the fragile flower of my youth
was destroyed in the fire to consume my imperfection
i am not under the impression that I am whole
or less than so
its a foolish man who turns from the right road
he has found
something worth burning
will purchase you a warm night

I doodle in my brain, I write in the sand of my brain. I was thinking about this today, because the house I proposed to my wife in was uprooted and ground to bits by machinery. We don’t have a lot from those early days; no friends (just family) from those days. I am retrospective by nature. I appreciate where I am, and if I feel depressed, it is only because I realize I have so much more to do before I am done. I brought my son home to that home, I started my new life there.

They tore the house down, it was never really mine, and I lived there for such a short time, but it was where it all began, and I started to get teary eyed as we drove away from the place, just thinking about what it meant, and what happened there. You don’t know what it meant; you weren’t there, you will have your own experiences, or have had them.

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.