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.
2018-06-16
Beautiful but chilly morning, Up early to do the laundry and have breakfast, then
showered and to karate with the kids. Back home via the fish shop, lunch was
seafood chowder with crusty baguette and some sushi on the side. Shopping after
lunch for roast lamb tomorrow, and ingredients for stuffed tomatoes, which Dzung
made for dinner. Delicious. Took the kids for a bike ride down to deep water
point after hanging out the washing and listening to podcasts. Ate some fruit
while watching the river. Saw Jumanji after dinner and demolished a box of Tee
Vee Snacks. Feeling tired and run down, will have an early-ish night.
Refactored the input handler in HackTile. Feels much better now; controllers are
managed properly and can be queried from anywhere. Nice. Will add mouse control
for spawning entities over the next day or two, and will make the camera
movement smoother and more precise.
2018-06-15
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.
2018-06-14
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).
2018-06-13
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.