2018-06-12
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!
2018-06-11
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.
2018-06-10
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.
2018-06-09
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.
2018-06-08
Busy all day at work. Rushed out in the morning to buy a birthday present for
Eli; Pokemon pack reduced from $80 to $30. Girl at the games store thought I was
there for Magic cards (there’s just been a new release).
Heads-down all day working. Quick break at lunch for meatball pasta and wine
with The West Wing, then back to the grind. No time for HackTile—picked up
Jack from Eli’s party (Eliza and I met Dzung walking home from the train station
on the way), then back to a warm house to recover with a cognac and order Thai
delivery for dinner, which was delicious with a beer. Then snuggled on the floor
under a blanket with the kids to watch Black Panther. Made popcorn. After the
kids had been put to bed Dzung and I had a cuppa and played Letter Tycoon. She
won on points. Ended the night reading in bed. A real family Friday.
2018-06-07
Long, productive day at work, finishing the last of the work before the end of
the current sprint, and culminating in a late conference call to New York. So no
HackTile, apart from a few ideas about how to improve the camera system to deal
with multiple cameras and arbitrary aspect ratios.
Made “bashy pork”, aka Japanese port katsu curry, for dinner. Proud to learn
that Eliza is in the top 50 maths students, of around 350 in total. She’s really
made a great start to high school.
Gardeners came today, and I returned a misdelivered package of cat food to our
next-door neighbours. Amazing what you can buy online these days. Dzung out with
April and Mary for lunch; I had onion soup and cheese on toast while watching
The West Wing. Zelda book was delivered, which Jack loved. He wet his pants
during class assembly rehearsal today; first time in ages.
Ended the day watching the second half of “Game Night” which Dzung and I started
last night.
2018-06-06
Busy day at work; got a lot done, and also managed to get the HackTile refactor
finished to the point where everything is running once again. Nice to have
abstracted out an entity manager, a camera manager and an input handler,
improved object state and lifetime management, and cleaned up a lot of the code.
Still much more to do, but progress being made!
Plan to finish the day with a bit more work on my day job, and then perhaps
watch a movie or play some games tonight. Dzung is going to be cooking spaghetti
and meatballs, but I must admit I’m still pretty full from the curry laksa we
ate for lunch.