Category: Technology
From the perspective of a full time programmer and hobbyist game developer – interesting tech with a mix of think pieces about the way technology shapes our lives
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Vacuous Social Data Sharing
It’s the not so secret, dirty secret of our modern lives. We live in a golden age of free services that make our lives interconnected on levels that our ancestors couldn’t even fathom. Instantaneous realtime interactive updates and vision of someone on the other side of the planet. For free!! We really do live the utopian…
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My Shout – App Idea
With everyone working from home a lot more these days, especially in the face of a global pandemic with self isolation in effect in most place still, it becomes tricky to make good on that old “buy you a coffee” promise to your friends &/or coworkers. My Shout is the idea for a service to…
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Embracing the Procedural
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve had a chance to update regarding Galliventurer. After playing around a fair bit with backends and trying a number of different nosql databases, one of which has been running pretty solidly with the existing discovered universe of a few hundred (470+ presently) stars and their 24k+ satellite bodies.…
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Our Robot Overlords
Artificial intelligence is often touted as the future demise of the human race. We’ve all heard it, the robots will either wipe us out or rule us with an iron fist, the last being quite literal. Call me a niave optimist, but truly intelligent artificial sentience won’t be like us. Our species is a by-product…
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Introductory Scene – The Lore of Galliventurer
* muttering accompanied by beeps/electric signal noises * “Huh, how’d you get here? Just when I’d finally resigned myself to floating aimlessly through the endless void of spa- woah hold up, you’re old! Positively ancient, in point of fact, when are you from?! The early 21st century or something? I didn’t realize soul travel* was…
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Lists on lists on lists
It’s alive!! Well the very infantile functional proof of concept for the idea that is the procedural generation for the universe of Galliventurer is alive. Above is the result of a single generation run at the time of writing (hopefully I remember to save a copy of that function and update the call as it…
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Game Realism – Should it Matter?
Something I’ve been battling with recently when contemplating the procedural universe generation for Galliventurer. How realistic should the properties of celestial objects be? In the real world/universe, star’s are visible colours because of their size & temperature, which in turn is based on: their age, elemental composition, and the type of fusion happening within. But…
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Random Generation That’s Not So Random
While I do want the Galliventurer universe to be procedurally & randomly generated, I don’t want it to be truly random. There needs to be a modicum of probability involved. Some weighting so that some things are rarer than others. After all we can have too many diamond covered planets or uranium based suns –…
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Galliventurer – Dreaming of a Universe
n. Galliventurer – one who adventures whilst gallivanting. We have a name. A compound of the words gallivanter & adventurer it fits the game quite nicely. It will also be the name of the player’s ship (though, you may be able to have many ships throughout the game). Also trying something a little different for…
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Documenting My Lack of Documentation
This is a public shaming. No quarter will be given, no merciful anonymity or private repo’s will suffice to hide my transgressions. I wrote a large complex recursive piece of functionality that was all but absent of documentation! At the time everything seemed so simple, so straight forward. I thought anyone on my team could…
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