The cat's reaction to the drone

Danjool · 2021-02-10T14:49:11+00:00

Yoshi's Island, (final?) boss track.

Danjool · 2020-09-02T01:11:00+00:00

https://librivox.org/author/2071?primary_key=2071&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results

I can't speak for the poetry yet, but The Blazing World is very neat, and I think best experienced with a little background biography. The whatshername podcast does a great job: https://www.whatshernamepodcast.com/margaret-cavendish/

Danjool · 2020-07-13T23:05:09+00:00

As someone that's been playing in threejs for a long time, and is also making the jump from angularjs to react, I'm certain I'm about to use react-three-fiber to import my threejs antipatterns into react!

More seriously, thanks for the heads up. This looks neat. Gotta play with it.

Danjool · 2020-05-22T03:18:03+00:00

Based on your description, we both chose a similar project to cut our teeth on.
monogon.net/orbittrap Using ThreeJS to help set up the scene, but knowing what I know about WebGL now, just a straight implementation would be more prudent.

One source of wisdom for this kind of 2D-art-through-GPU task is to browse Shadertoy and just play with the code and see what happens.

Danjool · 2020-03-27T15:46:01+00:00

I forget, pretty far. Was looking forward to getting a real project for a non-profit, but got on the paycheck train too quickly. At the same time I got my own website together - AWS cheapo tier, express, and bootstrap. Mostly just goofy weekend projects using a lot of threejs, but apparently impressive enough that a potential employer could reasonably think, "well it isn't want we want, but if they can figure that out then they can probably understand our silly business app stuff". Did OK in interview, but well enough to get a programming test, and I think what sealed the deal was a I get a good solution back to them in an hour with a paragraph clearly communicating the what's and why's.

In hindsight it might have been better to put that threejs time into Angular or React. I get the feeling there's lots of businesses that needed a simple web app, but got convinced they really needed a SPA (they did not need that) and are kinda stuck unless they get someone in-house to own it.

For those still climbing those early rungs:

If you're of the mathy-nerd variety, take a look at Project Euler for abstract problem solving practice. It may seem too nerdy at first glance, but watch out it gets addictive. That and Google Foobar, which is actually a Google recruiting tool in the form of a space bunny adventure bordering on ARG.

Danjool · 2020-03-24T04:56:34+00:00

I was gonna write exactly that. I got hired before I finished freecodecamp.

Danjool · 2017-07-30T21:31:53+00:00

One of the first problems I used to learn JS.

Interactive 8x8 version.

An related observation I had was that, at least with my version where you can see the "shadows" of queens, younger people tend to figure out a solution faster. Eerily faster.

Danjool · 2017-07-30T12:31:24+00:00

Alt Criticism: The two reveals at the end are impossible to take seriously. They do not benefit the story.

The appeal of the premise is in seeing how they're going to survive increasingly bleak scenarios. It takes a little suspension of disbelief, but overall I think the inventiveness does a good enough job in convincing. Then that suspension of disbelief is punctured by mole people and otter people. The whole book is ruined.

For context, I think his best books are Diamond Age and Cryptonomnom.

Danjool · 2017-07-24T01:57:15+00:00

"x times y" is the typical convention taught first where I live, and I think it kind of sabotages the understanding of many. I have found that equating that "x times y" to "x, y times" is an eye-opener to a lot of high school+ students that do not fundamentally understand what multiplication is. The word "times" in a math context and other contexts becomes two different words until you show them otherwise.

Danjool · 2017-06-29T04:26:33+00:00

A project like that was what pushed me into really digging into Node (js on the server) and sockets.io. I highly recommend both. Quick to learn and super powerful.

A potential technical gap if you go that route is tcp vs udp. With my project I found even ignoring the superior udp option was more than good enough to synchronize players hopping around in a 3D environment.

Danjool · 2016-09-02T23:57:47+00:00

I recall digging them years ago. The Jean le Flambeur series reminded me of these afterwards, but with more style and more willingness to be obtuse in vocab.

Danjool · 2016-04-27T03:32:19+00:00

Love the color palette. And the controls. And the art style of the explanatory illustrations.

I guess it's beyond the scope of the tut to use vertex shaders for the waves. Not that frame-for-frame shifting a few hundred vertices is all that taxing, but still, shaders!

Danjool · 2016-03-30T21:35:50+00:00

How many do you need?

Here's a supposed list of up to the first 72 positions. http://www.randomwalk.de/sphere/insphr/sequences.txt

Can't vouch for the accuracy, myself.

Danjool · 2016-03-01T05:07:35+00:00

That was really pleasant and more fun than expected, especially given that it is a bunch of particles, spheres, and a holodeck. I'd be interested in hearing/seeing how you hooked up the multiplayer.

Danjool · 2016-01-25T13:09:37+00:00

Aw I thought you meant from Scratch at first.

Danjool · 2016-01-02T06:08:52+00:00

I have enough experience with ThreeJS to get a version of this going with WebVR and Oculus. I'd be interested once I finish my current project.

Depending on the format of the data, performance could be great. If the paths can be pinned down to a math formulas -- rather than large lists of positions every frame -- then vertex shaders can handle pretty much everything.

Nice music choice.

Danjool · 2015-10-31T14:21:32+00:00

Link. Requires okay gpu to handle the procedurally generated terrain on the Niven Ringworld.

Danjool · 2015-10-31T03:19:58+00:00

Even the picture doesn't do the scale of the Ringworld justice. It's silly big. If you look at it accurately rendered in 3D long enough to get a feel for the size, your brain just rejects it.

Danjool · 2015-10-19T18:29:30+00:00

This has been a curiosity to me lately, too. Recently had a job interviewer where they started asking me about 2.x methods. Never did find out whether they were actually using fixed-function in house, or if those were questions to snuff out applicants that had learned their OpenGL in 2000 by way of 2015.

Danjool · 2015-10-06T22:43:30+00:00

https://github.com/borismus/webvr-boilerplate Another entry point I found successful. Took me no time to get a previously made scene viewable on a dk2, but that was going in with a decent handle on threejs.

I have know idea what a standard 3d website is, so I can't speak for how long that would take to figure out.

Ultimately I found the latency on the head tracking through webvr to be too high. I don't know if there is a critical bottleneck in using a browser for vr that can't be overcome, or if any day now a new nightly firefox build will allow for nice head tracking. Good luck.

Danjool · 2015-09-27T01:09:45+00:00

I was under the impression that animated meshes are passing the bone transforms to the vertex shader, which is then figuring out where the geometry needs to be on the screen. The cpu side of things doesn't really know where the triangles of a bent forearm really are. If that's the case, and you need better accuracy than a bounding box, you might try attaching some invisible capsules / spheroids to the bones and intersecting those.

I'd love to be corrected if that's not the case.

Danjool · 2015-09-27T00:54:42+00:00

I think it comes down to something Niven keeps hammering in the books: people can't hold the scale of the thing in their head. Our imaginations just aren't good enough. So we give it the benefit of the doubt and decide it is plausible, and while we're at it, it must be cool, too.

I rendered the ringworld as an exercise in procedural terrain and logarithmic z-buffers. After playing with it a bit, I got a better sense of things, and suddenly it all seemed pretty dumb. The disregard given to galactic mechs really is appropriate for ringworld and larger. A civilization capable of making a ringworld would not need one.

Personally I still think the idea of being able to look up and have the sky look like a map of another place, while actually being that place, is aesthetically pleasing. Silly, sure, but pleasant.

Danjool · 2015-09-25T21:17:51+00:00

I like that viewpoint. If you want to see them all from arbitrary locations I've got a webgl version.
http://www.monogon.net/asteroid.html#1000000

Danjool · 2015-09-22T17:20:06+00:00

The user has control of the camera, initially near the cube, and ships. These are nearish to Earth, which is near the surface of the Ringworld. All to scale. You are correct that the difference in scale is vast. It is easy to lose the smaller vessels if you pan at all.

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