A few products that made my summer family travels happier:
Photive 6 port Desktop USB Charger.
Anker 4-port USB car cigaret lighter charger.
Car vent phone holder (don’t remember the brand.)
Short stereo audio cable. It’s ghetto compared to bluetooth, but more reliable.
As summer draws to a close, I am planning my family’s computer use for the 2015-2016 school year.
My plans for this year are:
Note the lack of a dedicated game console. The kids play games on mobile, tablets, and laptops (for Minecraft specifically!).
My two youngest kids are getting their first phones this year. I’m worried about their phones getting lost, broken, or stolen. So for the first six months my kids will use hand-me-down phones. After they’ve learned to take care of phones, I’m going to give them better phones. (Still used, though!)
To achieve my plan I need to buy one laptop and three mobile phones. For the laptop I’m leaning towards a 13” Retina Macbook Pro. For the phones I’m leaning towards used iPhone 5Ss.
Why a Macbook and not a Chromebook? Build quality and applications. I have a low-end ARM Chromebook, and I noticed that nobody in the family uses it by choice, due to its low speed and poor quality screen. I could get a Chromebook Pixel, but for my family, at that price level a Macbook is a better deal.
Why iOS and not Android? It comes down to ease-of-administration. I want to lock down my kids’ phones, and unfortunately experience with my oldest child using Android is that it’s all-too-easy for him to defeat the aftermarket Android parental control apps.
For phone service I’m probably going to go with the BYOD T-Mobile Family Plan, because:
If I were on a tighter budget, or starting from scratch, I’d consider dropping the laptops, the Comcast Internet, and the home WiFi, and going pure mobile. I would get bluetooth keyboards to make typing school assignments easier.
Story of my hobby hacking life these days:
This happened to me last week with the concept of a “comic book reader”. I wrote a prototype that let me browse my collection. I was starting to list out all the features I needed to add (zooming, panning, sorting,RAR archive support…). And then I did a web search for comic book reader, spent a couple of minutes reading reviews, and bought one of the popular ones for $2. Sure it’s got UI issues, and bugs, and doesn’t quite work like it should, but I saved myself weeks of development time.
I need to think through how best to spend my hacking time in today’s world of super abundance. What’s my comparative advantage in this new world? What’s my compliment? What am I trying to learn, trying to achieve? What is worth working on? Existential questions on a Sunday morning. :-)
Pixar released their Non Commercial version of Renderman. Woo! Hurray for patent expiration dates!
If you don’t have Maya and you do have Mac and you just want to play with the command-line version, you have to jump through several hoops:
You need to install XQuartz before trying to install Renderman. (Otherwise the Renderman installer will fail.)
You need to copy /Applications/Pixar/RenderManProServer-19.0/etc/rendermn.ini to ~/.rendermn.ini (Note the added “.” in the front.)
You need to edit .rendermn.ini to add the line
/licenseserver ${RMANTREE}/../pixar.license
You need to add these lines to your bashrc (or equivalent, depending on your shell.)
(Found on https://www.fxphd.com/kbslug/renderman/)
export RMANTREE=/Applications/Pixar/RenderManProServer-19.0/
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/Pixar/RenderManProServer-19.0/lib/
export RMANFB=it
export export
PATH=$PATH:$RMANTREE/bin:$RMSTREE/bin/it.app/Contents/MacOS:$RMSTREE/bin/slim.app/Contents/MacOS
Once you’ve done that, you can use the “prman” command line tool to render rib files.
I am shutting down “Terminal Emulator for Android” development again.
Why am I doing this?
What this means:
What you should do:
As seen on Hacker News:
Hacker News Comment by dmbaggett
Maybe Andy forgot to mention it; it’s been a while since I’ve read the whole series.
The code was C and lisp so it didn’t really require any effort to port other than replacing the rendering pipeline. And we used the SGIs to pre-render every frame anyway, to precompute the polygon sort order. (The PS1 had no Z-buffer, so you were stuck sorting polygons at run-time if you didn’t do something clever.)
So we already had the rendering pipeline ported. Obviously you couldn’t save your game to the memory card, etc. – some stuff didn’t work. But the game was playable (albeit very frustrating with keyboard controls).
Some day I will write this up for real, but without going into detail, here’s a summary.
The camera in Crash was on a rail. It could rotate left, right, up, and down (in Crash 2 and beyond, at least), but could not translate except by moving forward/backward on the rail. This motivates a key insight: if you’re only rotating the camera, the sort order of the polygons in the scene cannot change.
This allowed us to sample points on the rail and render the frame at each sample point ahead of time, as a batch job, on the SGI using a Z-buffer. (We may have done the Z-buffer with software; I don’t remember.) Then we could recover the polygon order of each frame by looking at the Z-buffer. And, even better, at run-time we could simply not render at all those polygons that weren’t ultimately visible in the pre-rendered scene. This solved both the sorting and clipping problem nicely, and made the look of the game closer to 3K polygons/frame vs. the 1K polygons we were actually rendering in real time. (Many polygons were occluded by other polygons.)
The trick, though, was what exactly to do with this sort/occlusion information. In a nutshell, what I did was write a custom delta-compression algorithm tailored to the purpose of maintaining the sorted polygon list from frame to frame, in R3000 assembly language. Miraculously, this ended up being quite feasible because the delta between frames was in practice very small – a hundred bytes or so was typical. And if a transition was too heavyweight (i.e., the delta was too big) we’d either sample more finely in that area or tell the artists to take stuff out. :)
One thing nobody talks about but which is obvious in retrospect is that without a Z-buffer you’re pretty screwed: sorting polygons is not O(N lg N) – it’s O(N^2). This is because polygons don’t obey the transitivity property, because you can have cyclic overlap. (I.e., A > B and B > C does not imply A > C). This is why virtually every game from that era has flickery polygons – they were using bucket sorting, which has the advantage of being linear time complexity, but the disadvantage of being wrong, and producing this flickery effect as polygons jump from bucket to bucket between frames.
I’ll leave the matter of weaving the foreground characters – Crash himself and the other creatures – into the pre-sorted background for another day.
Here’s how I did it. I hope you find it useful!
Do these steps once, to initialize Boot2Docker:
Step 1: Install Docker for OS X
Step 2: Create a directory to hold your Minecraft files. This needs to be under the /Users part of your file system because boot2docker automatically mounts /Users to the boot2docker-vm.
mkdir /Users/yourname/minecraft/data
Step 3: Initialize boot2docker
boot2docker init
Step 4: Forward the TCP port Minecraft uses from the Mac to the boot2docker-vm.
VBoxManage modifyvm “boot2docker-vm” –natpf1 “tcp-port25565,tcp,,25565,,25565”;
Do these steps every time you want to start your Minecraft server.
Step 1: Start boot2docker.
boot2docker start
Step 2: Set up the shell variables so you can use the docker command.
$(boot2docker shellinit)
Step 3: Run the minecraft container.
CONTAINER=$(docker run -v /Users/yourname/minecraft/data:/data -d -e EULA=TRUE -e VERSION=LATEST -p 25565:25565 itzg/minecraft-server)
The first time your run this it will take a few minutes to download and install minecraft. After that it should be much faster
docker logs $CONTAINER
This prints out the logs from the container (you set the CONTAINER variable as part of the docker run command above.)
If you’ve lost track of your container, you can list all currently running containers.
docker ps
If you don’t see any containers, you container may have already exited. The Minecraft server will exit if it encounters an error while running.
You can shut down all running containers and quit boot2Docker by using the stop command:
boot2docker stop
Note that the Minecraft Server files will be stored in /Users/yourname/minecraft/data, and when you’ve stopped the server you can edit the files using your mac. (You might want to edit the files in order to modify the server settings.)
I’ve been reading the book Masters of Doom about the careers of John Carmack and John Romero. I have ported their games Doom and Quake to many different platforms. It was interesting to read about their lives and game business.
The book brought back memories of development in the ‘80’s, and ’90s. Things were simpler (and worse) then.
Some other John & John links:
I’ve long-since misplaced the source code to my Atari 800 game Dandy Dungeon. But thanks to the Atari800MacX emulator and the emulation scene, I’ve been able to play an emulated version of my original game. That’s been helpful for remembering all the little details of gameplay.
For example, I was able to determine that the original game animated the arrows at 15 Hz and the players and monsters at 7.5 Hz.
FWIW I think the emulator may be slightly incorrect about the HBLANK processing emulation. I’m pretty sure that the color background for the 4th line of text should be a different color from the color background of the 3rd line of text.
The iOS version of the game is progressing – the dual thumbstick virtual controls work well.
The next step (and it’s a big one) is going to be multiplayer support. GameKit here I come.
There are a total of 3 draw calls and 2 textures in this scene:
The whole tile map is rendered as a single draw call: a single 2-triangle tile that’s instanced Row x Column times, using a 3D texture as a texture atlas. I originally used point sprites, but switched to instanced triangles because I wanted to use non-square tiles.
The virtual joystick is rendered as two coarse triangle strip rings, using a 1D radial texture. Note the anti aliasing. (I could have used quads, but wanted to minimize overdraw.)
So far Metal has been fairly straightforward to use, at least for someone like me coming from a DirectX 9 / Xbox 360 / Android OpenGL ES 2.0 background.