Tuesday 26 November 2013

Tuesday At Quadington

Short Day

It's very rare I allow physical discomfort to stop me coding, but for whatever reason Tuesday has been a real mare for me. Might be overwork, or just the weather, but my energy levels are barely registering.  I did however have the professional sense to make today count so I booted up and carried on regardless for a few hours.

Quad Progress

More progress made here, with each quad now having the correct UV coordinates assigned, the viewport system rendering a single object to each gap in the community texture and I have started the code to correctly align the view camera with the target object.

I am currently struggling with ensuring the view camera alignment remains unaffected, and to work out the optimum distance to place the camera from the object to encompass the whole object and match it perfectly with the quad size too.  Doing this correctly means the quad system will work from any camera, and any angle, and any quad size.

I remember my early days at school and I don't think we did advanced 3D maths at GCSE level, but I wish I did.  For what might take a modern programmer five minutes to work through the relationships between all my vectors and matrices, will take my brain a considerable amount of time, usually through trial, error and stubbornness.

Other Bits

Also managed to catch up with my emails, do this blog and start one or two plates spinning so no-one is waiting on my feedback.

Signing Off

Hopefully Wednesday I will feel better. For now, I am going to put the kettle on, watch an episode of Time Team and then get an early night.  I did not sleep a wink (that I remember) in the last 36 hours so hopefully I can drift off. The quad system is the last visual hold-up to the next update, as after this it will be clean-up and testing which requires less 3D math and more donkey.

10 comments:

  1. (It's very rare I allow physical discomfort to stop me coding, but for whatever reason Tuesday has been a real mare for me. Might be overwork, or just the weather, but my energy levels are barely registering. I did however have the professional sense to make today count so I booted up and carried on regardless for a few hours.)

    You have done a lot of work with great progress.Working,meeting,driving,working.Remember its a job.
    Thanks

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  2. Lee.. this is not your mother speaking but ...take a break, get some rest. Over doing this programming stuff will not make you any taller and or smarter. Some times the body says... ENOUGH! We can Wait

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  3. I agree,

    Not a good day myself either probably due to similar reasons. Too much work and no play and all that kind of stuff.

    I would suggest that if not before when you get the current run done and another update out to users you have a rest while they play with it.

    In the mean time try and pace yourself, take some breaks and have a guiness now and then.

    :-)

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  4. Hi Lee

    You have done most of the hardwork now. I suggest after the next performance BETA to maybe work on some more fun stuff to give yourself a break.

    When I developed ZAP for Android I told the team I was going to take 3 months out to work exclusively on performance and went through the exact same process you have to know each and every draw call in the game.

    There were a couple of really difficult things to solve on that front but sure enough after 3 months I came back and had increased our FPS from 10 to 40 with all the graphics we wanted still in there.

    After that doing the gameplay and interface programming seemed like fun in comparison! I think the key thing is to have a balance on all of this.

    Reloaded is just starting its journey and you are doing all of the right things to make it successful.

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  5. The comment below is from two blogs before by xCept, whom I give great thanks & props to for mentioning the source of those images I have shown:

    "The screenshots from littlevince104 are powered by Tesseract, which is a fork of Cube 2: Sauerbraten (https://github.com/lsalzman/tesseract) and requires you have those binaries too. A technical readme of how they render shadows is available at http://tesseract.gg/renderer.txt. The thread with the map in question is http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=121367 but the download link no longer works. You can see additional screenshots there with the final one having softer (more fuzzy) shadows dependent on the lighting."

    Thank you for your time.

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  6. Looks like you are over worked and lack of sleep has your body talking louder than your brain. Trying to do things that are impossible for me to even try to comprehend . After a good rest you will jump back in with both feet and before you know it you will be knee deep in code. Your body once again will tell your brain time to shut down , and sooo it goes . The circle of a coder.

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  7. If you're that tired, Lee, for goodness' sake take a break! I'm sure there are some people that just don't care and would even get angry, but you're no good to anyone if you're causing yourself harm with overwork.

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  8. I've been following your blog for the last couple months (once I discovered it.) You're doing a great job, Lee! I very much appreciate all the work you're doing on performance and in general for that matter. I've never been a beta user of anything before Reloaded so it's been neat seeing everything progress. And your blog has been great in letting us know what's going on. Hope you feel better!

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  9. Having spent many sleepless nights on programming projects myself, I can confirm that once you hit the 24+ hour mark with no sleep you do more harm than not by continuing without some rest. I've actually failed to complete a few projects on time specifically because I was sleep deprived--to the point where it'd take me an hour to code what would've otherwise taken five minutes because my concentration was completely shot. There were a couple times that I've gone over three days with no sleep, coding endlessly. I've since realized it is far more productive to always ensure you are well rested especially for mentally-intense exercises, deadline-driven or not. Get some rest Lee!

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  10. You can see farther on a sunny day than you can on a foggy day. Back off, chill out, regroup, and refresh. As I stated before, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will Reloaded be. Reloaded is sooo much better than X9 and I prefer you complete Reloaded before you work yourself to death. Include chill time in your schedule!

    ReplyDelete