Work in the morning, then off to watch Jack’s class assembly. He dressed as a ninja and spoke confidently in front of the school. Dropped Dzung at the office and worked through lunch, then into the city for a couple of interviews before meeting Matthew for a beer at Nowhereman. Then into Leederville for a six-pack of Guinness and pizza. Jack (my friend, not my son) joined us, and we chatted for hours. Showed them both HackTile. No work on it today but planning for what to do next. Home before 11pm, Dzung and the kids had roast lamb with my parents.
Gorgeous day. Set up the daybed again. Dzung took the kids to school while I got to work, coffee in hand. Busy setting up some new organizations. Break for a late morning bike ride around the river in the glorious weather, then lunched on oxtail soup outside in the sunshine.
Eliza cooked beef cheesburger sliders with sweet potato fries and aoli for dinner. Was very tasty! She did a good job peeling five sweet potatoes, then chopping them up with the sharp Japanese knife.
Bit of work on HackTile after dinner. Multiple game controllers working to control multiple cameras, switch palettes, adjust update rate and so on. This thing is starting to take shape!
Next thing will be to replace flat colours with animating sprites. That’ll probably take me a while. Once that’s done some refactoring and optimisation will be called for (especially for the debug font, which badly impacts the frame rate, as can be seen in the screenshot).
Woke up very tired, after staying up late to watch Nintendo at E3. In fact, Dzung and I both overslept, so it was a mad rush to get the kids to school on time, and I missed a scheduled work meeting.
Worked throughout the day getting four new customers set up, but hit a roadblock with some third-party services, so switched to some HackTile work. Finished implementing the debug menu, and then added a feature to allow the palette to be swapped, hard-wiring 9 of the best sixteen-colour palettes I could find. Hooked these up to the input system, adding inputs to allow the update rate of the engine to be modified too, in addition to a pause mode.
Dzung out at the movies tonight, so I made pizza with the kids, and we watched some E3 videos on YouTube. Very cold, so have the heat on, and have taken to wearing Jack’s Harry Potter beanie. Will end the night sipping on a cuppa while watching The West Wing, waiting for Dzung to come home. Don’t want another late one.
Early-morning meeting with Mark. Kids off to school, and I then settled down to watch Trump meet Kim in Singapore, and the Sony E3 live stream. Started a new sprint and made good progress. Lunch with Wil; artichoke soup and ham and cheese toasted sandwich. Picked up the kids and off to Freo for Eva’s birthday dinner at Grill’d. A bit of HackTile upon returning; working on debug mode. Got fonts implemented and used this to draw camera information, and work-in-progress on a larger debug menu. First try getting fonts in was a bit buggy though.
Finished the night watching the Nintendo E3 live stream. Busy day!
Dzung dropped Eliza in to school, I took Jack in a bit early for school banking. Got a bit of HackTile work done first thing; laid the foundations for a debug manager and improved the multiple camera system, converting it from floating-point to integer arithmetic. Very happy with performance.
My modded UPB-X800 arrived, so I set it up during my lunch break and confirmed that my US BluRay discs worked (they did). Now all I need is a great TV!
Busy at work. Finished the current sprint, deployed to production and started planning the next round of work.
Picked up Jack and took him shopping, then got Eliza. Homework and piano practise, and then Eliza cooked dinner: lupin-crusted salmon fillets on a bed of miso and mirin sweet potato smash with mustard greens fried in garlic and ginger. Took over an hour to prepare, and that was with my assistance chopping and cleaning and so forth, but she had so much fun and was deservedly proud of the results.
Rainy day, so Eliza’s tennis lesson was cancelled. I made pancakes and we had a long, lazy breakfast instead. Then picked up Lilian from tutoring and dropped her and Jack over at Van and Kiet’s. On the way she told me about her desire to buy a bass guitar, and her mum’s long list of conditions (including teaching Joshua violin, doing her homework downstairs, doing her chores, eating Chinese food without complaining and so on).
Received a food delivery from “You Plate It” which Eliza will be cooking for our dinner tomorrow, and on Thursday. Included a ridiculous amount of fruit.
Dzung, Eliza and I went to the St. Petersberg Ballet production of Swan Lake, with principal performers from the Bolshoi Ballet. Amazing show. Afterwards we stayed in the city for drinks and snacks, then returned to Van’s for dinner. Amazed to see Lilian with a bass guitar! She’d actually gone and bought it while we were at the ballet.
Van cooked oxtail soup for the first time with excellent results. Van and Kim had gone to see the Dockers. Had a chat with Kim; she’s doing really well, and has just received her registration as a professional architect. Played with Joshua and had dessert, then home for the bedtime routine. Too tired for any further work on HackTile this weekend. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Dzung’s course was cancelled, so she took the kids to karate. I took the opportunity to do some HackTile work. Began by implementing multiple cameras, making sure to handle different aspect ratios, and to remove hardwiring of the texture size for rendering the game. Working well!
Next I introduced entity states for spawning and unspawning, and rendered these with a different colour. This requires the engine updates to synchronise with entity creation and deletion, so I introduced a new opcode allowing the engine to synchronise entities each time it updates. Also worked rather well!
The next step will be to update controls to allow the cameras to be manipulated, and to implement a nice debug manager to allow different parts of the engine to display debugging information on-screen, such as camera location, entity counts and frame rate.
Dzung making shaking beef for dinner. I also managed some time with The West Wing Weekly and Breath of the Wild; in the latter I’ve been running through as many shrines as possible, now that I’ve switched my playstyle from open-ended exploration to completing the main quests. Crazy I know (the game’s been out for well over a year), but I’m in no rush.