the first month

I have an early alpha version of my first project up. People are play testing it, providing great bug reports, and it is fun to iterate on the gameplay to make it more fun and more challenging. Targeting to work hard on a game state refactor over the weekend and expand my testing audience on Monday.

End of year: links and more

2023 was a rough year for goals, but I’ll get into that in my next post. Lots of big things planned for 2024 and I will blog it as it happens. For now, enjoy a few links and videos:

https://ansel.photos/en/ – Initial blog post from the author of this fork of Darktable: https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralenti/

Star Citizen game engine demo from October 2023:

Server Meshing first live demo starting at 1:15:30.

They will be going from something like the first image, to the second, enabling a truly massive multiplayer experience:

Code, Links, and more

A few interesting things:

coarse - The primary input mechanism includes a pointing device of limited accuracy
such as a finger on a touchscreen.

fine - The primary input mechanism includes an accurate pointing device, such as a mouse.
Media query for pointer accuracy

Open-source solution to deploy, scale, and operate your multiplayer game

Replicate makes it easy to run machine learning models in the cloud from your own code. You can run open-source models, or run your own public and private models.

A Star Citizen Gift Guide: Christmas 2022

Sign up using a referral link: For most of the year there is some sort of promotion where both you and the person you invite get a bonus: Currently the bonus is a ship!

Use my promo link: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/enlist?referral=STAR-VZF6-9RBT to create an account. This is free and enables you to fly during the free fly events throughout the year even if you don’t buy a game pack yet. There are two major free fly events in May and in November that usually last 10-12 days and let you fly a wide range of ships for free during the event.

When you decide to buy a game pack, head to the pledge store and add a game package ship to the cart:

Cutter, Avenger Titan, CX8 Pisces, Nomad, Cutlass, or Freelancer are great choices because you can do all sorts of missions with them. Arrow, Hornet, and 100i are good too, but don’t pick Aurora or Mustang. The other options are significantly better. I would get the Titan or Pisces as top 2 contenders for best starter ship.

Most ships can be purchased with in game currency, but if you want it in your hanger from the start you have to buy it from the pledge store. One nice thing is that you can exchange your purchases for store credits and buy something else if you get bored and want to try out a different ship between free fly events. You do needs game package ship to play, but you can upgrade that game pack to a more expensive ship if you find one you really enjoy.

Ships are sold on a rotating basis so a particular ship might not be in the pledge store, but they will all be there during the November free fly and ship sale event. The May free fly and ship sale event is military themed so while it does have a ton of ships available, it is not the full selection as it is in November.

the more things change

eudaemoniahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia

“The good composed of all goods; an ability which suffices for living well; perfection in respect of virtue; resources sufficient for a living creature.”

Aristotle says that the eudaimonic life is one of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason…

even Epicurus, who argues that the eudaimonic life is the life of pleasure, maintains that the life of pleasure coincides with the life of virtue

Eudaimonia implies a positive and divine state of being that humanity is able to strive toward and possibly reach. A literal view of eudaimonia means achieving a state of being similar to benevolent deity…

a better surface

Here are a few ideas for improving the Microsoft Surface:

Replace the custom charger with two additional modern USB ports, or one legacy USB port for backward compatibility.

Replace the custom Keyboard connection with another USB port.

Stop selling low RAM devices. Make 16GB RAM the base amount.

Pair the keyboard cover via Bluetooth.

a look into popular family history presentation formats

A look at the familysearch.org family tree view:

familysearch.org presentation of my great-grandfather’s tree with the primary focus on the branch of the past (ancestor focused) rather than the roots of the future generations after him.
A look at the code for the familysearch.org tree. The primary couple is treated as node 1, and then each generation row is presented in ascending numerical order.
Descendants of the couple, with the nodes numbered by decimals. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 are all children of the couple represented by node 1. Nodes 1.2.1-1.2.x are the children of node 1.2. Nodes 1.2.1.1-1.2.1.x are the children of 1.2.1, and so on.

Now a look at the same family on Ancestry.com in their ‘Pedigree’ view:

Ancestry.com presents the family tree information a little differently too, but also almost entirely ancestor focused.
A look at the code for Ancestry.org and how they are organizing the family nodes in their ‘pedigree view’.

Ancestry offers both a ‘Pedigree’ view and a ‘Family tree’ view, and the ‘Family Tree’ view functions relatively (pun intended) the same as the familysearch.org family tree view, but they are presenting it with every node open in both directions, which gets unwieldy fast.

Only a small part of a zoomed out view in the Family Tree view on Ancestry.com.

thoughts on Control

Here is my one sentence review:
AMAZING; WHERE IS MORE?

The key game mechanic that sets Control apart from most games these days is that it allows itself to be hard. The Board training gives you just enough info to survive. You slowly acquire more and more abilities, but it is up to you to figure out how to figure out the right combos for the right enemies. There’s no magic bullet; no one size fits all OP ability that lets you just stomp on everything just by pushing that button every single time.

I’d been flying spaceships in Star Citizen for too long and Control reminded me of everything that I really enjoyed about the ghost of gaming past.