Long, busy day. Heaps to do at work. Skipped lunch with Wil, and cancelled
meeting with Will tomorrow. Eliza off early due to parent-teacher meetings; she
had a ball visiting her old primary school with her friends. Walked home with
both kids, just like old times (sob).
Dzung out for Chang’s birthday, after rushing home to meet with Eliza’s maths
teacher. She’s a great mum. I took the kids to the shops to buy ingredients for
Eliza to make tomorrow night’s dinner. Then picked up a huge feast of fish and
chips, which we ate while watching the beginning of “Spiderman: Homecoming”.
Still working into the evening. Will watch an episode of Handmaid soon, then
crash. No time to even think about HackTile.
Got some chores done once kids were at school. Lots of work-related chatter. Did
three or four hours over the weekend so took it easy. Feeling less sore today,
so did three circuits of the 7-minute workout while listening to a podcast.
Eggs, toast and coffee for lunch while watching an episode of The West Wing (now
that I’ve caught up on the podcasts I need to watch a few episodes again).
Thinking about rules. Lots of thought experiments, like having magnets that
repell a ball. What happens when a ball-magnet pair face each other with a gap
in-between? There are three possibilities.
- One ball wins, which blocks the other ball from moving. This isn’t ideal, because it breaks the assumption that all rules are processed in parallel. Why would one win?
- Neither ball wins (we detect there is a conflict, which causes both rules to fail). This isn’t ideal, because there’s an obvious gap for the balls to move into.
- Both rules succeed, and the two balls begin moving towards each other. But then both rules are reverted (because of the conflict) and they move back to their original position.
I like this last solution, as it yields the intuitively correct behaviour; the
balls will wobble back-and-forth. The magnets have an obvious and consistent
effect on the world, and the world rule of one entity per cell is visually not
violated. It implies rules having multiple states, and the engine updating
between rule transitions. Things like sound effects could be triggered by the
rule beginning to execute, by the rule succeeding, or by the rule being rolled
back. That should give a lot of expressiveness to the engine.
Another thought experiment is an NPC that has four rules, each telling it to
move in a different direction. In this case, only one rule can succeed, as they
are all attempting to move the entity. Essentially the movement command requires
exclusive access to the resource. It’s fairest to select one rule to win at
random, meaning NPCs will get random (brownian) movement for free. Nice.
Apart from movement, there aren’t too many commands that require exclusive
access to a resource. Really just movement and mutating a register.
Final thought experiment is back to the magnet-ball rule, where the balls are
adjacent, with another rule that adjacent balls de-spawn (in a fiery explosion),
with magnets strategically positioned to push the balls apart. What should
happen here?
- The rule to explode the balls beats the rule to move the balls, and so they explode.
- The rule to move the balls beats the rule to explode the balls. and so they move.
- Both rules fire, so the balls explode while they’re moving.
Again, this last case seems intuitively correct. The rule to explode the ball
simply de-spawns both balls (which plays an explosion animation), and triggers
an explosion sound effect. The rules to move the balls still fires, but the
entity engine can handle moving an entity while it’s de-spawning, so there’s no
conflict to rollback.
All of this comes naturally when we think of the 3x3 grid as providing context
to decide if a rule should fire, and the rule itself then issuing a series of
commands (such as move entity and so on), rather than the rule mutating the 3x3
grid (which is what the user may see when editing rules, but not what the engine
works with when executing rules).
Anyway, that’s a bit of a thesis. Hopefully things will solidify somewhat over
the next day or two so I can begin coding this up.
Jack had school photos today. I cooked bolognaise for dinner. Full from
overeating! Dzung and Jack watched Australian Ninja Warrior. Eliza practising
her viola. Just a regular Monday night.
Jack to NorthShore. Eliza and I teamed up to play “Captain Toad’s Treasure
Tracker”. Then to Van’s for lunch; Ba made steak and vegetables. Did some
shopping in the afternoon, and made vegetable soup in the Thermomix for dinner.
Still early, so Eliza cajoled us into playing Munchkin. She won, of course, but
there was no backstabbing (so it was really just a race to the finish). Watched
a few episodes of “Handmaid’s Tale” with Dzung once the kids were asleep. Again
with the lack of HackTile.
Kids to karate with Dzung. I did some housework. French onion soup and cheese on
toast for lunch. Very tired in the afternoon; napped while listening to
podcasts. Think I have a mild form of Eliza’s virus. Dzung made Ramen for
dinner, and then she went to sleep early; I watched some game design videos on
YouTube while crashing on the sofa. No HackTile at all. Waste of a day, really.
Danny Goodman! Hours of reminiscing on the sofa in the sunshine. Wil visited
too. Great to catch up. Like no time had passed. Then busy at work, and off to
mum and dad’s for a lamb roast. Very tired, to bed with a book while it rains.
Super busy at work. Got heaps done, but exhausted by the end of it. Fish for
dinner. Eliza not feeling well and upset after a visit to the allergy doctor and
finding out she cannot select drama in year 8, as she’s already a music
student. Must find something she can do outside of school. Jack doing well with
his maths and reading. Dzung working hard. I can’t slog on with HackTile
tonight; I played around a bit but coding rules still feels premature; need to
steep a bit longer and show it to Danny and Wil tomorrow. Will chill out with
the TV before bed instead.
Very sore today after overdoing it yesterday with three repeats of the
seven-minute workout. Can barely lift my arms. Work very busy; Dzung and I made
an effort to go out to Hayashi for lunch. Frozen lasagna for dinner though.
No HackTile work, but put together an animation to post to Twitter.
o
Have been playing around with the editor, thinking about rules.