Your Personal Micro Blog(s)

Panoz AIV. Am I right?

 

Yup. From Midtown Madness 2. I didn't mention it but one of the goals was also to loosely mimic the way that game renders vehicles, but improve the overall aesthetic of it. Especially since the damage in the game has the reputation for "bird poop damage" (if you want to see that, look at LazyGameReviews video on the game)

I've been doing some testing with a 5% leeway for vertex movement (based on vertex normals) when spots of the car are fully damaged. I really like how this looks. (Of course that means the entire car will be 5% smaller when EVERYTHING is damaged but I don't think that will ever happen)

 

My leech, work,work,work. Fiddle around with Blender, Terragen and BeamNG but in general I'm a workaholic right now
and all creative intuition and motivation has been out the window since mother passed. It will be back in due time.

 

So far today, I have had:

• Project tutor meeting
• Spent 30 mins working on a game analysis
  
• Game Studies Lecture
• Mobile Computing Lecture

I have just watched 30 mins of YouTube while eating Sherbet and should probably do some more development. Which might be Android Studio, Urho3D Boids, Urho3D networking, Unity game dev, more written work or preparing for a presentation I am delivering later this week on Indie Media Gaming Communities such as Twitch and YouTube.

And maybe some BeamNG modding if I start to loose the will to live and think complex suspension engineering might be the answer. Either that or texturing the R60 [shudders].

 

The cable on my Hyper X clouds broke (for the second time) so decided instead of cutting another few inches off and re-soldering that I would just mod them to have a removable cable.

Used a stereo mount jack and aside from needing to snip off a little plastic support for the old wire it all went together like it was made to fit. Came out looking great, I'd have preferred having a round nut instead of a hexagonal one but it was the only 4 pole stereo jack I could find and I can always change the nut if I want.

Probably should have taken some pictures of the inside thinking about it, but essentially I just cut the old cable about an inch from the driver and soldered the 4 mic, ground and L/R wires to the jack, this is the one I used.




Good for at least an another 4 years

 

Yeah, School

 

It seems I'll have to start paying my mother's medical bills soon as her kidneys are going. It's possible to fix but medical services don't come cheap and she'll have to stand down from stressful activities such as, well, working. The good news is, an old family friend who's getting divorced and moving gave us a bunch of stuff to sell on eBay, and I have boxes and boxes and boxes of sports cards that someone gave my father when he was still alive and working in a landfill gatehouse. The bad news is, no one's buying the eBay stuff (except for some antenna base gaskets that cost pretty much nothing), and I still have to sort through the thousands of cards to find out what they're worth. So, I'm building an MS Access database to help keep track of all this stuff.

Assuming I won't get banned for saying this, our stock does include amplifiers for Toyota Prii so if you need one of those for some reason, I can help you get one.

 

I'm really tired. Life is busy, there is so much stuff to get done. Whether that is final year of Uni, finding some place to work after Uni, personal projects or just plain living (laundry, cleaning dishes). All combined it leaves me wanting to spend far too much time being less than productive.

Having said that, this week has been mostly ok in terms of productivity. The artefact for my final year project is more or less done, I am now switching over to doing the sciencey make people play it and gather data bit. Which is a nice change in some ways, but programming it was a fairly pleasant experience. Finding 20 IRL people to gather data from, might be a little challenging. Not to mention the impeding dissertation write up.

(the research is about level editors, so while the backend is reasonably nice [custom file parsing with meaningful error messages and suggestions, as well as a functional real time in game GUI based level editor] the graphics are super basic)

I have made some progress on a different assignment involving procedural generation. None of the "difficult" work has been done on that yet though, since generating a basic solar system in Unity isn't exactly rocket science. Either way, progress is progress I guess.


I also sat and passed an MTA exam. So I am now a Microsoft Technology Associate for software development. Which is always a nice thing to add to a CV. Unfortunately that does add the task of adding it into my CV and website, but ultimately more stuff to write about is never a bad thing.

I also got an Arduboy after seeing it on LTT. So far I have only make an arkenoid/breakout clone type game, would love to dig my teeth further into it though, its a really nice system to develop for. I added some animation stuff and a splash screen to the game a couple days ago, therefore my portfolio is gonna need updating again to match it. A public release of the game is also on the todo list.
You can see the older version of it here: https://alwyn.tech/~breakout.html

A fair bit of progress on a secret BeamNG related project was made, would love to post pictures, but don't want it to be public unless there is a good chance of it being finished. Sadly no progress for a long time on the R60, texturing isn't really my thing, and with it being my first (moderately successful) attempt at a full vehicle for BeamNG, the model doesn't really take well to the whole UV mapping thing. Which means texturing it is actually horrendous. Especially with my level of texturing talent. Which leaves me in a weird spot, because I really want to get the R60 off my todo list, but it's just not fun to do currently. So I think I might ditch the notion of doing "nice" textures and get something "good enough" on there, since it will never be done otherwise.


How is it already Friday?...

 

Well, I played a bit of Rigs of Rods, and deleted that freakin whiny high-pitched turbo sound.

 

I spent 4 hours outside in 30 degree weather trying to figure out why my truck's fog lights don't work.
Long story short: entire front end was scattered around my driveway all day and my 1/4in ratchet has gone AWOL. Had to drive to Autozone for a multimeter with the entire front end looking like this one (but I had removed the headlights too...):

As an added bonus, my intake system is rubbing against the radiator housing and has ripped a hole in the hydroshield. Great.

 

Adding a second town to my map.

 

I draw few sketches. GT3 versions of ETK K-Series and SBR4. I tried to colour it digitally but I still don't feel good with tablet.

 

I accidentally opened ancient ROBLOX Studio yesterday, and for some reason recreated Garry's Mod's tool gun in ROBLOX... I don't know why I still have ROBLOX Studio installed

 

My vehicle is currently in the shop For an oil leak repair and to probably get the FR wheel bearing hub replaced. It's making a vibrating noise like the FL hub did. So I'm currently driving my dad's '95 Explorer until I get home then my vehicle should be ready! Now I'm just doing some classwork, listening to Josh Turner, and wishing I could drive around.

 

My Dell Visor came yesterday
If you get a used one from e-Bay there's a 95% chance the "cosmetic wear" is all on the box that it came in and no dings or scratches on the headset or controllers. If you want to get into VR but don't want to go broke, check out a used Dell Visor on e-Bay for around $200 (includes shipping cost). Really a fun experience in games like Rec Room and Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand grenades. In my honest opinion it's better than the VIVE, being that it's got on-board tracking and superior resolution compared to the VIVE.

 

I joined Discord


Posting this a bit late

 

I drove a Nissan Skyline R33 GTR with twin turbos for some kind of event?
"I'm going to give it some beans here.."
"Ok"
STUTUTUPOP
"Nevermind"

 

Been pretty busy again today. Much less tired feeling though which is nice.

• Had a lecture and workshop doing Nvidia PhysX stuff.
• Backed up photo's from phone. Then also removed some from phone so I can start receiving emails again (ran out of space).
  
• Updated website page for arduboy game, now has a download link. Also created a forum post for the game on the arduboy forums so people can find it.
• Worked on the Motorbike game to polish it up a bit for testers, created new sprites. Tried to fiddle with my physics code, broke it, then reverted back to old physics code xD

[Physics bugs = Best bugs]

 

I love how General Discussion is closed AGAIN.... apparently for good this time. Maybe the Devs should ban the users responsible instead of ruining everyone's experience.

Anyway, just found out that there is a new hidden achievement for beam, anyone knows how to get it?

 

You can't get it yet.... Gotta wait for the bus