despair labs

A conversation with Marc Bradshaw about a Lua puzzle I found myself in.

Not bad.

My reply to a complaint/query about why “jousting” combat doesn’t really work in Pioneer, unlike Frontier.

Pioneer is looking real nice these days :)

Sigh.

hacking shenanigans, episode 17.

Sunrise over New Hope.

Cameras can be tricky little suckers…

Space doesn’t care that its Christmas.

Something I learned today: APT policy will ignore release information from the repository if it can’t verify the repository signature.

It begins.

Computer has been getting slower and slower lately, usually disk thrashing.

A little toy for a tired evening… At startup we’re just initialising stuff and loading models and other assets.

Pretty sliders for Pioneer.

I just noticed that our new ship is engaged in fruit transport!

One of the funnest parts of writing plugin and language glue interfaces is being able to quite often name things “trampoline”.

Scenario: You like the cricket.

So today Frontier Developments started a Kickstarter campaign for the next chapter in the Elite game series: Elite: Dangerous.

You, c.3200.

We’ve got some pretty crazy collaboration going on at the moment over at Pioneer.

ZFS on Linux pretty much just works.

People are getting excited about their new UI toys :)

New info view is coming along nicely.

Starting to integrate the new UI into the rest of the game.

The long-threatened new UI for reached pull request stage this evening.

main menu, alpha 9, 18 months ago.

I don’t always get things completely wrong… … but when I do, its rarely this entertaining.

So you think you have nothing to offer your favourite open-source project because you don’t write code?

I recently started pondering what kind of throughput a well-written Perl+OpenGL program could get.

More refactoring today, this time in the starsystem generator.

A little experiment I did tonight after some discussions we had about combat and intercept mechanics.

just got new gas giant rings and they look amazing.

I use IRC a lot, both for work and personal stuff.

Finally got back into some UI work today.

It took about six hours but I finally found the problem that is making Windows builds of unusable - its a code generation bug in GCC/MinGW 4.7.0.

To determine if its doing a cross-compile, autoconf compiles a trivial test program and tries to run it.

Responding to a sigc++ signal by firing another signal.

The simplest things… Pioneer is getting a new UI.

Nine months isn’t too long between posts, right?

I’ve been learning a lot about fonts in the last week as I work on the foundations needed to turn this: into this: I’m not going into detail right now, because I could write reams and still not end up saying much - font rendering is a real dark art.

Like many games, Pioneer uses Lua for its content generation and dynamic world stuff.

Hmm, I don’t write here much anymore.

Anyone who has spent any time around me knows that I’m something of a dreamer.

I’ve recently picked up maintainer duties for Net::OpenID::Consumer and Net::OpenID::Server which have needed some love for a while.

Disclaimer: I work for Monash University, but I don’t speak for them.

Today I declared myself officially on the Google Wave bandwagon when I released a tiny Wave client called ripple.

Another little program from my toolbox.

Its kind of hilarious that out of everything I’ve done in the last couple of months this is the thing I decide to come up for air with, but its been that kind of a day.

Nothing big to report, just work plodding along, so here’s an update in pictures.

My laptop has had an interesting couple of days.