Didn't write many blog posts this year. To make up for it, I hand-crafted some musoems for you.
WebGL2 Voxels
I made a minecraft-y voxel world in WebGL2 a while back... just realised it's not on the blog. Now it is!
The code is on GitHub, and my favourite thing about it: pure JavaScript - no dot files, no pacakge.json, no build files, no... nothin'. Just double click index.html (and/or view-source) - like the old days! I'm pretty happy that JavaScript Native Modules are finally ubiquitous.
I'll hopefully write this up a bit more soon - because I want to remember how I did the chunk generation! The basic architecture was inspired from this excellent (and massive!) WebGL series by SketchPunkLabs.
The voxel world also served as a base for my spooooky simultaneous 2D/3D game: Obaké.
Deleted my twi**er account
12 years it took me, but I finally got there. 12 years is a long time, and I feel like I've lost an old neighbour who I hated, but I refused to move just because of them.
Expect more ramblings, now that I have nowhere else to post them.
De-bloating my piece of the web
While tackling a TODO task on a client's mobile web app, I noticed it was loading nearly 15Mb of non-app scripts. This included several third-party marketing/user assistance/analytics scripts, CDN hosted libraries, some ad scripts, and their embedded videos where also loading their own cornucopia of scripts, cookies, and trackers. FIFTEEN MEGABYTES! I sighed as I injected the 13th "user-experience-enhancing" tool into the app…
"Oh the modern web." I lamented - my tired smugness tinged with sadness - "Why can't you be more like my blog. It's a beacon. An oasis in this privacy-hostile, bloated world. No tracking, no ads, no client-side frameworks. Just hand-rolled, artisanal code - the epitome of integrity… what the web should be."
Then, out of interest, I opened a dev console on mrspeaker.net.
What I saw shook me to my very core.
Read on for more »Where the ECMA 262 1st Edition did they come from?
Following on from my recent blog post "Where the HTML4.0 did they come from" (October 2005)... I just found two native JavaScript constants that I have hardcoded *at least* 100 times over the years:
Math.SQRT2;
Math.SQRT1_2;I guess I should be forgiven for not knowing about them yet, they've only been there since 1997.
Farm to Table: A postmortem
You have 48 hours of adventuring time in a country you've *never* been to, and *may never* return. By random chance, There is a 48 hour game jam happening simultaneously. A sacrifice must be made: the game or the experience? Choose wisely.
...
Trick question! You can do both, poorly! Welcome to my Ludum Dare 43 entry for the theme "Sacrifices must be made". My game - Farm To Table - has you training your workers, breeding them to improve, and possibly grinding them up to make the tastiest burgers in the business!
The gameplay centers around selecting the lil' workers from the queue and assigning them to different tasks: farming, cooking, breeding, and, well, getting crushed into mince meat.
Oops, forgot about you
I may have forgotten to maintain and update the ol' mrspeaker.net. Sorry about that - I'll get right on it!
These are my Emacs days
I've been using Atom as my primary editor for several years now. But recently there's been a tidal wave of support for VS Code. It swept through the tech industry and washed away Atom and Sublime and friends. I figured it was fruitless to fight the trend, so I switched to Emacs.
Now that I reflect on it, it's been a long time coming. From early on I suspected it would end this way. Somehow I intrinsically knew it would eventually happen.
It happened.
Me n’ Carl Sagan hand-rolling some WebGL2
Imagine, if you may, an apple sitting happily on your desk. One day, and in a manner causing much confusion to our apple friend - you wrote some weird WebGL2 thing from scratch. From the apple's perspective, it might look something like this.
However, from a source code's point of view it would look more like this.
Space.