going on above water, but underneath, paddling like the clappers ;-) The visible, above-water bit is our ongoing analysis of the media coverage of the UK election:
Currently improving my tools for feeding in twitter data to the mix and analysing the twittersphere (is that really a word?). Looking forward to the election being done and dusted. Got to start thinking up how to further fund this stuff ;- )
$nonwork: slowly (very slowly!) hacking away at a prototype sort of ‘shared clipboard’ kind of thing that I’ve been wanting and has been kicking around my head for a good few years now. Trying really hard to keep it pared back and simple. Hopefully have something to show over the next couple of weeks.
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$work: The news-analysis tool I’m working on (Steno) has yielded its first public results - an analysis of the coverage of HSBC coverage in The Telegraph, in the wake of their chief political commentator resigning. We got mentions on the BBC and in the FT, which was nice. Currently working on tools to analyse twitter traffic for the upcoming UK election. Currently hating how twitter auth is so hostile to server-based apps :-( PIN numbers? really?
$home: Worked through the intricacies of OSX package bundling to get a Mac build of my retro-arcade-shooter game available for people to try out. Download links for mac and windows over on the TIGSource forums. I’d love some feedback btw (like, does it even run? ;-)
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$work: More on the news-article collection & analysis tools I’m working on. Lots of golang. We’re planning to use it to analysis coverage of the upcoming UK general election. We’ve got a landing page up now for anyone interested in receiving reports on said coverage, as they happen: http://electionunspun.net/
!$work: finally started making some progress on releasing one of the games I’ve had kicking around for a while (ie 15 years or so). I even started a devlog over at Tigsource to keep me motivated. Actually, motivation isn’t the problem, it’s just finding the time to work on it.
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$work: I’m working on tools to grab UK news articles from the national papers and broadcasters (works out to around 3000-5000 articles/day) and tools to help my non-techy colleagues analyse said articles. Aim at the moment is to monitor the media coverage of the upcoming UK general election, with an eye to producing regular reports on how things are being reported. I’ll post some links when we get some results to show. The larger goal is to produce tools which can help analyse the media coverage of any particular issue or event. Development mostly in Go, at the moment. I’m starting to nibble away at the corners of some NLP techniques, but really, we’re still at the ‘stupid’ phase - lots of hand-crafted keyword rules to identify articles about various people and topics.
$home: utterly failing to make any headway in getting a game I started writing about 15 years ago out the door. It’s 95% done, so there’s only the other 95% to do :-)
Tom Ryder did a good series on using Unix as an IDE: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/