2018-06-23
Up early to buy brioche burger buns from Garden City before they sell out. Then
back to get the kids breakfast and take them to karate. Dzung took Eliza to buy
a viola while Jack had his lesson. Home via garbo again, this time to pick up
lunch for the kids and to get premium hamburger meat. Kids got dressed and we
went in to Supanova. Finlay had the time of his life!
Dropped Fin at mum and dad’s in the late afternoon. Stayed for a cuppa and a
some rocky road. Then in to Hayashi for a wonderful dinner (superior beef,
vegetable tempura, sous vide salmon, clam miso soup, rice, beer, lotus chips).
Back home to make lamb and barley soup for tomorrow, using leftovers from last
week’s roast. Finished reading Queen of Sorcery to Eliza, and miffed to find
that the series has been pulled from the Kindle Store. Wrote an email to PRH UK
to ask for an explanation.
Did a little bit of HackTile work; added an overlay renderer and used it to add
a transparent background to debug displays. Need to soldier on and get this UI
built out over the next week!
2018-06-22
Morning meeting. Light day at work. Went shopping at lunch time to pick up
groceries and beer, and to get the new Mario tennis game. A bit of HackTile in
the afternoon; refactoring to add two game modes that can be toggled between,
and starting to build out controls for the UI. This work will take a while.
Finlay over for a sleepover. I made tortillas. Everyone watching Hotel
Transylvania 2 while I read End of Watch. Will have an early night.
2018-06-21
Another busy day at work. Lots of HackTile design, but no programming. Plan to
introduce two states; a game state and an editor state, and toggle quickly
between them. The editor will have a fixed layout, with the entity and rules
editors implemented as pop-up dialogues. That gives me something to start with;
refactoring to support multiple states will take a bit of work, and the editor
layout can then be implemented with placeholder content, and I can then start
fleshing out just the entity editor. Should work fine. Still need to stew on it
for another day or two before I roll up my sleeves and start implementation.
Dzung made leftover curry for dinner, I cooked some lamb cutlets to pad it out.
She’s feeling sick, and there’s still a bit of meh-ness around. Forgot to put
the bins out last night; another symptom of our general malaise at the moment.
I’m going to watch an episode of The West Wing and call it a night.
2018-06-20
Bit of a meh kind of day. Eli came over early, as his mum and dad both needed to
be in the office early. He and Jack are obsessed with minerals. They examined
Jack’s rock collection enthusiastically, and were fascinated when I set up the
digital microscope for them to use. After school, Jack made “Brentwood
Geologist” membership cards for himself, Eli and Josh, which I helped him print
and laminate. Great to see them obsessing over something!
Watched the lap-a-thon in the afternoon, which Dzung volunteered at. Made
bolognaise for dinner. Sat on the sofa and watched three episodes of Seinfeld
after dinner. Don’t know why, it was just part of the overall meh-ness of the
day. I think it started when I woke up bright and early for this morning’s team
meeting and nobody showed up. Also the comedown after the intense work setting
up new customers.
Did some HackTile work; got alpha blending working for sprites. Really has a big
performance hit; barely hitting 100fps when maxing things out now. But it’s
necessary, as I want to have multiple layers. Spent some time thinking about the
sprite editor, sketching out some UI designs based on SEUCK. I think I need to
stew on this for a few days before coding anything up. I want to keep the editor
simple, so making it opinionated is key. One way of doing this is to impose
tight constraints on flexibility; limiting the exact number of entities and how
they can be used, for example.
2018-06-19
Very busy day at work struggling with builds. Not fun. Day was grey and
miserable. Jack’s lap-a-thon cancelled due to weather. Dzung made sweet and sour
fish for dinner, to use up leftover coriander and spring onion. Delicious.
Switched to a new font for debugging, and made sure the font colour changes with
the palette. And got sprites rendering from the hard-wired pixels into a texture
buffer to update with the palette too. Need to get alpha working next, then on
to a basic sprite editor so I don’t need to design these in hex digits.
Will end the night with a bit of Zelda, cheese and brandy. Time to celebrate.
2018-06-18
Grey Monday morning. Jack complaining of a sore tummy. Slow day at work
struggling with Android builds and getting new apps set up on TestFlight. Picked
up the kids and Jack made MaPu ToFu for dinner. Eliza got hit in the head with a
basketball at school but took it stoicly. Later she cried when I read her the
final chapters of The Queen of Sorcery.
Reimplemented the debug font for HackTile, using a caching library. Debug
rendering now incredibly quick, exceeding 300fps when vsync is disabled, event
when maxing out the engine. And implemented the beginnings of the sprite
manager, to the point where drawing squares of flat colour has been replaced
with blitting images from a sprite sheet. Still lots of more work to do there,
and I feel that the next step will be implementing a basic sprite editor.
Watched an episode of The West Wing at lunch. Plan to watch another before bed,
as Dzung is working and I’m not ready to hit the hay.
2018-06-17
We all had a bit of a sleep in. Late breakfast with the kids, then busy
preparing roast lamb, potatoes, carrots, beans, brussel sprouts, salad, gravy
and so on. Meat was a bit overcooked but delicious all the same. Ba raided our
kafir lime tree for the restaurant as usual. Quickly packed up then over to
Elaine’s for Mahjong with Josh, Annie and Mitzi. I worked on HackTile while Jack
played Zelda and Dzung and Eliza played Mayjong with the others. Got mouse
drawing working, and Eliza had a ball trying it out!
Amazing how much fun things are when you can interact. Had dinner at a nearby
Thai place, before taking the kids home, leaving Dzung to play with the others.
Jack and Eliza mucked around with HackTile a bit once we were home, then it was
off to bed. And I’m exhausted, so an early night with “End of Watch” for me.