Tomorrow promises to be a big day at work

I fixed silly bugs in my reflection code, the fix is so elegant and simple it makes my poor heart tremble with joy. Ah, now that’s pretty weird of me to say.

I was contemplating my ray-tracer which does not use the traditional thin-lens design that basically is a take on the pinhole camera, but does some fancy stuff with the ray’s starting point and jitters it up a bit so that the focus is directed exactly at a specific point in the render. I realized that my ray-tracer has no mechanism for focus; it has a sharpness, and at best, the smoothness of anti-aliasing, which makes some things look rather Tron-ish. However, I’ve been thinking of jittering a specific pixel’s ray cluster and directing the resulting rays through the ideal focal point for that pixel, making each individual pixel’s cluster act like a pinhole camera, and producing the same effect, except instead of using thin-lens approximation, my tracer uses an actual lens and shortest-path-first behavior for creating an image.

I actually made a thumbnail for this next render, it was taking too long to load my old page with those 2 big renders on it. It’s my settler’s map but with 3 big reflective balls and a blue plane beneath (which is also reflective.) Light itself does not reflect though …

I like it, not cause it makes any sense, but because there’s a lot of bright colors and the reflectiveness really adds some depth to it.

cross section
magic super collider
I’ve been playing with focusing on the rays in my raytracer, instead of what the rays collide with. This did help me fix my reflection code, but I haven’t gone back to actually do any 3d renders, I’ve become addicted to messing with what can be done when I tell the raytracer to show me the actual rays. It’s cool, reminds me of pixel arty-ness (because it isn’t anti-aliased at all, any smoothness if purely mathematical.) I like the second one because it shows there’s a point at which a ray is reflected left or right when it bounces off a sphere. It makes this cool negative space curve in a big field of straight lines.

I haven’t been feeling like blogging lately. It was cool to play 5 player settlers on Saturday, I just wish I didn’t have to leave and get my hair cut; it was like I got short-changed on the hang-outs.

Of course, some of you went to see Dark Knight and couldn’t be arsed to wake up the next day and hang out, so screw you bastards and your awesome movie. I may vow not to see the damned thing.

… For a few days.

I knew it!

Today on Facebook I said:

The best spiritual experiences are ones were there are no words, and few people. So, technically speaking, anything outdoors is almost always more likely to be spiritually uplifting than anything you can experience indoors; except in cases where there are few people and fewer words involved.

Draw from that what you will, it represents approximately 87% of my spirituality, cultivated over years of reflection and deep thought.

Agnostic is merely a technical term, and like most terms only offers a cynical glimpse at the idea behind it. There’s nothing wrong with saying I don’t know, I have come to see it as a perversion of nature when someone does claim to know, but I must admit, that myself not knowing does not necessarily preclude others from knowing.

… which probably wasn’t a good response to a joking discussion.

But I thought it was a pretty well thought out and short explanation of my very spiritual belief system.

I updated my raytracer to not cast shadows if the collided object has a texture that has a 0-value alpha channel, which means, I get cooler shadows cast from my textured objects!

Yay!

Next item needing attention is shadow-testing rays.

… for the week to begin. I did manage to get a few things done, attend a family reunion, which included a very crazy inner-tube ride (pics on Sukie’s facebook), and re-write some of my raytracer. The part I re-wrote changed my ‘rays’ from an array of dynamically allocated rays(eg 1024×768 pixels, which works for most things without problems) to a class containing a linked list. I like the linked list, though it takes up more memory, because it gives me more flexibility when it comes to handling the data (for ray bounces, ray refraction, and any post processing flim flam I can think of.)

After seeing Hellboy II I realized that I really like CG, and that maybe it is a pursuit that will not ever bear (financial) fruit for me, but it is still a worthwhile pursuit while I am learning, which is something I enjoy more than I enjoy making money, which I do enjoy to a fair degree.

I think that last paragraph was confusing. Anyway, off to work.

Photo removed, it was really getting on my nerves.
Yes, I spent some time with my photoshop.

Tomorrow Night is Orbis Gras, the Inaugural. To make up for TheOrb77 being abandoned in such a brutal fashion, we should all bring meats to grill in his honor.

Not sure if it’s 6pm or 7pm, we should really really pick one of these times, I’m grilling on coal, so we should definitely try to converge at one time, and get the meats grilled in as small a window as possible, otherwise we’ll have to go stove top with it. For reals.

3 blogs in 3 days. Not sure if I’ve ever done that. My Caliente blog went over so well it has revitalized my interest in the blogs. I must warn you, most posts are probably going to be like that last post. I’m a geek.

I’ve been replaying Ultima VII. Well, that, and compiling Exult, an engine that runs Ultima VII. Exult 1.4 isn’t stable, at least, my compiled version definitely isn’t, but learning to save very often is a skill itself.

I ported Exult3D to 1.4, I made a patch here (only download if you want to patch the 1.4 source. I checked out sometime in early June.) The camera controls are infinitely better than the original. You actually can see a lot of 2d elements now (they were very very screwed up in old 1.2) I had assumed Exult3D was abandoned but the author actually still idles in the exult IRC channel. That was fairly annoying to discover – but at least he shared his source code so others could pick up on it some day. My favorite hack of this code is the walk code. I rotate the 2D mouse coordinates by the same value the 3d camera is rotated, before passing them to the game logic, which somewhat makes the 3d angles + walking make sense. However, a new problem came out of that – you’ll need a compass to find out what direction you are going. Har Har.

Well that was nerdy enough. I have reverted to just playing the game through, since that’s kind of what I wanted to do to start with.

Ultima VII is a game my oldest brother bought while I was at scout camp, must have been 1992 or 1993. It is also the first game I played that was really, really, really open ended, and ridiculously immersive. My son says it doesn’t have very good graphics.

I think Ultima VII is why I’m a computer nerd. Oh I loves me some consoles, but the little trainers and shape viewers for Ultima VII made me realize that there were guts inside the games. And guts are fun.

I broke my dad’s PC trying to make Ultima VII work. I must have been 12 or 13. He got fed up pouring over the DOS manual and gave it to me and said that since I broke it, I had to fix it. I read the manual, I knew where to look because I had payed attention to what I was doing when I broke it. Anyway, I got it fixed and learned that DOS 6 is waaaaaaaay better than Windows 95 (which was forked from DOS 5 – some features from DOS 6 didn’t come back until Windows 98.) We had to do some config.sys and autoexec.bat wrangling to get Ultima VII to work, while not breaking the core uses of the PC.

I digress, it was learning about how the guts work that made using the PC truly enjoyable. Even today, I still spend way more time playing with code than I do playing games.

Last weekend me and 7 of my closest friends (or 6 and the Guildie, however you slice it) crammed in a van and headed south and then west a little for a stay in Caliente, Nevada. Never heard of it? Well, I have, and now I have been.

You see, for as long as I can remember (or at least for the last year) I haven’t liked the 4th of July. Because Frik and Carebear leave town and I don’t get to see them. And I mope around the house. It’s depressing. The family used to have root beer floats on the 4th, but it turns out that I’m the only one who liked them. In my family, no one plans anything, and no one does anything, and the 4th is just another day.

I told Sukie a few weeks ago that I wasn’t looking forward to the 4th because Carebear and Frik were going to be leaving town, and she thought it was cute but that we’d do something fun for sure.

Well, Sukie got a text asking if we wanted to go to Caliente this year. She asked me. If I was a young, spry guy, I would have done a back flip right then and there. Holidays with the best-est friends ever! Yeah! Last month’s crazy all-nighter would most certainly be out-done by a national-holiday-hangout-of-epic-proportions.

I would at this time like to apologize for those of you whose feelings might be hurt by my devotion and dedication to my friends. I am most astonished by the fact that I have any friends at all, to be truthful. If they were ones, they would be cold ones. And a one that is not cold is hardly a one at all.

I think the story of this weekend could be told through food. I had:
1 – Rancho burger @ Hermies in Cedar City. Thank god for people who work at restaurants who can actually recommend good food.
2 – Pancake breakfast @ the park in Caliente. My sweet zombie jesus I don’t think I’ve ever had pancakes so good.
3 – I almost forgot! Navajo tacos that were actually flown in from the reservation! Oh wait, no, it was just that one person knew how to make frybread. Only a goddamn ignoramus would think that the tacos had anything to do with the tribe.
4 – Pizza from Pioneer Pizzeria in Caliente – that was some really good pizza. Looking back, what the hell is a nice pizzeria like that doing in a place like Caliente?
5 – Breakfast at the Branding Iron in Caliente – they didn’t have a table big enough for the lot of us! But it was a damned fine breakfast burrito!
6 – Tacos at Carebears uncles house!
7 – A delicious pork sausage sandwich at Cafe Orleans in Cedar City! Ask Frik about his Muffliatto sandwich (yes, I know that’s actually a spell from the HP books – but I swear it’s not that different from the name of the sandwich, which has the same effect of silencing the target!)

Ah, the food was good and it was good to remembers it.

I loved the parade (A-Wiki, Anyone?), which hearkened to a parade I witnessed when I was younger and lived in Brigham City. BC is bigger than Caliente (but so am I.) I did grab for cash, and get sprayed with hoses, most of the afternoon was spent in line for tacos, which we could have made ourselves, but how would that 6th grade class get to Washington D.C. then? I am glad that I was able to get the water out of my ears, it would have hurt badly to have to pop those bad boys on the ride home, let alone walk around with swimmer’s ear the rest of the weekend. I got $3.50 in change.

Oh yeah, and before I forget, swimmer’s caps and Riot Shields. Oh weeeeeee’ll be quite ready next year, damnit. Of course I had to make my trademark cynical comment that getting sprayed with firehoses isn’t something that Holocaust survivors or Hippies would find very fun. But it was fun. And they used the hose on the truck, which was like an insta-tsunami. It whetted the tacoes, and the baby. Yes, think of the poor sleeping baby who gets at least a bucket’s worth of water splashed on her?

Oh, and think of me, carrying my pouting son on my back in to the middle of the street just to get him wet. His disposition went from sour to silly VERY quickly. It was just silly fun, and it was like being young again.

Our cottage was awesome, it smelled bizarre and there was a gas leak which we figured out in the middle of the night, and the smell went away the day after we turned off the gas to the stove. Hmmm…

We had a working theory that the cottage was where FLDS husbands took their wives to consumate their marriages, which is a bizarre thing to think of, considering it did have a distinct creepy air about it. But I liked it anyway, I think you could put a bunch of people you love in the creepiest of places and it would seem great instantly.

Oh, and I bought a straw hat. It was an impulse buy, but at $2.29 anything that keeps the accursed sun off of your head is like manna from heaven. It was actually funny because once you got used to the hat it was a good thing to wear – anywhere you go your face doesn’t get nearly as hot. I must have been a sight, in my weird sunglasses T-shirt shorts and Adidas, to wear this strange straw hat. I have to say, the hat got a lot of use, and a lot of people tried to steal it away from me.

The things that I liked the most was losing any sense of time at all, and spending time with friends playing games. Yes, we do it every couple of weeks anyway, but it was a nice combination, all that calm small-town-ness and friends and good (really good) food and the cottage which was the epitome of shelter from the storm, it always stayed cool.

I also liked the trip to the green-grass place, with the wading pool of doom. Sukie’s shocked that I’m still writing a blog entry.

I think I’ll stop, but I must say to my friends, I love you, I had a lot of fun, and we should hang out more often.

And to Guildie: Apology *not* accepted. You had an emotional outburst! It was an honest moment and you should stand by it. Besides, you’re only apologizing because it’s driving me crazy.

Addendum: Ok, Guildie, you win this round. Apology accepted. I feel bad, but I still maintain that you shouldn’t. I apologize for how I was acting, I was being an ass and completely deserved the retaliation. I can’t promise I won’t be an ass again, which is basically what accepting an apology is to me; a promise to not ‘do wrong’ again.