Get back on the up hill slope
John B is starting The Saints of Salvation, which i finished a couple weeks ago. Very interested to know what his review of it will be, as i have some thoughts and would love to discuss!
Blog Configuration
Posted to mastodon about the work i have done to reduce image sizes and got the most feedback ever. Which was enheartening. Next steps are going to be looking at the HTML and CSS and all that, trying to simplify it. Ideally to make it "readable" just as text. I'm not sure that is a realistic goal, considering how many links i use. Even in my markdown "raw" file the links are kind of horrible to read. I could do the reference thing, rather then in-line, which would help, i guess. But only with the raw file, the HTML will still have all those anchor tags and their hrefs in-line.
I do like looking at the server logs, and seeing what all the bots are requesting. Most are, i assume, looking for easy server exploits, of commonly run scripts or packages. Amazing that there is so much action going on that you just never see.
And like that, another appears
In a bit of coincidental timing, Plurrrr points to an article about the mythical "fast" web page, which is kinda what i was thinking about yesterday with the 250kb Club stuff. I want to be showing photos here. I could do more to optimize those photos, make them more space efficient. And i guess i'm less worried about size and weight then i am about bigger costs? The cost of electricity to move all those bytes. For folks on low-bandwidth devices or just less access to data... I didn't use to care about any of this stuff, but from hundred rabbits, SolarPunk and LowTech Magazine i've been thinking about it more. I am the one with free time and resources to make my shit better, i should not be pushing that off onto others to deal with. For instance, could have low res or highly optimized versions of the images for the posts, but then high res versions behind a link. Simple.
Blog Configuration
So, wired up the use of sips to resample the width of all incoming images down to 800 pixels, and then used ImageMagick and Mogrify to bake in rotation and strip out all metadata.
mogrify -auto-orient -strip <file>
sips --resampleWidth 800 <file>
I've also got the click-to-see-original-image thing working too.
Feels better having done that. A virtual weight off my shoulders... All those Bytes, now freed!
Working in the Covid Mines, going down down down
Have been learning, for the uncountable time, that games actually want to be highly integrated. Having things call other things directly is not automatically a bad idea. Using events as weak RPCs is worse then direct calls. Anyway, this all to say that our project is coming along, i've got a bunch of the "meta" gameplay stuff working again, after a big refactor to clean up months of technical debt. Feels good!
One thing that i am proud of is how we have been "upgrading" old save files to whatever the latest format is. This to ensure that it is rock-solid so when we release and need to upgrade save files, we can be sure that it is going to work and not break everything.
MMO for me? For u?
Did the tutorial to Albion the MMOG. Pretty fun actually, although in reading about it, and thinking about the impact you can have on the environment, i'm not really sure i'm that interested in spending time there? I still prefer the classic Minecraft style of world-interactions? Being able to gather, and craft and build however i want, within the games limitations, is pretty great. I would like a more MMOGy style game, but using the Minecraft engine? I am pretty sure there are mods for it that might bring it closer to that? I should check...
Blog Configuration
Also now looking at the Web Bloat Score Calculator and seeing what i can do to improve the site. The biggest things are, of course, the photos. I have 1 javascript library, and it is like 9k, for the source-code highlighting. So, photos are it. I'm not sure i want to reduce the photo size, i like having the high quality images there... I guess i will never be part of the 250kb Club. sigh
Cold in the office
Oh, just got my Random FUN Generator pdf from SJG. Excited to read through it and try some of these out!! Of course i am now also looking for fun and interesting looking dice... Wonder if Dispel Dice will ever be open to just D6s...
OMG Candy
ZeroMQ
Reading through the zeroMQ book and now i want to do a distributed application! So sad that i just have to stick with multiplayer network games.
Experiments
Did some work on a 2d car physics project over the weekend. The classic Car Physics for Games (archived it locally) article is the basis for this work. Got the weight transfer stuff working for acceleration and decelerations. Then on to turning, and tire slip and rotational velocity. I think i have most of this working in my head. I am still interested in a model which is expressly not a "realistic" simulation, as we know that, for the non-diving-simulation kinds of games we want to make, players actually want a much more arcade-y feel driving experience. Tuning that feel is the tricky part. And that is what i want this car controller to make "easy". I have a much greater understanding of car physics then i did when we made AutoAge, and also what makes for good car driving feel. So hopefully, i can make a component which allows for easier tuning of those "feel" parameters. It is an ongoing process.
Other Stuff
Got the holiday-cheer lights up, tracked down and acquired a tree for the house. Culture has its way, and i do feel better seeing all the lights on the houses in the darkness which comes so early these days.
Also learned about wget and using it to download a copy of a site or url.
wget -r --no-parent http://site.com/songs/
via HowToGeek.