Looking at back-end stuff…

Currently just finished getting up to speed on powershell, now looking at PHP/MySQL back end coding. I want to become more familiar with React for SPA/front end work (particularly here for management of persistent storage of web service content) and need PHP/MySQL to create the back-ends for both VR code and other front end stuff.

I’m also looking at bit at WebGL and supporting libraries as being able to build out really interactive and graphical front ends for things. Lots to do and lots to learn 🙂 Been buried in work stuff for several years and now that is wrapped up and I’m just helping out with small stuff on other products I may have time to chase some of these home projects.

RPGs – Traveller and Call of Cthulhu

I picked up a copy of the core Mongoose Traveller 2e books recently. I have long liked Traveller in theory but had a hard time when I was younger thinking of how to run it in practice. I’ve still got my original ‘little black books’ edition on my book shelf. This edition is much more extensive and has much higher production values.

I’d love to try running some Traveller sometime in the future. I think I have a better idea how to make a game like this one work. Less combat (much) but more investigation and problem solving for the players. A sand box with lots of directions to go. I’ve become better over the years at improvising and I think Traveller likely needs lots of that.

Call of Cthulhu is also on my list. I expect I’ll probably pick up the core books sometime soon. They’re a bit expensive but it is an interesting system and even more oriented towards problem and puzzle solving than Traveller. I’ll probably also pick up a few adventure modules with the core books so that I have some patterns to work from as to how to build adventures that work in the game. This one is even further from my wargaming past as combat tends to go really, really badly when things from beyond are what you’re fighting.

Playing in a D&D 5e Campaign

For the first time in a long time I’m a player in a D&D campaign. I ran a 3.5e campaign years back for my daughter and some friends. Had a blast with that but as with all campaigns it eventually ended.

It has been a much longer time since I played in a game. A friend that I worked with years ago tapped me to join a new remote game he’s starting up. It is a 5e campaign set in Greyhawk so a new system (I have the books but I’ve had no one to play with since I got them) and a setting I haven’t used in ages.

I’m playing a dwarf cleric and we’ve only had two sessions so far. The usual issues with schedules clashing and such. So far I’ve been having fun. The first session started slow, but that is to be expected with a new group. The second session ran more smoothly and I’m gradually coming up to speed on the new version of the game.

I’ll probably pick up some more 5e books over the next few months. I’ve got the core set and Xanathar’s Guide and Tasha’s Cauldron. These cover most of my needs from the player side, but I am interested in seeing what else there is in 5e at this point. I certainly like 5e better than I did 4e. I still have a fondness for 3.5e and would be happy to play that again sometime too. More work and a bit more complex to run but more options too I think.

VR Random Dungeon

It has struck me recently while diving deep in TLS RFCs that it would be kind of fun to build a VR random dungeon generator inspired by the old AD&D dungeon master’s guide random dungeon generator.

It would be comparatively simple to code and would be a blast from the past and provide an interesting sense of scale to some of those old ten foot wide corridors and massive rooms.

Not sure I’ll ever get around to putting the necessary effort in, but who knows I might one day be able to walk the halls of an old school random dungeon of my own creation 🙂

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Continuing to read and watch Blender training information.

Blender

Getting a bit distracted by pulling in blender 2.8 build source code. I’m now a bit curious about the internals and may let myself be distracted by that now and again. Certainly planning to see if I can run a local build on JabberwockChaos upstairs has path issues that I’ll need to resolve before I can do much on that front. One of the nicer things about having more than one build-capable machines around.

Unity

Looking at a few things in the immediate future

  • Get text working. Hover text labels over stars that always face the viewer with at a minimum the name of the star.
  • Build star gate model(s) in blender and import them into unity and then place gates in the view.
  • Build a simple information viewing panel in game and support star selection where the information for the selected star shows on the panel.
  • Build a simple mechanism for saving game and loading games. Need a persistence format for game data.
  • Look into adding simple feedback sounds to the game. At least a noise when a selection is changed in the star display.

A New Year, Blender and Unity and Games

Rolling into 2020 after a busy and somewhat chaotic six months I’m looking to get back on track with VR coding in Unity.

Blender

First step (although likely still mixed with other things) will be to get up to speed with Blender 2.8. I’ve bought the previous two editions of The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics (one in paper, one in Kindle) and not found the time to run through them before a new edition was published.

With blender 2.8, the UI has allegedly been completely reworked. At this point I’m going to put off laying down cash for the version of that book that covers this version of Blender and first go through a beginners tutorial to make sure I’m decently on my way before spending a big chunk of cash.

Hoping this goes well as I’d like to be able to create more interesting items than my current simple shapes to populate my VR creations.

Cluster

My first goal in the Blender work will be to put together models for my stargates. I’ve got my star cluster in place. I’ve got some usable ship models (though these could use significant work to make them more visually interesting).

I could use some sound samples for interaction feedback. I have minor haptic feedback when a star is selected with the control wand but a ‘bump’ noise would be welcome as well. I need to dig up my little digital recorder and figure out the APIs in Unity for this stuff.

I need to add in star name labels and other related display bits. Ideally these would float above each star and face the viewer/camera regardless of their position. I’ve got public-domain name lists of star names to use so I should be able to do better than just ‘star’ above each one.

I’d like to fully implement a ‘select’ system where the last star that was ‘wanded’ shows its full system information on a hanging display monitor to one side of the main play area. This could then be extended to support setting up unit orders for movement and such.

Adding in planet generation should round out the environment management.

Then I’ll need:

  • Cluster state save games.
  • Ship entry.
  • Fleet movement orders.
  • Assignment of ships to a fleet.
  • One admiral for each fleet.
  • Exploration to reveal the system information once ships have arrived.
  • …and more…

Unity

Clearly I have much more to learn about using Unity for game development. There are probably additional tools that I should be considering as well.

No particular areas of focus within unity at the moment, but I expect that once I get back to doing some coding there, I’ll find plenty of things to dig into.

VR

I’ve got my HTC Vive set up back in the front basement (had moved it up to my home office but there really isn’t enough room there). We’ve doing a clean-up pass through the basement so there should be yet more space down there in the near future.

I’m expecting to get the motion capture cameras set up again soon as well. Not sure when as I’m going to try to stay a bit more focused on blender and unity in the immediate future.

I’m still tempted by new headsets but so far I haven’t seen anything that is sufficiently exciting to throw money at. If I picked up a second one I’d probably put one upstairs and one in the basement to facilitate development work.

The closest something has come to getting my attention was the HTC Cosmos with its inside-out tracking and new controllers. I’m still a bit tempted as the convenience of a headset without external trackers would be nice. The fact that they’re suggesting that they may add support for outside-in tracking to improve precision has kept me on the side-lines so far.

If they add support (a new face-plate has been suggested) so that this head-set can do both with the better display panel it already has then I might go for it.

3D Printing

I’m still on the side-lines with 3D printing. It is an interesting technology but I don’t have enough need and I’m swamped with things I want to get done as is. I still might consider a pre-built machine at some point (particularly if the basement work bench gets cleared enough to be usable) but it is likely low on my list.

In truth, I suspect that a laser cutter would be more immediately interesting than a 3D printer. The big problem on that front is that a decent laser cutter is much more expensive than a decent 3D printer.

Wargames

I’ve been walking through my game collection to gather ideas and inspiration as I go. There are quite a few concepts that would be worth bringing over from board wargaming into complex computer games.

One challenge I see for turn based strategic games is that many of the board game designs have interactive resolution steps within a turn. This works well when you’re standing across the table from your opponent and the two of you can interact as things get resolved. This does not work if you’re trying to run something turn based where the participants aren’t expected to be online at the same time.

I’m looking at mechanics where the fine-grained actions are either carried out by a mechanic (commanders or similar where you have a number of choices and each commander has a profile) or where they’re abstracted into a larger mechanic. On balance, there’s no reason that a strategic commander should have any input into the ebb and flow of one battle or a local commander be involved in the decisions that a platoon leader makes.

Steampunk Universes…

Went to the steampunk festival that my friend Sam is involved with last weekend. Nice event, I couldn’t stay as long as I’d have preferred but had a though provoking conversation while I was there.

Atoms as a problem

If you’re going to scale physical objects down to very small sizes (and to make high tech steampunk happen you kind-of do) then atoms (and quantum effects if you want to go there) become a significant problem.

We have it easy

Given that we’re running into those limitations with our information processing technology and our switching mechanisms need to do no more than gate electrons from passing through, a steampunk analytical system would run into more serious problems.

Scaling for analytical engines

I would imagine a high tech steampunk analytical engine as incorporating tinier and tinier mechanical switching elements in its implementation. Ignoring for the moment square/cube issues (which may actually work in our favor) and gas related effects (vacuum is your friend) the scaling limits would start to pinch rather earlier I’d expect.

You want micron scale switches and gearing as part of your technology. You don’t want to deal with the hassle of building gears with single atom wide teeth or switches with atomic scale switching elements.

Construct a new set of physical laws to suit

I’d suggest an alternate set of physical laws where matter is indeed continuous as the ancients would have expected. You can subdivide a piece of brass into arbitrary smaller fragments and still have the properties of bulk brass.

Build a machine that allows you to manipulate smaller items and then just cascade down to arbitrarily small feature sizes. Add in jacquard loom or player piano style automation and you’re set to start producing fully mechanical analytical engines. In this sort of a universe, nano-tech might actually prove to be more practical than in the one we’ve got. No strange domain transitions as you get smaller and lots of incentive to develop micro-machining technologies.

It would be rather interesting to extrapolate this universe a bit more and think about the other implications. Certainly wouldn’t have radioactivity in the form we currently do as there would be no atoms to fragment. Chemistry would be completely different perhaps involving behaviors more akin to alloying than to chemical bonds.

Interesting set of thought experiments to play with here I’d think.

Oculus Claims to be Moving to Hand Tracking

Saw this here (Lorna shared the link).

This does sound like interesting tech (though tracking larger joints and body position seems even more interesting). I do not see how it can handle some of the core use-cases though.

Pretty much anything that requires fine manipulation (triggers, buttons, throttles and HOTAS rigs) would seem to be out of the picture. Being able to track gross hand motion seems possibly within reach. Being able to pick up a glass in VR with hand tracking and then spin it around to look at the far side seems extremely challenging.

I can see this working in the near term for things like fighting games where you punch an opponent. I can’t see it replacing controllers or similar items for fine motor interactions…hoping they’ll prove me wrong though.

Ok, interesting…vive also seems to have some early access hand tracking with the vive and vive pro mentioned here.

New Job and All of the Busy That Goes with That

I’ve just moved from KMC Systems to Draeger and the last couple of weeks have been very busy. That has resulted in very little outside activity worth posting about. At this point I’ve been in my new position for a week or so and feel a little bit more like I’ve got my feet on the ground so I’m expecting to get back to some interesting work.

I’m also no longer working with Malcolm and Sam so no more lunch-time discussions of semi-random technical issues and unity programming stuff. Hoping to set up some regular get-togethers as we move into the fall. Got to get the interesting stuff kick-started again and three brains are definitely better than one.

More VR Ideas – Simulation

Game of life

Thinking that a VR game of life implementation might be fun and relatively straightforward. Perhaps on a sphere would be even more interesting…closed universe.

Also wondering whether a three dimensional version could be jugged together.

More of a fun toy than a real game, but perhaps fun to play with.

Need to think about how to map the quantized grid from a flat version into spherical layouts. Might make sense to do something with continuous placement with volumetric cells that bump aside any too close and attract cells that are near enough to aggregate. Would be similar but a bit different.

Orbital Simulation

Playing with a setup where masses could be placed in three dimensional space and then items released and run the simulation forward.

Could be fun to play with looking at the orbital mechanics issues .

Could move forward to a game where orbital combat is run through. Place vessels with real-ish engines and weapons. Implement UI and interaction to manage motion and allow planning and execution of maneuvers .