Moving Back to TextDrive soon

Posted on February 13, 2013 by proj

It should be pretty seamless – I got the email and other people have already moved back from Joy Ent. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know when I find it.

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C++ Code for Asteroids Style Font

Posted on February 13, 2013 by proj

I decided it would be good to put up the code I wrote this weekend for the Asteroids style font in case anyone else was interested.

Rest of engine is missing, it’s all crap anyways ;) . It should be easy to use the font with any engine due to the way the glyphs are arranged. I haven’t tested every letter yet, if I find any issues I’ll update the code. I don’t consider myself a graphics programmer, it’s something I do for fun – feedback is always appreciated.

Header and CPP follows…

Continue reading →

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VectorFont class

Posted on February 10, 2013 by proj

Well after a slightly tedious afternoon typing in coordinates and writing a little class wrapper I rendered my first string in the asteroids font.

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Making of Asteroids

Posted on February 10, 2013 by proj

Cool little article on the making of Asteroids.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/making-asteroids/

Has image links to the graph paper used to sketch the vector font and asteroid objects :)

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Political Engagement

Posted on November 14, 2012 by proj

This recently election cycle I’ve gotten really engaged with the political process, much more so than I’ve ever been. The internet has been hugely beneficial in this process and has eliminated a lot of previous barriers to entry. In the recent election the sites I used the most for research were:

In combination with the election debates, CA voters guide and editorials from a variety of sources I felt good about making my own choices on the various appointments and the ballot. I’ll admit when it came to my news and editorial exposure I found myself reading maybe 70% left leaning material. A lot of the conservative material I found was easily dismissed on just basic fact checking. I would love to get some pointers on better right leaning material.

When it comes to the post election material, the information coming out of whitehouse.gov has been interesting. I just watched the press briefing but it was pretty embarrassing how much of the focus was on scandal and not on issues.

I don’t intend on writing much about politics or getting involved in any kind of debate. I’m mostly just impressed with how much ground you actually can cover online with a small amount of motivation towards becoming an informed voter.

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Spotify You Suck!

Posted on September 29, 2012 by proj

Spotify is some new breed of internet garbage. My interaction with Spotify has so far been this:

  • Friend sends me a link to listen to a song via Spotify
  • Song doesn’t play unless I login with facebook (I refuse)
  • Spotify begins spamming my email address with messages like this:

You and Michael are now connected on Spotify

These are from random people on Facebook. Who knows how they’re farming my email address from these people.

I click the link at the bottom to remove my email from their spam records. It takes me to a sign-in page.

I click the Contact form at http://www.spotify.com/us/about-us/contact/

It takes me a login page

SPOTIFY YOU SUCK!

I have no recourse to stop them from spamming my email, except for the spam filter. Guess what spotify? Spam filters are reserved for scammers and the scum of the earth. Yeah, that’s you now.

There is no email contact form no way that I can tell to remove this cancer of a ‘service’ from my life.

I’m going to follow up an see if I can lodge an official complaint with an external body. Until then this blog post will have to do.

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First 2 hours with Borderlands 2

Posted on September 18, 2012 by proj

Some things that are cool:

Voice cues, general humor and boss intros.

As a sequel though it’s feels underwhelming.

First thing I notice is they stuck with the lame tutorial intro. Totally ruins the cool vibe of the intro, they could have rolled from that into something way more engaging.

Plenty of games have figured out how to teach you while playing incrementally. Borderlands is not a complicated game, just structure the levels and game mechanics naturally instead of forcing a tutorial. Better than the first but still way off.

Still has visual issues of the the first game.

Enemies are still very tough to read. The colors are all in the effects and environment. There’s way too many visual styles on screen at the same time. The colors and read hierarchy just seems totally mixed up.

I still don’t think it does FPS right. The aiming is off, it still feels like dice rolls. The get-hits are almost non-existent. The firing response just doesn’t feel good. I’m expecting it to get better later through progression but not sure.

Played online co-op, laggy with constant rollbacks (LA->Seattle). Network code in co-op does not need to be so rollback happy. Who cares if I interpolate for a second?

Ninja looting doesn’t feel good. At least make it an opt-in thing for people. Totally a taste thing but I vastly prefer the D3 system.

Going to try it tomorrow on LAN at work.

Maybe I don’t get it.. is there something I’m missing here? I have this feeling that RPG shooter should not feel like this. It just feels wrong to me to put the RPG first for instance with dice rolls when I’m in the first person perspective. The shooting and action needs to be front and center. I know the game has rabid fans but I’m not one of them yet.

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Vector Display

Posted on September 6, 2012 by proj

Need: http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/09/03/vector-display/

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SHR vs. SAR

Posted on December 16, 2011 by proj

It came up in an interview today when SAR (shift arithmetic right) is used instead of SHR (shift and rotate right) the simple rule (on gcc at least and probably cl) if it’s a signed it will use SAR and not SHR. Makes total sense of course after looking at it. Left shift is always SHL regardless of sign.

int a = 0x80000000;
int b = 0x00000001;
a = a >> 5;
b = b << 5;

Produces:

movl   $0x80000000,-0x4(%rbp)
movl   $0x1,-0x8(%rbp)
sarl   $0x5,-0x4(%rbp)
shll   $0x5,-0x8(%rbp)

After shifting the variable will be: 0xfc000000

This sometimes surprises some people who assume that shifting is always the rotate shift operation (that shifts in zeros)

WikiBooks Shift and Rotate

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Artshow SVG

Posted on January 13, 2011 by proj

I’m happy at how artshow is coming along. It feels ‘done’ and as a learning tool has been the perfect scope of project. I think if I would have done something more ambitious it would have been more difficult to bring it to completion (like the majority of my projects in svn).

Here’s the way it’s setup:

  • Simple PHP page that queries the wordpress database for the wp_postmetadata for images matching a certain prefix and returns the wierd WP formatted metadata via an AJAX JSON query.
  • The main frame is basically a single div to bind to raphaeljs
  • The image metadata is parsed and put into a local js object cache and the SVG is built-up using the raphael js API.
  • The UI is all javascript driven using the animation framework in raphael

You can play with it and see the code here:

http://xenopod.net/artshow.html

Art is by Joe Peterson.

It works on the iPhone/iPad as it is fully web compliant. Much thanks to the Jquery and RaphaelJS libraries for covering me on the front. I really don’t want to bother with browser compatibility.

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