Have I mentioned that we adopted two Siberian kittens? So we have:



[More pictures past the link.]

Well, perhaps Ai-chan may have mentioned it now and then. The black one is Wolfram (pronounced "tungsten") and the tabby is Catmium.

Anyway, I'll probably take more pictures when I get some better light than we've had the last couple of days.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/6375.html ]

So, broke down and got the Nissan 370Z I'd wanted for some time. Ai-chan isn't particularly happy about the spending, but is somewhat mollified that I got the touring edition with heated seats (been so warm that it's not useful right now, but she's all for it in principle). And with the new job, we can afford it. It does mean that Domo-kun (the XTerra) is going to be relegated to the street -- only room for two cars in the garage. I couldn't ask Ai-chan to park the Fit on the street since she's the only one really driving these days anyway. Besides, I had to give on some things to get her to buy off on it in the first place.

No pictures yet -- they're doing final detailing and we'll be picking it up tomorrow (I forgot to take anything at the dealer). Plus busy setting up a new desk for the new equipment for the new job.

Also, did a Messier marathon last weekend before I went to Seattle to start the new job; I should do a post on that, maybe in a day or two.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/6019.html ]

So, long time, no update. I suppose stuff's been going on, I just haven't been connected to this journal thing in a while. Not sure that this will become any sort of habit, though -- we'll see.

At any rate, I suppose one piece of big news is that I'm diving back into astronomy, and it all started when I picked up a used TeleVue NP-101 from an old acquaintance who was selling it (since he had a couple of larger refractors and didn't really use it anymore). Since this was the large(-ish) refractor I lusted after back in the day, I couldn't really resist (I had a 70mm TeleVue Pronto back then, which is about half the size at about the same focal length -- this is about as large a refractor as I'd want to deal with, for larger apertures I prefer other telescope designs). And so, now I have a scope again.

Well, a scope needs a mount, and I really want to stick it on a Losmandy GM-8. Unfortunately, they're somewhat backordered, so I'll have to wait a couple of months for mine to arrive, and in the meantime I'm making due with a borrowed alt-az (which works okay, but really isn't the same, especially if you want to put power on something, what without the tracking and the slight shakiness when you focus).

I also got some other stuff to make it useful -- I'd had a few books and supplies, but was missing a few key items like, say, eyepieces. So I got a cheap Celestron set (for the filters and such as much as the eyepieces, honestly -- the eyepieces themselves will make good star party eyepieces someday, maybe), and now a couple of "real" eyepieces, namely a 22mm Nagler and a 7mm Pentax XW. They make a decent pair, but eventually I plan to get a few more (the current plan is to get a 9mm Baader Orthoscopic, a 12mm Nagler, a 5mm Takahashi LE, and -- maybe -- a 2.8mm Takahashi LE someday, as well as a 41mm Panoptic whenever I get a telescope with a longer focal length than the NP-101. And, of course, every single one of these cost significantly more than the entire Celestron kit which combined contains five eyepieces and a bunch of other stuff). At some point I'd like to replace my Celestron C11 Schmidt-Cassegrain, maybe even get a medium-sized Maksutov-Cassegrain for planets and such, but for now, this is what I'm using.

Anyway, the big near-term thing I want to gear up for is the Messier Marathon, usually best done in March or so. (Farther down the road is the annular solar eclipse in May, and the Venus transit in June.) I've done it before with both a 4.5" Newtonian (the first scope I owned in Colorado) and my old 70mm Pronto (the Newtonian was about perfect -- the NP-101 should be as well -- but the Pronto was just a tad on the small side). So, both as a bit of practice and also because it was clear and I wanted to get some observing in, I did a mini-Marathon run today (a Messier 5k?), and I'm sure everyone is still reading and wants to know how it went... And so I'll tell you.

M74 -- the first failure of the night was the very first object, which I just couldn't pull out of the light pollution to the east, even after coming back to it and trying it a few times.
M77 -- no problem.
M31 -- extremely bright, so easy, although all you could really see was the core.
M110 -- the companion galaxies, on the other hand, were a complete bust, couldn't see them at all.
M32 -- see M110.
M33 -- no dice, it can be hard to pick out under dark skies, with this much light pollution it was hopeless.
M34 -- no problem finding this.
M76 -- couldn't find it. It's not a good sign when you can't even pick out the guide stars in the light pollution.
M79 -- couldn't see it. Pretty sure I was looking right at it, too.
M42 -- easy target, even pulled out the OIII filters and spent some time on it.
M43 -- on the other hand, couldn't see this part.
M78 -- no problem -- I was actually surprised I could see this one.
M50 -- I don't think I found this one; it was just too low (trees in the back yard, plus light pollution).
M47 -- I'm pretty sure I found this one when I was looking for M50 (it was almost impossible to see the guide stars).
M46 -- no dice.
M41, M93 -- didn't even bother, down behind a tree.
M52, M103 -- didn't bother, hard to see over the house.
M1 -- found it, was a little surprised I could see this one, too.
M45 -- easy under any conditions, so yes.

...At this point, I decided it was too cold (about 30ºF -- more to the point, the light wind was a tad annoying) and kinda gave up. I'd already seen the next objects anyway (M36, M37, and M38). I did take a look at M44 just because I hadn't through this scope yet (some of the other object above were repeats). So, managed to nab nine objects (out of 110-ish), failed to spot another nine, didn't bother with the rest. I might go back out later and look at some other stuff, but I'll probably just get up in the wee hours and look at Saturn or something instead.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/5683.html ]

So, it's been a couple weeks since I've posted anything here -- I've been kind of worn out by back-to-back conventions (one for fun, one for work) and haven't had a lot of extra energy for working on the game. However, today, I have a new screenshot to show. And so, since last time:

- Finished the ship design tab.

- Redid the scrollbars on the other pages after deciding that the default scrollbars just didn't work. I would have left them alone except for one thing -- I resize my content to fill the remaining available space when the scrollbars appear, and doing that led to various minor rendering issues, but the real deal-breaker was on the ship design page where not only did the scrollbar take up an awful lot of space on the component and hull views -- slightly annoying, but not the actual deal-breaker -- but it got into a nasty infinite expand-contract loop when the squeezed content was small enough not to need a scrollbar but the unsqueezed content needed one. Bleah. So I just finally took the damn thing out and implemented my own.

- Did a bunch of graphics for technologies and modules and such -- still have a few to go, but all the ones I needed for the ship design page (plus a bunch of others for other technologies) are done.

Anyway, your moment of screenshot -- have a big, complicated ship design tab (this just scratches the surface of it):



[Click through for full size.]

And, bonus Ascension Theory technology image:



Onward to the fleet tab, probably.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/5607.html ]

Long weekend. So, since last time:

- Added a planetary display (that was pretty quick and easy -- mostly copied the code from the system display on the galaxy tab).

- Redid the buttons. I wasn't happy with the contrast (it was nearly impossible to see if a button was selected or not). Unfortunately, you can't just change the button colors, you need to replace them with a completely different type of button. I'm still not happy with them, really, but creating my own buttons would be a real pain, and they're good enough for now).

- Added the option to play various races on startup.

- Spent a good chunk of the weekend making logos for all the races.

- Added a diplomacy display, which was really what those logos were for in the first place. Also went back and added them to the planetary and galaxy displays (see screenshots for what I did). Again, another page which was largely a copy of a previous page (although this time, copied the layout instead of the content).

- Redid the research page a bit so it better matches the color and layouts used elsewhere.

So, screenshots:

Planets:



Aliens:



[Click through both for larger images.]

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/5132.html ]

Not really that much since the last update Saturday morning, mostly I just have a few screenshots people might find interesting. But... What I did do:

- Created a number of "special" systems, including the home systems of a number of alien races.

- Changed some of the art around, namely the switched the black hole art (from system to galaxy display and vice-versa), and added art for the neutron star systems. And a few special planets.

- Created first-pass alien races, along the way finishing off a number of special star systems (some are more random than others, though).

- Updated the planetary display, colors, population, etc.

- Optimized galaxy creation a bit (it's still kind of slow).

So... Screenshots. First, our home system here:



[Click through all the images for full size.]

A black hole:



A neutron star:



One of these names is not like the others:



Anyway, kinda fooling around with races and names at the moment.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/4967.html ]

Since our last episode:

- Added a background galaxy to the galaxy display. It actually took quite a bit more work than you'd think; I had to figure out how to draw parts of the stars transparently, and part opaque, which required figuring out the Cocoa drawing methods and making additional masks and such of the star images. But... I did manage to get the effect I was looking for, with the galaxy fading out as you zoom in, and more prominent zoomed all the way out. I also changed the overall galaxy shape and creation process to match.

- Did some optimization to speed up scrolling and zooming, i.e., fixed off-screen rendering (i.e., so it doesn't happen) and added a bunch of smaller versions of all the images so it can draw things faster when zoomed out -- I might do a little more work there, it's responsive, but it's still not nearly smooth enough to make me happy. Instead of enforcing scrolling so you can't go off the map, I let you do whatever you want, so added a center button if you managed to get lost off the edge, or just want to zoom out more quickly so you can go somewhere else.

- Changed the look of the screens so that they're more uniform (mainly the tech screen). I also changed the buttons so they look better on black (which ended up giving them kind of a "Star Trek" feel which I like). I also integrated debug into the existing screens and removed the dedicated debug screens (basically, you can toggle on debug to make everything visible instead of just what would normally be visible).

- Added a system screen that shows, well, the planetary systems. Added more controls to handle that, as well as planetary information with colors based on habitability. I also upped the minimum size a bit so that was more readable.

- Added a startup screen, with options to set the galaxy size and research rates.

- Went through all the existing code and refactored out a huge number of NSNumbers I don't really need (replacing them with floats and ints).

So... Some screen shots. This time, full-sized screens (full-sized on my huge screen, I mean), starting with the galaxy display as it was a few days ago:



[Click through for full-sized (also below).]

And the system display as of a couple of hours ago (still fiddling with it right now, none of this stands still):



...And onward we go...

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/4700.html ]

So, some decent progress this week/weekend.

- Worked on some basic technology descriptions for the tech tab. Didn't quite finish -- it's kind of mind-numbing to come up with interesting copy for everything. It's even more mind-numbing to come up with non-interesting copy for everything, but at least it's quicker.

- Worked a little bit on the graphics for the tech screen, too, but didn't get very far there, either, just redid a couple things. Really need to spend some quality time there at some point.

- Added a galactic display, figured out how to render it properly (aha, NSImage, not NSImageView. Now I can draw lines over everything), added labels and controls for the labels and generally made it pretty-fied, and then threw in zooming and panning.

...Actually, damn, that looks pretty good.

Here's an early-game view:



[Click through for full size (also below).]

And a later game view:



And you know what, it looks really nice on the big screen:



It can probably handle some decent-sized galaxies on the big screen.

Next up: navigation to and from the system display (next weekend when I can concentrate on it) and images and stuff for the tech screen (which can be more of a catch-as-catch-can evening activity).

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/4440.html ]

A fair bit of stuff this weekend:

- Added a status bar. (Ooh. Aah. Cue applause.) There's a (now working) "next turn" button there, although the status itself isn't actually hooked up to anything yet.

- Started on the player code. I started with tech handling -- the "next turn" button now lets you advance through the tech tree, although the amount of progress per turn is currently hard-coded.

- Build a player tech page, where you can watch your progress while you advance through that same tech tree (I'm probably not going to make a whole lot of changes to it, I'm fairly happy with it in its current state):



[Click through for larger size.]

- Started adding descriptions (as well as text for technology benefits that aren't directly tied to, say, specific ship modules or planetary improvements and such). I'll probably spend the bulk of my time over the next week or two working on that (and graphics for the techs and such -- right now, I just have the a "default" image, which you can see above. Yay, generic sphere).

- Here, have an unexplored star:



[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/4302.html ]

So, things have progressed slowly since my last update. I went from insomniac (read: tired but rather productive) to insomniac and exhausted (read: utterly unproductive) to now (read: um, signs cloudy, ask again later). But, in the last few weeks:

- Created the tech tree. For that, I broke down and got Omnigraffle -- although I (pretty much) had the rough outlines of it worked out ahead of time, it's still pretty complicated and I needed better visualization tools to really get it organized (and I do still tweak it from time to time, but it's mostly done):



[Click through for larger size.]

- Implemented the tech tree. For that, I'm using ruby to generate the XML/plists. It's much easier than editing the plists in Xcode, and if I need to change things, I can make quick changes to the Ruby and regenerate as needed. I also wrote a lot of code to validate the tech tree on load.

- Created a tech tree debug screen:



[Click through for larger size.]

- Moved all the star names to plists (again, hello ruby-generated XML). I'm probably not done there; want to add some more names and generally clean the names up -- for one thing, I'm fairly certain there are some duplicate names in there.

- Created the ship module definitions. Also, wrote code to link them to techs properly and validate them on load.

Anyway, from here I'm probably going to work on the user tech interface, which also means I'll have to start on some of the core user code.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/3958.html ]

So, since the last update:

- Created the galaxy, i.e., figured out how the stars are going to be generated and laid out (mostly this was a matter of implementing what I'd decided to do several weeks ago, and tweaking it to make it work better). I'm envisioning various galaxy sizes from 25 to 100 stars (with up to six planets each -- this turned into seven once I actually started making the systems). This could easily change, though.

- Came up with some names for stars, neutron stars, and the central black hole. I did this the stupid way, though, and need to refactor it now that I know better (it's kind of hard-coded, needs to move to a plist). So I'll need to clean that up at some point.

- Created a debug panel for the galaxy layout, with star information tooltips (nothing fancy, the actual user navigation screen should be a lot slicker). Have a small galaxy:



[Click through for larger size.]

- Generated all the planets and planetary parameters; again, this was mostly implementing something I'd worked out a few weeks ago (lack of sleep has made me surprisingly productive here, since when I couldn't sleep, I'd noodle with things. Although, at times, it's also made it impossible to do much of anything, too, when I've been too exhausted). Although I did end up tweaking it an awful lot, since one I had it running, I could figure out how many of what types of planet were being generated a lot more accurately. There may be a lot more tweaking in the future, as well.

- Added more planet pictures (now that the planet frequencies were better defined), now have a total of 57. Also split the gas giant class into inner and outer gas giants with different art.

- Created a debug panel for the star systems, so I could see what they looked like (in terms of parameters, I mean, I know what the pictures look like, and again, the game navigation screens should be slicker. Among other things, the planets would be rendered at different sizes). Here are a few systems:



[Click through for larger size.]

Next up, the tech tree.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/3652.html ]

So, the last week-plus I've been working on the game off and on, I think I'm actually past my first trac milestone, need to update that at some point. Everthing's pretty much in place and going now, so a (quick-ish) progress report is in order.

- More or less finished the Cocoa/Xcode development book I was reading (I haven't read the stuff on dealing with dispatch queues or anything, but I was tired of reading instead of coding and I've already covered the critical stuff. This project probably won't be compute-intensive enough to use those, anyway).

- Built the interface framework in Xcode, started on galaxy/system/planet generation code; in parallel I'm working on the debug interface. I figure I'll do my first serious interface there, so by the time I get to the user stuff it'll be a bit more polished (mostly on the code side; polished interfaces are easy to build in the Xcode Interface Builder).

- Took a break and created some art for the galaxy/system/planet views. Have thumbnails:

- Stars:



- Planets:



That's one star per spectral type, plus neutron stars and black holes. There are also ten classes (so far) of planets (categorized by atmosphere) but I did up several versions of each class for visual variety (at least two per class, more for common or interesting classes). Three of the classes are invented; the rest exist in the solar system (you might recognize some). I could do more easily if things felt too repetitive; all the planets and stars are Lightwave3D objects or scenes and easy to regenerate or modify.

And that's pretty much it so far.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/3444.html ]

For no apparent reason, I've decided to write a game. Possibly because I've gotten tired of playing them for now. Possibly because I had the urge to play the kind of 4X space game nobody really makes anymore, or if they do, aren't quite the sort of game I want to play.

So, I grabbed Xcode 4. Because, well, despite spending several years developing on Windows, I really hated it as a development environment. And I don't currently have a Linux box. And (apart from actually playing games, for which I have a dedicated Windows box) I spend most of my time in OS X (both at home, and at work where we mostly use Macs for development). I also installed trac. And subversion. And got a book on Cocoa programming with Objective-C and Xcode. Having gotten started, it actually seems to be a pretty nice framework to work with -- I like it so far (getting trac and subversion working... Well, that was more of an ordeal). Although, if I have any illusions of being able to port this later, I'd be better off with a C++ model layer. I guess I'll have to think about that.

Whether I'll stick with this game writing thing... I don't know. I've never finished a project this large (although I did get pretty far with the whole Japanese drill tools thing before I decided to just use Anki -- I don't know how many hours I actually put into that, but a lot. Almost certainly thousands). But then, I've never been this organized, either -- I mean, with a ticket tracking system and revision control and everything. Keeping game concepts organized in tickets might actually work.

I guess we'll see.

In the meantime, I'm totally using this as my temporary logo.

Anyway, while I was at it, I installed rvm, git, emacs, ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3.0 -- I figured I could use some of the same tools I'm using for the game to work on CalTrackr (especially trac -- I created a bunch of tickets instead of the old "notes in a text file" method I was using before. What I haven't decided -- yet -- is whether or not I'll switch from git to subversion there). Besides, I wanted to move all that off my old Windows box -- I don't use that box for much anymore, and it's getting due for retirement. I've already made some fixes/enhancements, but as of this writing, I haven't rolled any of the changes out, but I will when I finish things up at some point -- there's one date-related bug that will be much easier to fix at the beginning of next month.

But, back to the game thing, I'm finding that the hardest part is actually coming up with a decent name. The art and stuff I feel like I can handle myself -- I'm not going for fancy, I'm going for clean.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/3251.html ]

Lousy refereeing. Really lousy refereeing... Game-changing lousy. At least it ended up making the game interesting and not worse.

And I have trouble respecting Brazil's women's team after that performance. But then, Brazil's men's team never got by on teamwork, either, they've always done it with individual skill and flair. But really... Not classy.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/3006.html ]

...I love you. But how the hell did you miss that goal?

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/2659.html ]

Had a houseguest in town from Japan, so we went up into the mountains. Fortunately for them, they came the first nice weekend we'd had in a while (May was extra-rainy). Unfortunately, they hadn't finished opening Trail Ridge Road (the high road) in Rocky Mountain National Park yet. Fortunately, they'd opened all the good bits up to the Alpine Visitor Center (the rest is anti-climax, honestly). Unfortunately, the visitor center was closed. Fortunately, the main visitor center at the entrance was open -- as was the road up to Mt. Evans, which we also visited.

It was really, really cold and windy up on top of Mt. Evans, though, so we didn't make it the last few feet to the top. Rocky Mountain National Park wasn't so bad, though.

The biggest unfortunate thing, though, was the Arizona wildfire smoke which made the skies hazy and gray, and distant mountains brown or invisible. That was very sad.

Anyway, Summit Lake:



[Click through for the set.]

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/2511.html ]

...You've managed to make the constant Russian spam even more annoying.

(Pre-Irony alert -- I bet this entry gets plenty of Russian spam, too)

...They're out.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/2227.html ]

Regionals have started. Baylor up today.

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/1896.html ]

After some trials and tribulations (including upgrading to LW10), I finally got a new version of Bad Egg finished. This one (unlike Game) I think is a clear improvement over the old one -- I actually tried to do something even more ambitious, that is, replace the yellow egg with a yellow-ish crystal egg, but the result wasn't really that good. Anyway, old one on the left, new one on the right:

 

[Click through for larger versions.]

The difference in speed here is obvious and astonishing -- half an hour versus forty-two, and that tells only part of the story because I also turned the quality way up, rendered at 16 times the resolution, and threw in depth of field to boot which is probably would have added another 20 times to the render time to the old version, minimum. Part of this is the 100+ times speedup in CPU, part of it is far better algorithms (add another 20 times speedup, maybe), but... My guess is that (if it didn't run out of memory and explode) the old machine would have taken north of a month to render what the new machine rendered in half an hour.

Stats for the original (render time 42:01:13 at 1280x960):

6 objects
77020 points
74322 polygons
0 lights
7 surfaces
0 image maps

Stats for the new version (render time 0:30:04 at 5120x3840):

48 objects
263589 points
266951 polygons
7 surfaces
0 lights
0 image maps

Yes, zero lights -- both images were done entirely with radiosity using a luminous surface instead as an indirect light source. Also, I guess the old version of LW only counted distinct objects -- both scenese have the same number of those (although the new one definitely has more instances of the objects).

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/1707.html ]