Oct 29, 2012
I've been making excellent progress on my game. What you can see in the image below (way below) is random NPC colors, buildings, and GUI elements. The text outline isn't working like it should be, but that's not a big problem. All NPCs are animated and in this scene I'm rendering 100 at 60 FPS (it uses a lot of CPU, but it should be possible to improve greatly). The AI has been hooked up in such a way that you can talk to it. There's a bunch of stuff left to do, but I'm really enthusiastic about how far I am. I mean, all parts of the game are started. The graphics are poor, but I didn't set out to write a video game that was going to rest upon beautiful graphics. This game is special, it's going to have something that other games lack. It will be unique in so many ways, I doubt anyone will be able to say that it is yet another clone of <insert game here>. Of course I still am working my day job (and lots of hours as well), so it's bedtime instead of coding time.
Sept 17, 2012
I've been telling a few of my friends that I've been writing a game. I have an entire game engine with a tiny amount of gameplay sitting in my vault under the names "Hack Mars" and "AltSci Cell" (Cell is where this blog comes from).
Aug 16, 2012
I spent a few hours on art so I thought I might spend a few minutes writing about it and sharing it. The first one I worked on was 3D hair in Blender. A while back I learned how to use the Cycles render in Blender which makes very nice looking renders for 3D models made in Blender. My proof of concept was a beautiful bucket of water splashing on a cube. It worked [195kB]. So what could I do that would be more practical? Wet t-shirt contest? Not yet. Instead I've always wanted to render hair in real-time like the Final Fantasy series. I've had troubles even getting the look right. It turns out that Blender is quite good at rendering hair. My hair [296kB] looks a lot less awesome than their hair, but the physics and mesh is absolutely perfect. How did I make my hair? I took a plane and an icosphere. I subdivided the plane and moved the corners and middles outward. This makes a star shape. I moved the outer part of the star down and I moved the middle part of the star down a bit as well. Then I made the star (now almost hair) into a cloth with 80x friction. I turn the icosphere into a collision object and start the animation. When it looks right, I stop it and apply the cloth modifier. Then I turn it into a cloth again. Then I can animate the icosphere and the hair. Simple, no? I modified my samples to 40 so that it looks a little less grainy. Samples is a very important part of Cycles and can be found in the render tab under the Integrator section. If you set samples to 10000, it will take a long long time to render. Artists often set this fairly high for their end product.
My second piece of art I worked on tonight was a simple greyscale 2d line art
sketch with my new tablet (pen tablet, not screen tablet). The sketch which was
done entirely with pen is first.
Then I cleaned up a few things with mouse and filled in the hair and skin.
Jan 23, 2012
Some things require no explanation. Some things do. Today isn't the day for a cryptic blog post, so I'll get right to it. AltSci's SSH shell service is unavailable to most users due to an unpatched Local Root Vulnerability in the Linux Kernel. I tested it on my machine at home and it works. That will teach me to upgrade my kernel regularly. =[ The explanation of the vulnerability is incredibly good and the timing could not be much better. If you have a shell that has a new kernel, you should know about this.
I've been working diligently on a SIP softphone, BikeIM. The simplest explanation is that it is a competitor to Skype. Skype has several features that version 1.0 of BikeIM will not: a GUI, video support, a directory, SkypeIn, and SkypeOut. So without all these killer features, how do I expect to compete? Linphone, Ekiga, and Jitsi are Open Source competitors to Skype that have most or all of the features that Skype does. Many people use these tools in place of Skype. My reason for writing my own is to be able to trust the code. Instead of writing my own softphone, I could pen test or code review one or all the open source softphones, but when I found bugs, I would go through the process of writing it up, getting the developers to patch, and getting people to upgrade. That process is not as difficult as writing software, but the end result is a handful of CVEs at best. The reward for reviewing and testing open source software is good software for everyone. The reward for writing good open source software is good software for everyone. When I started writing code in July 2011, I evaluated Linphone, Pidgin, and Ekiga. Linphone and Pidgin didn't work for me, and Ekiga had issues that I could not accept (despite working quite well). It's possible that Linphone has improved, but I do not think that Pidgin or Ekiga have changed. VoIP is a strange example of Open Source innovation: multiple well-designed systems all using open protocols but with reliability that is suspect in my opinion. Asterisk is a perfect example of how an Open Source project can grow too quickly for its own good. Asterisk has had so many vulnerabilities in the past 6 years that they have become famous for their flaws. The problem with Asterisk is that the code base is increasing in size by implementing unnecessary features without proper code review and testing. This is a recipe for disaster and the size of their project should daunt even their most staunch supporters. But Open Source is not alone, closed source VoIP software works, but all have serious reliability issues. If you've ever had the stuttering effect on Skype, you know what I mean. Not only will BikeIM be reliable and Open Source, it will grow as times goes on. I plan to use it in place of a home phone and will leave it on all my systems. Version 2.0 should have a GUI for those who prefer. I hope that my work will inspire Open Source VoIP projects to increase their testing to ensure reliability and quality. Even if they can't afford professional security experts, they can appeal for help. Since my project will also be Open Source, they will have the choice of copying any improvements I make and visa-versa. That's just how we roll.
Read more »
