Very busy all day at work. Made good progress. Did North Shore homework with Jack. Eliza has a sore throat, worsening since yesterday. Dzung will take her to the Doctor tomorrow. Made steak, gravy, mash, beans and carrots for dinner. Dessert of custard and apple cake. HackTile for a bit; got animations working, and got the map serialising. Good enough for now; will switch to rules, and come back to animations once we need different states for movement and the like.
Very hungover. Should have stuck to my guns and avoided the drink. Slow morning as a result. Needed to finish cleaning too. Mum took the kids in the middle of the day, so after a hot shower I worked from late morning to early evening, and continued after dinner. Now to bed at ten o’clock with no HackTile done, but at least I managed a full work day.
Jack back to North Shore! We hope it’ll give him some discipline at school and that his grades will improve by the end of the year. Island Market for brunch; tried to limit what I ate. Then preparing steamboat once back home. Faith and Yoshiya loved playing the Vive, and I celebrated the halfway point of the increasingly inappropriately named “dry july” by sharing two bottles of red. Late night for the kids, and I couldn’t face cleaning up straight away, so watched “The Shining” first. Ended up still awake at 2:30am. No HackTile.
Regular Saturday. Lazy breakfast, clothes washing and karate. Rushed home via Garbo to pick up groceries for lunch, then kids off to piano while I cleaned my office and tried “MoonQuest”. Shopping in the afternoon with Dzung, buying things for dinner and tomorrow’s hotpot. Have decided to pause Dry July to be able to drink with our guests. But one day a month is pretty good, right?
Spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, then an episode of BiTfD before playing a few levels of Kirby with the kids. Got some more HackTile done, too.
Now that serialisation is working, I updated the entity editor to allow individual animation frames to be selected. Next will be to draw then animating, and to make it easy to preview animations by moving the controller. Drew some nicer sprites to aid in this work. And, after that, rules!
Took the kids to Riley’s for breakfast, then to Garbo where I bought “Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker” and the Ultra HD version of “Bladerunner 2049”. Back home late morning and was busy at work for the rest of the day. Kids played games until Eva and Finlay were picked up after lunch.
Squeezed in some HackTile in the late afternoon. Optimised palette swaps, implemented serialisation for sprites, and removed all the code for creating default sprites. Worked great, but will have to revisit at some point when I support an architecture with a different endianess. So animation is now on the agenda. Looking forward to it!
Mum and Dad over to watch “Battle of the Sexes” on the new TV. Had some Thai delivered for dinner. Mum made dessert. Put the kids to bed, and ending the night watching an episode of “Endeavour” with Dzung and a cuppa. Noice.
Dzung took the kids to Scitech to spend some time with their cousins. I worked scoping out the new payments feature for my day job. Enough work to keep me busy for the next fortnight, working towards an end-of-the-month deadline.
Eva and Finlay arrived for a sleepover in the late afternoon. Made lamb cutlets, pasta and salad. Civilised dinner around the dining table while telling jokes, then watched “Early Man” with popcorn. I cleaned up and made the beds while the girls played Letter Tycoon. Eva will be sleeping in my office, so I’m working upstairs for a change. Boys asleep.
Have been thinking about life in general. Want to improve my level of fitness, lose some weight, contribute more to society (I scheduled myself to donate blood again, triggered by Callan’s platelets scare), build stuff of value (an old trope of mine, but relevant now that I’m almost finished reading the excellent “Bullshit Jobs” book… working for a salary should only be the journeyman stage between apprentice and master), improve my diet (will restrict myself to three drinks per week once dry July is up) and so on. Lots of life stuff swirling around in my mind today.
HackTile-wise, I’ve decided to focus on serialisation and forget about generating default sprites, which is just a timewaste. Once serialisation is working I’ll be able to load sprites, so the default set could be designed by hand. Will do some work on that tonight, but it will take a bit of time to finish. Once it’s done animation will be unblocked. Happy days.
Beautiful day. Took kids to the carwash for breakfast. Getting the car properly cleaned is always cathartic. Tidied up the garden too, and got the kids to finish tidying the house after all the housework I did yesterday. Finished a few big tasks at work, and had a long chat with Will that turned out well. Need to spend the rest of my week on design work, to scope out tasks for the next two weeks, but that seems doable. Will take the kids swimming, and then make lasagna and salad for dinner. And, I promise, will do some HackTile too.
And so I did! Happy to break the hoodoo. Just some simple work on the map editor; fixing a bug with entity zero not working because of some assumptions made in the rules of Conway’s life, and implemented a preview when drawing entities in the map, to be consistent with how sprite drawing works.
Great to be back on the bandwagon. Need to focus now on getting sprite animations working correctly, and then it will be on to serialisation followed by the rules editor. To put meat on the bones, so to speak.