21-05-15
Here is a false widow spider found on my water butt (rain barrel as Americans maybe call it). False widows are mostly harmless. This one looks like a big healthy glossy female with a distinct (if pretty goofy-looking) skull pattern. I also found a smaller one unfortunately drowned in another water tub nearby.
21-05-14
I finally got to read (the published parts of) Dennis Nilsen's autobiography, which I had been wanting to do for almost a decade. It's impossible to 'review' the book - if that sort of thing is your cup of tea, I'm sure you're already planning to read it, and if it isn't then you won't. Here are some short thoughts on it anyway.
- He was allowed to keep birds in prison, which is nice. I'm not sure if this is still allowed as one BBC article says no new birds are allowed to be purchased as of 2015.
- He watched Psychoville and took note of being named in it. I'm sure Reece Shearsmith is happy.
- He's one of those "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member" people. Somehow he manages to insist that he's utterly alone and it would be disastrous if the army found out he was gay, while being surrounded by obvious homosexuals and constant gay gossip (the army isn't exactly the most heterosexual of places). It's more his contempt for the other people around him that keeps him from feeling included in the army, union or prison. I think we all know somebody like that or maybe can relate to it. I get the feeling he goes out of his way to pair up with people he thinks are beneath him.
- The book has a few pages of photographs which includes the paintings that Nilsen talks about, which was useful and appreciated as they would otherwise be difficult to track down based on his descriptions.
- Most of the book is made up of mundane but fairly amusing gripes about prison. If you're more interested in the sensational parts, then stick with Killing for Company (which on the whole seemed fairly accurate despite Nilsen moaning about it).
- When will we get to hear his musical compositions!?
21-04-18
Today's find is this neat minimal implementation of the Spore crature creator in Unity.
I like this implementation because it's so simple and focused. It uses the built-in capabilities of Unity well to get something up and running quickly.
Here are notes on the actual implementation of Spore: Chris Hecker Liner Notes for Spore. The video is fun because it shows that you don't necessarily need to know about 4th order polynomials or compact isocontours, you can get pretty far with your ideas just by using the tools available.
The Spore creator is something that should have been right up my alley, but I actually never spent much time playing with it. It was easy to make blobby reptilian things but hard to make appealing mammal-like animals. 3D isn't kind to imaginary creatures. Spore and Creatures 3 aged poorly compared to Petz and C1/2.
21-04-17
Haven't updated in a while because I've been working on a Petz renderer and editor. You can check it out at LnzLive on Github.
Today's find is the design documents and demos for The Sims.
Hackernews discussion with comments from developer Don Hopkins
GDC talk about emergent storytelling and story trees
Some stuff I found particularly interesting:
I like how to-the-point the document comments are. As a professional developer I'm constantly being told to be more polite and understanding, ask questions on PRs rather than making statements, don't use judgemental words like "weird" or "bad". No such etiquette here. "Clicking and holding is a horrible user interface technique. Don't do it!", "This whole rotation scheme is TERRIBLE", "RAT HOLE!". I love it, but I've never worked anywhere where that would be acceptable.
They thought fire would be too difficult to implement, but wanted a whole bizarre system of playing your own music and syncing up the Sims' moods and actions to it (including, ahem, Sim orgasms). The 'play your own music' thing was big in the 90s and for some reason got people very excited. I remember in some PS1 games you could take out the game disc and replace it with a music CD to load your own music into the game. We were easily amazed back then.
The original personality traits included Generous/Greedy and Smart/Stupid. I suspect these were dropped because it's too hard to express them in Sim behaviour.
The story trees (which almost certainly didn't exist in Sims 1) are fascinating, especially that they were authored manually but still allow for a degree of emergent behaviour. I recommend watching the GDC talk even if you're just a player and not a programmer.