Hello there folks, I come bearing yet more interesting screenshots today. Right to business then.

First of all, Risujin put in a slight glowing effect with the logo and resized some things. Here is how it looks now:

Another big thing that he’s done is make the tile that your mouse is currently over highlight, and the model on it glow. Here are some images about that:

And when you click on a tile, the game now opens a “ring menu” that lets you choose what you would like to construct there. This work is still incomplete in terms of what will be on the ring and possibly ring size, but I think the idea is clear:

And then when you click one of the icons in the ring, it will place a model on the tile. Obviously in the finished version, things will be constructed more slowly and the models will be textured, but you get the idea:

Also, I spent a while and made a finished-ish Sloop model (textured). Here is the process of selecting and building again, but this time I can select a ship for demo purposes:

And here are some better angles of the ship model:

Well, thanks for reading. Hopefully you found that to as cool as I did. It’s obviously even more fun when you have it live in front of you and can actually rotate and spin the globe. I think we’re all generally pleased about how it’s coming together. I really need to make more models, though, and quick!!

Cheers.

Hello there, I would like to publish my concept for how an extrude tool / system could fit into the Inkscape workflow.

Preface

First of all, I think it would be extremely useful to have an extrude system for Inkscape. It would speed up a lot of the issues related to adding nodes to an existing curve. In Blender, I spend a lot of time making low-poly models where I have to pretty much build them vertex by vertex (or node by node if you will). In Inkscape, to do the same kind of thing to extrude just one node, I have to:

1. Make a line
2. Use the node tool
3. Double click on the line near a node to make a new node at that place
4. Move the original node as desired

I would much prefer to just select a node and hit e to make a new node near it and put select that node.

Similarly, the process I described above gets much more lengthy if I need to extured a line or a more complex shape where I have several nodes. As such, I’ve created some mockups for how this could be done better. It all hindges on the idea of select a node and hit e to duplicate the node near it and put the node into selected mode.

Concept Art

So, here, first of all, is how this would work with a line:

Secondly, here is how it would work with a line or a more complex shape:

I think this system I’ve divised here both fits well into the existing Inkscape code and makes a lot of sense. Thank you to those Inkscape developers and that take the time to read this and consider it.

Risujin and I have been working hard as usual and have more progress to show off. Mostly, I’ll just be showing off some pictures as they’ll say more of what people are interested in than explanations of what’s going on would.

So, first of all, Risujin has committed several fixes and now a lot of issues have vanished. He discovered a couple bugs related to the PLUM model exporter (related to normals), the fixing of which has given us correct lighting on the models.

I’ve redone the tree model and made it overall better. That model is in SVN, by the way. Anyway, long story short:

Risujin has also worked his magic some more and improved our performance quite significantly. The face count limit for the models looks like it has stabilized at 300 faces, which is a lot of detail if you know what to do. I hear the game renders over a million faces at 25 fps on Risujin’s computer.

So yeah, we have models loading nicely, and some models done! Stay tuned for more exciting stuff coming up.

Hello again. I’m getting back into the habit of working on Plutocracy and making blog posts (woo). Here are the updates from the last couple of days.

So, I’ve been doing some art. Here is to showing off.

First of all, I’ve made a (thus far) naked tree. The tree actually has a really detailed texture with bark and stuff, but it actually turns out that when you view it at the size you’d be viewing it in game, it’s pretty much just brown. Anyway, as what you’d be seeing in game sounds like it is more interesting than details that you’ll only ever see on my blog, most of these images will be posted with a bit of distance on them. However, Risujin says that placing models onto the globe is in the pipeline, so I should soon be able to take screenshots with the models in action. Anyway, Here is the tree:

Second of all, another unfinished model is this strange rock I’ve been working on. I haven’t textured it properly yet, so I just made the entire texture grey. Here it is anyway:

Third of all, you may remember recently Risujin added the cool new limbo mode for when you first start up the game. I saw the potential of this and decided to make a new logo, partially inspired by a heraldic wallpaper I have. Naturally, I’m not in the habit of stealing art — so here is how it turned out:

This is actually not how I made it originally, it’s been changed due to some suggestions and complaints I received.

Also, I should mention that the above image was brought to you by Plutocracy’s new screenshot feature. Notice how there is no window around it like normal? Plutocracy can now do the screenshotting for me. For those of you that have this version of the game running, press F12 to take a screenshot. For the moment, there is no kind of confirmation that a screenshot has been taken, so don’t worry. The screenshot should appear in you .plutocracy/screenshots folder. Thanks Risujin, it feels like you made this feature specifically for me.

So that’s it for the art updates (this kind of thing takes a while, you know!). I thought some of you might be interested what the texture for the tree actually looks like from a development point of view. The way textures (for Plutocracy and a lot of games) are done is with something called UV mapping. Basically, the model is unfolded as if it were made of paper and laid out flat. Then you paint onto the flattened model and save the file you used. Later, the game can use the unwrapping layout it used and the image file to texture the model. Makes sense, I think.

Anyway, I’m new to UV and pretty sloppy, but here is the tree’s texture:

You can imagine that the flattened model would roughly fill the non-black space.

Anyway, have yourselves great days and I’ll have more updates for you later (probably).

Hello there, my it has been a while.

First of all, I would like to tell those followers of our project that aren’t very close with the development team that all is well. We haven’t given up on the project, and things are progressing nicely. What has happened is that my computer had broken (so no new art from me). I had it repaired, but also bought a nice new desktop also. Making models should be easier now, and I have two computers so it shouldn’t happen again. I also went to England and moved. As such, I’ve been mostly offline for about 3-4 weeks. I’d like to mention that I’m also back in school now at The University of Waterloo, but I think I still have time to work on projects in my spare time. Besides, what is life without working in the community

Risujin had been mostly very busy during the time that I’ve been gone. He’s added a lot to the game, which I’ll cover below. However, he too went on vacation for some 10-14 days or something like that. He too is back just recently and is rapidly getting back into the swing of things. He’s really awesomely self-motivated, and we’re all jealous of his speedy output.

Amanieu, our programming apprentice has been swamped with school work, also went on vacation, and is just finishing up his exams now. I think he’ll be back in action soon-ish, but I don’t really know. Anyway, things are great.

Yeah, I know, blah blah blah, heh. Here is the part that you people care about, the changelog with images! Prepare to be amazed, my friends. I will now write a tour of the game so far.

Limbo Mode (or Title Screen)

The first thing you see when you start up the latest Plutocracy client is this screen, what Risujin refers to as “Limbo Mode.” This is somewhat equivalent to what you’d see when you first start up most games, but with as slight twist. The plan is that the UI of the game won’t change modes — ie. you’ll always have the menus that are displayed, you just won’t be able to use them in some cases. As a continuation of this, the server browser will be available at all times, which Risujin has convinced me is a good idea. For example, you’d be able to check if there are people online on another server that you like, or see where your friends are. In related news, we’re contemplating a “buddy list” for the UI as well, so you can keep track of your mates. Anyway, here is the Limbo screen:

So then after you look at the Limbo screen, you’d probably want to get into the game. To do this, you will have to use the Game Menu. It looks like this:

After you click “Host” (or eventually “Join”), the darkness in the middle of the globe and the Plutocracy logo will fade out. And you will meet with the actual game. Theoretically, the game at this point would quickly connect to the server (or start the server) and display the game in progress. This will look roughly like this (but, with, you know, models and players and a completed UI):

New Globe

I’ll show you some pictures of what the globe looks like at this point. Some things I’d like to point out. We have a moon and sun, both of which emit light (of different colours). As you look at the globe, the stars, moon, and sun seem to rotate around you. The game is slated to have dynamic night and day, with different visibility conditions. In fact, at this point, if you watch one point long enough, you will see the night become day and then night again. It’s all very pretty.

Also, please appreciate the fact that since Lambdanaut left the team, Risujin has rewritten the globe and island generation algorithms. They both work really well now and are very fast. Also, the islands are now well controlled in their creation, meaning that you’ll never have an island that is super massive and annoying to get around. In fact, islands now have size limits. All of this is very impressive to programmers who recognize what a huge task that must have been.

Finally, I’d like to mention that Risujin put a considerable amount of effort into the atmosphere and tile texturing system. You’ll see that there is a aura-like atmosphere around the globe, which not only looks nice, but also simulates the diffusion of light, softening it and spreading it out. Another challenge was the fact that the entire globe is made of triangular tiles. Risujin came up with a cool blending system which makes triangles look like a coherent land mass. Kudos for that, it took some time. Check out the globe and comment what you think. I expect something along the lines of “OMG NICE!”.

User Interface

I’ll also show you the UI that is currently available. It should be pretty self-explanatory, but I’d like to mention that the console has tab completion which is pretty handy. As in the screen shot, if you hit r_TAB, it’ll show you the possibilities. Our system also actually tells you what the variables do, which makes the console way more user-friendly. Can you tell I’m proud?

Internationalization

Also, we (I think Risujin, Kasuko, Amanieu, and I all had a hand programming this feature) have excellent multi-language/internationalization support now. It’s like seriously very nice. I’ll not bore you with the internals of how it works, but something I’d like to mention is that we have a source parser that finds all the strings that need translating and generates the file for you, so that all you have to do is type in your translated strings into the blanks. The script is slated to have some improvements that will handle merging changes and deleting old entries eventually. Kasuko will probably do it eventually. To change languages, for the moment what you do is type “c_lang ‘LANGUAGE CODE’” into the console, where the LANGUAGE CODE is something like ‘fr’ or ‘ru’. Anyway, here is a screenshot of Plutocracy with the partial French translation:

As for me, I’ve been doing some sketching and plotting for how to change the art style of the game somewhat. I have quite a few ideas laid out and have made some early models. More about this later when I actually have some more things to show. Should be pretty exciting.

Anyway, we’re not dead. In fact, we’re doing really well, and morale is still pretty good as far as I can tell. As the game starts to take shape, it just becomes more and more exciting to work on it. There is a starting time when everything is just a vague mental image, something that is a bit foggy. You reach for it and grab it, mould it until you can see it clearly enough to design. As you design it, more fine-grained ideas start to come to your mind and momentum builds. Eventually, you get something for all your hard work and it’s exciting to finally see clearly that which seemed so surreal a while ago. We have the framework. The globe works. The internationalization works. The model loader works. The user interface works. The game is ready to be born. Hold onto your stomachs, friends. You’re about to witness a baby come into this world.

There is a nice plugin that I found recently that lets me write blog posts in VIM and post them right away. I think it’s rather well done and recommend it (assuming this blog gets posted).

This plugin is called “vimblog,” but it only actually works for Wordpress out of the box. I’m not really going to beat a dead horse with as stick here, though, because the author of the plugin already has installation instructions and some images.

Vim Plugins Page

Installation Instructions / Main Page

Images on Flickr

However, he didn’t really put up usage instructions. It’s easy enough, though, and I found some information in the source code (and cleaned it up a bit):

Usage for deleting a post:
    :Blog del id
Usage for saving a draft of a post:
    :Blog draft
Usage for Publishing a post:
    :Blog publish
Usage for getting the list of Categories:
    :Blog cl
Usage for Get Post [id]:
    :Blog gp id
Usage for New Post:
    :Blog np
Usage for Recent [x] Posts (defaults to last 10):
    :Blog rp [x]
Usage is :Blog option [arg]
    switches:
        - rp [x]   => show recent [x] posts
        - gp id    => get post with identification id
        - np       => create a new post
        - publish  => publish an edited/new post
        - draft    => save edited/new post as draft
        - gc       => get the list of categories
        - del id   => delete post with identification

It has some nice features, as you can see:

• Listing categories / old blog posts
• Has some nice information at the top of the page you’re editing (see below)
• Handles categories and just about everything you’d want

When working with a blog post, it has information like this:

Post     : [54]
Title    : Using VIM to Blog (Wordpress)
Date     : 04/03/2008 15:10:46 GMT
Link     : http://garoth.com/?p=54
Permalink: 
Author   : 1
Comments : 1
Pings    : 1
Categs   : Website

Which is actually very nice and handy, I think.

I just started using it, but it seems to have few small flaws:

• No way to add categories? (Of course, you could log in to do this.)
• Syntax highlighting seems to get messed up a bit. (Fixable. There is a Markdown (see below) syntax file around.)
• No way to get back to a draft? (Don’t use this feature and just save your posts to your computer.)

Another thing I should mention: using this kind of thing with Vim is great especially if you have markdown installed on your website :D. Markdown simplifies post syntax for doing things like lists, etc. It’s meant to be more human-readable, and even people who have never seen it before should be able to understand what it will do.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with this stuff.

Hello.

Long story short, I was hacked. Some news highlights:

• Forestofthought.com was down because it was redirecting to some spam site.
• Someone set up a bank phishing site in the backpages. I was notified by a kind passerby, Ken.
• My IP was blacklisted by usfamily.com because the server was mailing spam to everyone. News to me.
• My host suspended service for about half a day until I explained what was going on.
• My IP has been now greylisted. Not on the whitelist because the vulnerabilities may still exist.
• I’m not posting much because I’m in the progress of moving to a new VPS hosted by The Mercenaries
• Plutocracy is still coming along, don’t worry. I have some cool new developments to report when everything settles down (Risujin’s doing).
• Started working out. See sidebar.

Anyway, thanks. I may be too lazy to transfer this post to the new host. Hopefully everything works out.

It’s not much of a virus, but it’s sure worth seeing. Some “design group” has put together a “virus” that makes all desktop elements fall as if affected by gravity/physics. This whole thing seems very questionable to me, considering:

• It’s not a virus — just a one-time thing
• A design group programmed a non-viral virus for the Mac?! Seems unlikely.
• As far as I know, they’ve only shown it happen in a video. I don’t think it’s been distributed at all. No way to tell if it actually works.

Still, it’s stylish and funny. Worth a look — watch the video at Dazeen. Here is a (hotlinked) preview:

Some of you will recall that in the past I have mentioned my work on a program called Veranda. This is an update that showcases the more-or-less complete version. Naturally, due to the nature of coding, this is already outdated… But close enough. Here is a tour.

This is the starting look. When Veranda starts up, she connects to Versaplex which gives her access to an initial database. From this database, she automatically fetches the items that go into the sidebar.

Then, if you open up a section of the sidebar and click on a row, she will attempt to do something with that row. For tables, she opens a new tab and types a query for you. I believe this query is then also automatically run.

A note, if you click on the green arrows symbol, Veranda will change the view type for you. So far, she can show the data as a proper table, a textual table, or as raw data from Dbus. More views are easily addable — things like csv may be available in the future.

Here is what the Dbus data Veranda gets looks like. Not pretty, eh? At least I already organized it for you in the other views.

If you click on a Procedure in the sidebar (or something similar to a procedure), Veranda will once again load it in a new tab. The keyword “CREATE” is automatically converted to “ALTER.” Note that this set of commands is not automatically run — the output on the bottom is from the previous slide.

And as a finishing touch, Veranda also sports a nice regular expression based, progressive sidebar search. By progressive, I mean that she searches as you type, narrowing down the list for you. Regular expressions (regex) are a programmer’s way to create a pattern that may match many different strings. In the example, Veranda is matching a table that has a name which starts with “spt,” followed by at least one other character, then an underscore, and then any amount of characters at the end. I suppose the “any amount of characters at the end” is redundant though, because that is generally implied. Oh well. Also notice that the non-regex table/ prefix helps you select which categories you want to search in. Naturally, you can regex the categories as well.

Don’t worry though. If you don’t want to learn regex, you don’t have to use it! Just typing any part of the name of the sidebar item will find it for you.

Well, thanks for looking at my program. I’ve spent a fair bit of effort on her, and I think she’s pretty nice. Some other notes: * The bottom statusbar informs you about what is happening, and in a more current version tells you whether the command you ran has succeeded. Errors from Versaplex appear there also. * All the top keys have bindings using Control. This is explained in the README. * I’ve also now added a way to go to the next and previous tab using new buttons/keybindings in a more recent version.

Hope you like it, cheers.

Hello,

This is a pretty specific post. It’s about how to do a tricky table of contents with dots in LaTeX — mostly for people who need such a format in University/College. I did not write this code and neither did my source. Regardless, I’ll credit my friend for giving it to me — thanks goes to Chris Schwarz (cschwarz at ucdavis dot edu). We’re not sure who wrote it originally. Sorry. Anyway, the results look like this:

Naturally, the only difference between this and a regular table of contents is the dots. Here is the code to make this work:

% This is all for formatting and making the Table of Contents according to 
% spec. Don't play with it.
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\l@section[2]{%
  \ifnum \c@tocdepth >\z@
    \addpenalty\@secpenalty
    \addvspace{1.0em \@plus\p@}%
    \setlength\@tempdima{1.5em}%
    \begingroup
      \parindent \z@ \rightskip \@pnumwidth
      \parfillskip -\@pnumwidth
      \leavevmode \bfseries
      \advance\leftskip\@tempdima
      \hskip -\leftskip
      #1\nobreak\ 
      \leaders\hbox{$\m@th\mkern \@dotsep mu\hbox{.}\mkern \@dotsep mu$}
     \hfil \nobreak\hb@xt@\@pnumwidth{\hss #2}\par
    \endgroup
  \fi}
\makeatother

And, I suppose, a brief explanation of how to use this is in order. Put the above code into your preamble section — that is, before the document proper starts. What this code does, in short, is reprogram the \tableofcontents command to display the dots instead of plain space. Therefore, after you start your document, simply use \tableofcontents as you normally would. \tableofcontents will generate what is shown in the image. It does so based on your sectioning — that is, chapters, sections, and other such things. It will place this wherever you use the command, so I suggest using it at the beginning of your document, after the title page. As another tip, use \newpage to force a new page to start. If you surround your \tableofcontents command with a pair of \newpage(s), that will make it have it’s own page for sure. Also note, sometimes, you may have to run the LaTeX code a couple times to get the table of contents to point to the correct pages. If this fails, consider editing the .toc file that is generated. Regardless, it gets it right most of the time.

I’ve also briefly written up an example of the table of contents in action:

• Source — This also has some of my customized code for doing margins and special math symbols.
• PDF Output

Enjoy. I hope this will be useful to someone.