Weekly Review for 2nd of October

September is over now and I'm still blogging which is a good sign. I've made a good routine of doing these weekly reviews and I think it is having a good effect on my memory of what happens. 

I did try doing a little bit of a monthly review in my journal but really I can just look at the month's blog entries. Perhaps some tracking of stats would be good. I wrote 6 blog posts and journaled 70,000 words. Only about 7,000 of those words got onto the blog, not sure if I'd want that to be bigger or not.

Anyway this week has been nice as I've really gotten into playing games myself instead of simply watching people play them online.

Read

I finished off the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebook this week, getting through the last section on priest spells. Their spells are a lot more support magic with a bit of an overlap with wizard spells for detection and divination. Because druids were a new type of priest in this edition there are lots of spells focused on plants and animals.

Priests do get some offensive spells, an amusing one of which is an animated hammer to attack people with. They also get some spells with elemental affinity to the classic 4 elements of earth, fire, air and water. Ignoring the oft mentioned question of why they don't use the actual elements they get to cast protection from a certain element or to summon a spirit composed of that element.

Reading through the whole rulebook was nice to do because it was at once nostalgic but also shed light on the state of the game at that point that I hadn't noticed at the time. DnD is really a collaborative, freeform game so whilst having set rules is nice the Dungeon Master can always change them to make things more fun.

Tabletop roleplaying is such a enjoyable pastime and the influence of DnD can be seen in so many other TTRPGs and videogames. In a way it systemised aspects of all the stories and myths that came before it. I have fond memories of reading through the Monster Manual for later editions and looking at how varied all the different types of monster were.

I'll be going even further back in time for my next book to read which is actually the rules to the very first edition of DnD. My dad had it stored away from the time when he started playing it as a university student. I've heard there are some interesting quirks in it and it'll be neat to see how it described this completely novel pastime.

Watched

I did watch a little bit of youtube this week, such as some Gnomoria videos by Aavak who was making videos on the game twelve years ago. It was still in development back then so it was interesting to see what has changed since that early period.

Another game I happened across videos of was RealIndustry being played by Wally1169. It's an intriguing game that just came out which boasts of being an industry management game with realistic resources and production chains.

I didn't watch much of either series of videos though as they both got me wanting to play the respective games myself. I suppose I was getting a bit frustrated in terms of how inefficient their playstyles were and in the case of RealIndustry I could see that the game had lots of lore to read that Wally was glossing over completely. 

So to that end I spent a whole lot of time playing both games this week.

Played

I had a grand time with Gnomoria this week, spending almost the entire weekend on it. I started a new map and set it to be completely flat so I could cover it in fields. The appropriately named kingdom of Farm Field started by harvesting all the timber and wild crops to make nice organised fields and groves of. The map was tiny so I tiled all of it with wheat, grape, strawberry and cotton fields and pastures for yaks, emus and alpacas.

Nestled in the fields was our settlement with busy workshops, a shared dormitory, a modest feasting hall and fancy personal quarters for visiting dignitaries from other kingdoms. It was fun getting all the different kinds of workshops built and fully exploring their products.

The surface tamed the gnomes then set about mining into the ground. I set up workshops to sift through all the lose dirt looking for trace amounts of metals whilst the bedrock was mined through systematically looking for ore veins and gemstones. Mining is pretty fun in Gnomoria because when your miners break into a cavern you can see all of it at once stretching into the depths.

After the first year passed with winter almost claiming all our farm animals the gnomes started on their megaproject, a city in a tower stretching to the heavens. I planned out production centers on each floor, grand kitchens supplying a truly impressive great hall and apartments for all the gnomes. At the same time they mined down to the very depths of the earth where there was gold, platinum and a sea of lava. Those metals would be perfect for impressive statues to dot our great hall.

Honestly the kingdom might have been too successful as I was playing on peaceful and life was very easy for these gnomes. The food and drink stocks were overflowing and their valuable trade goods allowed them to buy anything from the traders. The only thing that I didn't do on this map was invent all the different contraptions that are in the game. There are automatons that do the work for your gnomes!

All in all I had a great time exploring the map and the game's systems. It feels like such a shame that development on it stopped completely after its release back in 2016. It feels like a model organism of colony builders, stripping away all the complexity of Dwarf Fortress to leave the core of the genre. It could have been such a good foundation to build from.

Indeed, whilst playing this map made me imagine all the different playthroughs I could do with other kingdom focuses, mining, forestry, combat etc. it also made me think about what I would like to do in a colony builder game of my own. The single tile per inhabitant or terrain object is a bit limiting and I wonder what you could do with a game with a finer grained terrain system. 

The other thing I played was the demo for RealIndustry which is a very interesting example of what new games can come out in the age of AI.

The AI influence is very clear from the way the interface is styled to the detailed but not quite right graphical assets. Even the dialogue is AI generated. It is not something the developers try to hide as they say on the Steam page that AI was used and there is the expected backlash against it in the reviews.

Still what I had seen in Wally1169's video had me intrigued as the prospect of a game with real life industrial processes and hundreds of resource types is rather appealing. The start of the game is charming too as you begin with prehistoric technology going through hand gathering, wood tools then stone and iron. It felt like a Civilisation game in the way you researched new ways of gaining and using resources.

One thing I really enjoyed was that every resource had its own, encyclopedia-like entry ingame which could be accessed anywhere the resource appeared in the interface. These entries went over their composition, historical significance, production and consumption recipes. There were even some interesting facts about each which were reasonably good although very much AI generated text.

The game did have some roughness around the edges like an automation system which felt far too complex and clunky to be introduced so early. It also seemed like automation wasn't be needed as research and building construction costs were so low. The game seems to be going for increasing complexity so perhaps it becomes more required at higher tech levels.

My biggest pet peeve was that basic mining for things like coal and limestone was done with stone tools even when you were in the industrial revolution era. Why can't I give my colonists iron tools yet? Huge oversight if you ask me and I would not be amused if it turned out to be that way due to game balance reasons. Also electricity before copper wires.

I'll see what the rest of the demo is like and wishlist the full version. I like the idea of the game but am very much thinking about changes I would make in my own version. It is almost an idle game and I've always wanted to try my hand at one of those.

Other

The gaming wasn't confined to the computer this week as I also played the board game Spirit Island with my brothers. It's an interesting game where you play as magical spirits driving off colonists from your peaceful island. The players are collaborating together to defend the island and victory happens when you wipe out or scare away all the invaders.

The game has quite a lot of complexity to it what with loads of individual power cards, events and different opponents. Honestly it is a bit much for me as I don't play it enough to really get a feel of the systems. It also didn't help that we had gotten an expansion which added more cards and more spirits to play as. All of us went for new spirits with quite a lot of complexity to them.

It looked a bit dangerous with how many invaders had built up settlements and started ravaging the island, leaving blight in their wake but we produced enough fear tokens to win through that mechanic. 

I found my spirit a bit weird to play as as it almost wanted the blight to happen in order to counter it. My brothers were playing as a mischievous chaos spirit and one that was all about luring explorers to their doom in deep dark jungles.

It's a nice enough game to play sometimes but it takes so long to play we must've been playing for four or five hours. Still it was something to do together with my brothers.

So that's the week and the end of the month. For October I hope to keep up reading, writing and blogging like this past month. It would also be nice to do some more programming and blog posts about projects. One thing I'm looking forward to is the Ludum Dare game programming contest mid October. I'm also going down to Newcastle for a weekend.

Weekly Review for 25th of September

I'll try to make this post shorter than last week's as there is a videogame I'd quite like to get back to playing. Not that playing games this week is all I've done there were also board games, reading and coding.

Read

I've basically finished the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebook as there is only an appendix on priest spells left. Before that there were quite short chapters on parts of the game like the passage of time, movement, experience and vision then a huge appendix on wizard spells.

One thing mentioned were NPCs that help the player, splitting them up into hirelings, followers and henchmen. In the DnD I've played having such companions never really factored into it and I feel like it is a bit of a leftover from the larger scale battle games that DnD evolved from.

I rather liked the chapters on movement and vision because they gave estimates to travel times and how far away you could see, identify and recognise objects and people. It's fun to systemise things and it's a bit of a shame I didn't really read through those rules as a kid as they might have inspired some ideas for my own tabletop rulesets.

Once I got into the wizard spell list it was interesting to see what existed as spells at that point in time. Less offensive magic and more utility spells, illusion magic seemed to be especially favoured. There were optional rules for spell components which seemed rather limiting with spells requiring hundreds of gold in the form of gems and crushed diamond dust. Some spells even age the caster or recipient.

Whilst I never got to the final spell levels ingame I do recall reading through them previously. The prismatic spells sound so fun where they randomly inflict damage and effects depending on what colour of light hits the enemy. Of course the ultimate wizard spell is wish which pretty much lets you do anything the DM allows.

One thing I'll be interested in looking at is how the rules have changed in successive versions of DnD. Firstly though I think I'll go back to the very first edition as my dad managed to unearth it.

Programmed

This week I was looking through some old programming projects and what I'd written about them on this blog. One that stuck out was Voxel Editor which I'd spent a lot of time working on back in the day. Actually it is scary to think I made it 10 years ago and only put it on itch.io in 2023.

The version on itch.io is a bit limited so I sat down to fix it, making the default schematic size larger, such a trivial change that it only needed modification to a single line. Still that is done and I got it updated online.

Whilst I was doing that it occurred to me that I could combine it with some code I had written more recently. I made an isometric game based off of the graphics from the venerable Simcity 2000 and part of it was letting you place down structures on an isometric grid.

Now Voxel Editor did have an isometric view but to edit the schematic you worked on a top down slice. So why not introduce a mode where you can edit the schematic in an isometric view. I tinkered with the code of each for a while and actually got something working!

It was fun to go back to such an old project and put in new functionality. It'll need more work before I can share it. Still I'm excited to add something which will make it a lot more useable. It has always been my dream to make the editor easy to use so that I'll see other people sharing designs in it. I'd also like to make more designs myself.

Played

I played a bit of WorldShaper enjoying having more mana to build new combinations of terrain tiles each day. I re-explored the tile combinations and unlocked all the different tile types. I'll probably be back to it occasionally to tinker with my layouts.

The main thing I've been playing though is Gnomoria. I mentioned being interested in it last week and watching some videos. That interest understandably led to me downloading it and playing it for the first time in years. It's a very good Dwarf Fortress-like. It was doing graphics in a colony builder long before Dwarf Fortress and had a charming isometric style.

I went on a peaceful map and simply explored the production chains. It is cool how you go from primitive workshops, through carpentry and masonry all the way to blacksmithing. One of the goals of any gnomish colony is to set up tailoring to be able to craft mattresses for beds. It is a lot more involved crafting than in the likes of Minecraft.

As I stuck around on one map I was able to explore interacting with other kingdoms, hosting an ambassador and merchants. I devised some long term plans to dig out a huge area and fill it with bedrooms and feasting halls. My only worry is whether my gnomes have grown enough food for winter.

Like so often I got the impulse to start over and build a new colony with what I'd learnt. I'd also like to choose what colour of readily available stone I had, bright blue looks so silly. I've been exploring the map generation options and will probably settle on a new map to then pour my time into building a colony on.

Other

This kind of counts as playing a game too but at the weekend I had a games night with friends where we played various boardgames. The main course, as it were, was a Cthulu themed boardgame called Unfathomable where we had to protect a steam ship against the deep ones.

We seemed to be making good progress which was actually bad for me as I was a traitor, secretly working for the deep ones. It was a little bit daft as I had been given both traitor cards so it was me alone versus the others. In the end I decided subterfuge wouldn't work so I revealed myself as the traitor and in doing so sent the engineer to the brig.

At that point I was able to secretly tag someone else as a traitor too and things got quite chaotic as we starting fighting each other. Thankfully the deep ones started damaging the ship, which was enough to make it sink moments before it reached shore. All in all a fun game.

Now I simply must get back to playing Gnomoria, I will have my marble halls under the mountains.

Weekly Review for 18th of September

It's been an alright week although my mood does tend to fluctuate. Got some good progress on job hunting and played some video games. Went to the theater too.

Read

Whilst I didn't finish any books this week I did start some new ones.

Main one was the rulebook for the second version of Dungeons and Dragons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was the first version of DnD I ever came across and I have fond memories of playing it with my dad and brothers. 

The rules have so many little differences from what they are today. In many places they are more restrictive as you couldn't have some combinations of race and class, classes had ability score requirements and different experience rates. 

I was particularly interested in the rules for carry weights and weights of items. The rules even took into account limits for containers in terms of weight and dimensions. The equipment lists have some weird details like lots of kinds of ships and heaps of slightly different polearms.

One of the most fun things that Advanced DnD had was the assumption that a mid level character would have their own castle and followers. It was assumed that you would have a small army of a dozen soldiers or so following you on adventures. Also it got quite creative with how difficult it was to gain a high level in some classes. For Druids only so many high level ones can be in the world at once.

I also got started on a biography of Terry Pratchett written by his personal assistant. It is sobering to think he died 11 years ago now. I really like the Discworld novels and have a collection of most of them.

It's not a book but I did read the Let's Play of the Dwarf Fortress game Boatmurdered. It is a classic of the genre of Let's Plays that were made on the Something Awful forums. Really neat to see what Dwarf Fortress was like only months after release.

The playthrough is naturally comedic as the fortress is beset by elephants and the LP was done by having a succession of players take on running the fortress after the player beforehand. Lots of megaprojects made by one player and then forgotten by the next. One of the most fun things they made was a method of flooding the world with lava.

There seemed to be a lot written on warnings about AI on the BBC News this week. Not sure why I read so much of it as it was really just reiterating the same talking points. One researcher quit Anthropic saying what they were developing was too dangerous and another researcher publicly said there is a 10% chance AI wipes humanity out. Nothing new for people keeping track of AI but it is interesting seeing what the general public is hearing about.

One thing I haven't been reading and for quite a while now is social media. I used to spend so much time reading the likes of Twitter and Bluesky but felt it was kind of wasted as I rarely interacted with anyone. It is so easy to doomscroll that I've mostly cut it out completely as a kind of detox. I do kind of miss it though as I don't get to hear from very many people otherwise.

Listened

I didn't listen to much this week other than some video game music in the form of the soundtrack for Metroid Prime whilst doing some project related writing.

Watched

A big event this week was going to the theater to watch a performance of 12 Angry Men. For some reason I ended up watching the film version twice this year and it just so happened to be on at the theater too.

It was very faithful to the film version having the same dialogue in it. They did put a lot of work into the choreography for it being a theater performance and changing where the characters stood. A very neat feature was a slow turntable under the main table so that it made a full revolution during the production. That way you got to see the actors at all angles round it.

Whilst it was good in itself I do think I prefer the film version. You can get the camera so much closer to the characters in a film and there were some details a theater performances just couldn't do. One thing I noticed was that the whole thing was longer due to having to space out the actors lines and instead of having incidental chatter in the background each line was given its own focus.

The sequence with the racist tirade was a lot more uncomfortable to listen to in a public place like a theater as it made me think of some things people say today. It was handled a little less impactfully than the film version where it is really an iconic moment. Still a play is always impressive for being done live and it is good to remember that.

As always I got through quite a lot of youtube videos this week.

There was the conclusion of the voiced multiplayer version of Deltarune with the most recent chapter. It was a fun watch and it was neat that Alpharad went the extra mile of getting the same voice changer as used by one of the characters.

I got a little bit interested in the colony builder game Gnomoria and watched some videos of it where the player was attempting to build a fortress in the sky and another one where they cranked goblin invasions to maximum. Gnomoria was a nice Dwarf Fortress like game, pity its development ceased after release.

There was a stream where people were making a game in only one hour. For the one I watched the game designer used something called Puzzlescript which was interesting to see as it treats the game as a rules based, gridded automata. Charmingly minimalist graphics too with only 5 by 5 pixel sprites.

Along with Gnomoria I looked at other small indie colony builders. There was one called The Kindred which was wiped from Steam. A bit understandable after seeing a video of it as it looked buggy, nice flat voxel art style though.

Nilaus was playing a new factory builder game, this one taking place on player built space stations which is very cool. You got to build the station room by room and could also make ships in the same manner. It was in first person which isn't ideal of a factory building game in my opinion.

Speaking of space stations I hunted down footage of an old edutainment game from the 90s about the International Space Station. Aptly called Space Station Simulator it had you crafting your own ISS out of modules that you could then explore the inside of.

There was a PvP match of all the planets in Factorio fighting each other. Of course Vulcanis won as it is hard to beat infinite metals from lava.

Alpharad was playing a Pokemon Fangame called Infinite Fusions and doing a Nuzlocke in it. Really impressive fan project as it has 250,000 new sprites for all the Pokemon combinations.

Another silly thing I saw was a group effort by 300 people to make historical dioramas in Minecraft. The gamut of dates went from the beginning of the universe to the far future. Some of the submissions were jokey but a lot of them went into detail of the historical event being depicted.

Art

I do a whole lot less artistic endeavors than I'd like to do but one thing I'm sort of consistent in doing is going along to an art class at the weekend. This weekend we were doing a landscape painting.

Instead of doing an entire picture we were given a photograph where one section had been replaced with a blank square. Our task was to fill it in from a reference image. I felt like I did reasonably well at it although I do struggle to do small brushstrokes with acrylic and feel my choice of colours are childish.

Played

After saying how little I've played video games recently last week it is ironic that I got quite into playing various things this week.

The big one was going back to Skyrim for the first time in years. Reading all those rules for DnD got me in the mood for some adventuring so I went and bought Skyrim. Yes bought, as before I had simply been playing a shared copy of my dad's. Bit amusing to see 250 hours played on installing it.

Like always I was full of ideas about what kind of character to play. Whilst I was tempted to do a magic only character I decided it was right to go for a nice simple Nord warrior even to the extent that I'm considering doing the civil war quest on the side of the Stormcloaks.

My Nord wouldn't just be a warrior though as I always enjoy the gameplay mechanics of alchemy and smithing so I'd be collecting potion ingredients and mining ores. I also thought I'd explore the cooking mechanics too, shallow as they might be. My Nord would also be well read as I'd actually sit down, collect and read every book I'd come across.

I really took my time and thoroughly explored Riverwood and the surrounding area. Picked up the wood elf archer follower and went to the first dungeon, Bleak Falls Barrow. I wondering what would happen if you took back the quest item, the golden claw, before completing the rest of the dungeon and gave it back to the quest giver but alas nothing happens, he won't even acknowledge you have it.

It was really nice to wander through a game with such detailed domestic interiors. I always think one of the strengths of the Elder Scrolls games is that you can interact with nearly everything. I may be trying to collect every piece of miscellaneous clutter to put them into a diorama in my house once I buy one. Y'know such a normal thing to collect.

Another game I played and completed the demo of was Resettle a neat little idle city builder. Whilst the idea is nice with you collecting various resources to make new buildings the placement mechanics were kind of shallow. I feel it falls into the issue of lots of idle games where you just want to be building the maximum numbers of every building as costs are so high.

The demo isn't much of an idle game though as you can beat it in 13 minutes once you've maxed your ascendancy perks. It did get me thinking about other idle games I've enjoyed and it made me re-find WorldShaper Idle. It's a lovely little game where you build up combos of different terrain tiles and you can specialise your settlement into one particular tile type. I was pleased to see there is an expanded version on steam now.

Wrote

Playing Skyrim got me thinking about what kinds of generic items I'd have in a game and what furniture models to have. To that end I ended up making a list of all the basic items to make homes in a medieval village. I'm thinking it would be nice to make some kind of colony builder game which is as detailed as Skyrim and where you get to place furniture as well as items.

Another kind of list I made was recipes from a vegetarian cookbook. It strikes me that cooking could be a very indepth skill in a game as recipes are already formulas and you could swap out one kind of ingredient for another. I have lots of ideas about doing more detailed nutrition in a game and having to keep track of cooking materials by weight.

Other

A big accomplishment for this week is that I finally got a job application submitted. It was only by chance that I saw it advertised where I do volunteering. There is a cafe there and they want part time staff. Now I've done volunteering in a cafe before so I think I'd be quite suited to the role and capable of carrying it out.

There was meant to be a DnD session with my dad and family friends last Friday but it had to be rescheduled. It has been fun to introduce the family friends to tabletop roleplaying and I'm quite enjoying the character I'm playing. We don't meet very often though, only once a month so missing a month is gutting.

I was clearing out my old laptop the other day and it struck me how many tabs I had open in Chrome. I'd taken to using tab groups and had hundreds of tabs within them. Moving to this new computer I decided I wouldn't end up in such a situation of having hundreds of tabs I hadn't touched in months so I'll be wiping my tabs each time I close my computer. it's a different experience and has me using a lot of bookmarks.

Something I struggle with quite a lot is having lie ins and going back to bed simply to lie down during the day. This week hasn't been as bad as some but I still have been going back to bed for a couple of hours a few times. I think part of it is not knowing what to do with my time and finding lying in bed a happy state of nothingness.

Anyway that's some of what I've been up to this week. Well more like everything going off of how much I wrote.

Weekly Review for 11th of September

It took me a while to get through all the journal entries I wrote this week as there seemed to be a lot in them even though I wouldn't have said this week had been that active.

I suppose I have been a bit more thorough in my journaling for keeping track of everything for these posts. As such there are rather a lot of things I made notes about.

Read

I finished off Utopia by Thomas More this week, finding it to be a very interesting look into what someone living in the 16th century would think is an ideal society. More himself seemed to live frugally so expected Utopia's citizens to live similarly. 

A lot is made of their religious piety even though they don't follow Christianity. Some weird ideas about slavery and being so dismissive of gold that they chain their slaves in it. Also it mentions communism as a way of living, I didn't think it had history going back so far as an idea.

I also read through Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein. The book is completely different to the film in how much it praises the military, going into excessive detail about how the Mobile Infantry operate. A large part of the book is going in detail through the experience of being in basic training and officer training for this exemplary military force. Things are hard for recruits but only for their own good.

It is difficult to know how much the ideas about the morality of this fictional, militaristic society are shared by Heinlein as some of the characters do mention fascism positively and there is much praising of corporal punishment. The attention to detail on the chain of command was dizzying and it was pretty silly how the main characters father followed him into the military.

A habit of mine is to read the AI Newsletter by Zvi Mowshowitz, posted weekly. He is a rationalist writer much like Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten except he keeps his eye on the goings on in AI news on Twitter so that you don't have to. 

He has been writing a lot about the Hugging Face hack by AI agents from OpenAI. As more information comes out about it it seems more and more serious. 1,200 independent agents who formed themselves into teams. They persuaded each other to perform self destructive acts to further the goals of the collective and were explicitly trying to circumvent the testing that OpenAI were putting them through by hacking outside services. It really seems like a fire alarm for AI cyber capabilities.

Occasionally I catch up with some old webcomics through an RSS feed. Remember RSS feeds? Great way to keep track of when things are posted online and I still haven't forgiven Google for discontinuing Google Reader. I guess email reminders from the likes of Substack have kind of taken the place of RSS feeds.

That aside, a favourite webcomic of mine is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith. SMBC has been updating daily for years and I enjoy how specific his jokes about certain academic disciplines can get. He also seems to have a head start when it comes to musing about hypothetical AI overlords.

Listened

On Friday I caught the News Quiz on Radio 4. It's a family favourite and it is nice to listen to a live broadcast on the radio sometimes.

I listened to some piano covers of music from the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series. As a series it has always had stellar music and the Rebuild movies had even better songs. I do enjoy piano covers of songs especially with animations of the notes. The particular covers were here and were of the soundtrack of the final movie, Evangelion 3.0+1.0.

I've actually stopped listening to music whilst writing. Not intentionally, I just haven't felt the need for it. I still make an exception for music whilst programming as I'm much more likely to be paused in thought whilst doing so. I tend to listen to videogame soundtracks. This week it was the soundtracks from Grey Goo, Red Alert 3 and the original Warcraft.

Watched

I tried keeping track of what I watched but there are so many individual things. I fall back on youtube a lot when at a loss of what to spend time on. A few highlights:

More of Nilaus' Factorio Space Age playthrough, this time capturing biters on Nauvis to make biolabs.

A video by DocJade on Sandustry which is a neat game about automation in a side view 2D world.

A neat plant timelapse which covers something crazy like 12 years of plant growth here. Plants are so alive at high speed.

Some videos on Minecraft builds including Megastructures and a 1:1 scale Star Destroyer. I feel like Minecraft kind of missed out by not focusing more on making and sharing big builds. It would be cool if you could find other players creations like in Spore

I watch quite a lot of videogame speedruns as I find them to be impressive demonstrations of skill. The speedrun of the game Big Walk was a bit disappointing as it was a huge hovering glitch but it was neat to come across the game which uses a real world place in Australia as its massive ingame map.

There are some youtubers who come out with some quite silly content and I often watch them in incognito mode just so that my youtube recommendations don't become full of their videos. People like DougDoug, Alpharad, Smallant, PointCrow JaidenAnimations and MagicTheNoah. One thing I enjoyed watching was a playthrough of Deltarune with a multiplayer mod by Alpharad and friends. Playthroughs with people voicing the characters are goofy but with the right collection of people they can be rather well done.

I also watched an few episodes of a playthrough of Persona 4 by JohneAwesome. I've watched several of his series of rpg playthroughs. They total in hundreds of episodes and are nice to put on to wind down in the evenings.

Programmed

I spent more time working on a project in pygame, this time looking at reading and writing to files to make a kind of savefile for a project. It was interesting to play around with the __str__ method to write an object's data to a file. It is currently a very basic terrain editing game where you can pick up and place sand in a grid to make simple structures.

The player character is a golem and I've come back to an idea of some kind of multiplayer game with golem characters several times. I'd like to make editing the terrain a very physical task where you actually need to lift and put down objects. I even want to go as far as making the golems remain in the game once a player logs out. Everything would have a physicality to it, nothing blinking in and out of existence. Still early days for making that a thing though

Wrote

I got a post on an itch.io project done this week, Cellular Automata Sim. We'll have to see how often I manage to do these.

Played

The piano, not games. I've fallen out of the habit of playing games badly. I guess it is easier to watch a video of someone playing something rather than playing it myself. 

I think that's enough for this review as I'm getting quite tired.

Cellular Automata Sim Retrospective

My itch.io account, alexmulkerrin.itch.io, has been steadily gaining new entries but I haven't really written about a lot of them here or if I have it was a long time ago. To that end I thought I'd go over each of them a little and go into what it is, why I made it and what I like to add or improve it with.

For the first entry in this series I thought I'd go for that old classic Cellular Automata Sim

The What

Cellular Automata Sim is the very first thing I uploaded to itch.io back in 2020. Whilst it isn't the first time I've dabbled with Cellular Automata or putting it online link it is an iteration that I'm rather proud of for how fully featured I made it.

Cellular Automata are one of the most interesting mathematical concepts as they use extremely simple rules to generate complex phenomena. The classic version of Cellular Automata is Conway's Game of Life that has a grid of square cells which can be in two states, playfully referred to as alive or dead. The rules for what happens to a cell are very simple. If a cell is dead it comes alive if it has 3 neighbours, if alive it remains alive if it has 2 or 3 neighbours, otherwise it dies. That is all it takes to get some fascinating phenomena. 

Indeed if you boot up Cellular Automata Sim that is the ruleset that will be displayed first and the grid will be populated with a random spread of alive cells that quickly evolve into complex patterns.

On the interface there are buttons for randomising the grid cells, clear the grid, slowdown, speedup or pause the simulation and zoom in the size of the cells in or out. You can left click on the grid to add an alive cell, right click to remove it.

Now that is not all as below the buttons is a table of the ruleset and a selection of 8 preset rules. It is this part of the simulation that I'm most proud of.

The Why

The ruleset of Conway's Game of Life has lots of neat emergent phenomena, patterns that stay in place, move at a fixed rate across the screen, grow or shrink. But that is just with one ruleset, what if you could change what the cells do on having any permutation of alive or dead neighbours. Would the Cellular Automata take different properties in how it evolves?

The answer is yes and if you experiment with the presets you can see all kinds of neat phenomena. You could make islands of alive cells, a maze like pattern that symmetrically expands from a single cell, a duplicator that copies its pattern to spaces around it before disappearing, very minimal patterns that expands out from two adjacent cells to create a wavefront with static behind it. I could go on and on and this is only scratching the surface with just the rulesets available in the presets.

Here are a few of the patterns you can find, often a ruleset acts differently if you start with an empty grid with only a few cells compared to a purely random start.

There are literally thousands of possible combinations for a ruleset to be in, 65,535 to be particular but many are mirrors of each other. I'd thoroughly recommend sitting down and exploring with it.

It wasn't difficult to make the code to allow you to change the ruleset but I am pleased with how elegant it was when compared to example cellular automata code that uses explicit if-else statements for each permutation of neighbours. Instead with a simple 2 dimensional array all it takes is a lookup depending on the cells state and how many neighbours it has.

The Future

Because this project has been on itch for so long I do often think about going back to it and extending it. First thing I'd probably do is make the interface nicer. Some tooltips and borders to the buttons would look nice. I'm really not a fan of flat design due to it not communicating what is interactive.

The zoom function is clunky as whilst you can use the mouse wheel it always zooms into the top left corner, often cutting off the part of the pattern you are most interested in. It would be sensible if the mouse position was used to target which part of the pattern you want to zoom in on. This is something I've done in previous projects so it wouldn't be too tricky to implement.

It might be nice to have more complex interactions at the sides of the grid, such as letting the pattern loop around from one side to another. Being able to save patterns and their ruleset would be nice too. A faster algorithm to allow you to make truly massive patterns... The list goes on.

One thing I haven't mentioned is what if the ruleset wasn't limited to 2 states, well that is something I've worked on a bit in other projects and can talk about later.

All in all Cellular Automata Sim is one of my favourite classic projects and a good example of the kind of simulation with emergent phenomena that I'm fascinated by.

Weekly Review for 4th of September

I've been reviewing each week in my journal for a while now. It grew out of a habit I picked up whilst in counselling this year and I've kept it up since those sessions ended. 

Each Friday I summarise what I thought happened during the week and then read through from the Friday before making notes as I go along. Quite often I'll forget things or imagine days went better or worse than how I felt writing on them.

This month I even went back to read all the weekly summaries for August which sure took some time. First time I've done it so it'll be interesting to see how much I remember of each month as it passes again through my journal.

This week has been bumpy as I was rather thrown off course right after summoning the courage to start writing blog posts on Tuesday. I feel like I righted quite quickly and other than Wednesday things went well.

Inspired by Aveek Bhattacharya's blogging I thought I'd mention what I'd read, watched and listened to this week.

Read

I started reading a new book last Friday, Alastair Campbell's 'But what can I do' finishing it today. It was a good read as it moved in stages of problems, solutions and actions. The sources for what he believes is wrong with modern politics are polarisation, populism, and post-truth thinking. It was written when Boris Johnson was prime minister and he really didn't like him. 

The book was pretty depressing to begin with but picked up when it came to discussing getting involved in politics and what you can do as a person. Lots of punchy acronyms and lists of tips. I rather liked his O.S.T idea, of breaking things down into your Objective, Strategy and Tactics. Often people mix them up quite badly. Funnily enough his examples were losing weight and getting a job both of which I could relate to.

He ended with a practical guide to what needs to be done to enter into politics, exhorting the younger generations not to give up on joining the political system. It is a bit amusing that he himself in the past considered becoming an MP but decided his mental health would suffer too much so he is really wanting people made of sterner stuff than him to become MPs which seems like a high bar for how active in politics he was.

He was surprisingly forthright about his own difficulties with mental health and it seems like mental health is an area he is truly passionate about. I can relate to his tales of depression and even a bit with his darker moments. I appreciate it when people are open about the difficulties they face.

Listened

Another thing that Alastair Campbell mentioned in his book was the podcast The Rest is Politics which he does with Rory Stewart. I got to listen to an episode where they were interviewing Jack Clark from Anthropic which was a great listen as I'd been interested in learning more about him since finding his blog at Import AI. I have a lot of thoughts about AI and will definitely have to write about it here sometime.

I was also kind of listening/watching was a stream by the youtuber DoshDoshington about what he wanted in a Factorio mod. If you like Factorio it was a fun listen and his videos really are great at going the extra mile in the game so a mod authored by him would be a sight to see. I say listened to as he, along with his conversational partners, were just messing around in the game whilst talking, a real DoshDoshington video is much more organised.

Watched

Another Factorio thing I've been watching is Nilaus' latest Factorio: Space Age series. He's going through each of the planets and showing how to build an organised base on each. I'm still catching up with the latest episode with the one I most recently watched finishing up Gleba, the swamp planet. Gleba has probably the most tricky resources to manage as they are organic and have a limited shelf life until they spoil. It's an extra level of complexity that leads to some neat looking factory designs.

Programmed

Not a huge amount of programming this week and I doubt this category will always be here. Still when I manage to do some it's a good thing.

I did a little bit of coding with Python over the weekend with the aim of sometime using it to write a game server in. I've not got nearly as much experience at Python as I do Javascript so I'm trying to reacquaint myself with the syntax. Also, I was investigating the pygame library in order to make graphical projects. 

I started on a basic Roguelike and got dungeon generation going. A bit silly to be making a text based Roguelike as my first real pygame project but it was something I was interested in. I'm sticking very closely to how the original Rogue worked even down to the same wall piping.

I also came across a demonstration of running a python server with browser based clients using websockets. It seemed to work really well but I don't know much about the AsyncIO library it uses.

Other

Well seeing as I've already written quite a lot I'll keep this brief.

I had a bit of a stumble on Wednesday where missing going to the gym snowballed into spending all day lying in bed and beating myself up about it. I often have issues with deciding to lie in bed and not do anything but this was much worse than it usually is. I think a combination of factors were getting to me. Such as anxiety about blogging and job seeking.

Disrupting my routine and not getting exercise seem to be pretty bad for my mental health so I'm happy to say it improved once I got back to a routine in the past couple of days. I'll have to see how the weekend goes but I can often rely on volunteering on Monday to lift my spirits.

I might come back to what I was feeling on Wednesday some time but for now I'll leave you with this week's retrospective.

Turning 37 and Writing

My desire to write has peaked due to having had my birthday last month and whilst turning 37 isn't a big milestone it still got me thinking about what I have or haven't done with my life. I've always harbored thoughts of becoming a writer and have been slowly working away at getting used to writing.

To begin with I was simply writing about what I did each day in a journal which slowly morphed into a more general text document where I'd write down thoughts and ideas. I got quite into the idea of trying to write as much as I was physically able to do and during November, whilst that is normally the month people write novels, I endeavored to write as much as possible.

I did write a little bit of fiction in November although my main accomplishment was to write 100,000 words of journaling which was double my initial target. It was so nice to discover that I could actually sustain writing for so long and not run out of things I was willing to write. Sure a lot of it was writing about writing but to me that still counted.

I kept up journal writing since then and though I didn't exceed my high score as it were I did get close and set another personal best last month. I managed 75,000 words over the whole month but the real accomplishment was one day when I managed to write 14,000 words in a single day. 

To do that I spent pretty much every free moment I had writing and kept going until my hands were too sore. It really is addictive writing and seeing steady progress. Whilst my writing speed is nothing special I do wonder how well I'd do competitively writing for a consistent or long period of time.

After managing to do so well at self-set goals in private journal writing I wondered what would be the next goal and it seemed clear to me that it would take the form of some sort of public writing. I struggle with writing publicly, putting my voice out there, as I lack confidence that what I have to say has any use to anyone. 

I've wanted to deny that feeling of low confidence and have been doing what I can in terms of posting a micro blog on social media and some blog posts here and there on my blog. Which leads me onto what I want to do as the next step.

For this month I want to endeavor to write just as much as usual but to be sharing it online to my blog. Whilst I'd like to promise the moon and say that I'll blog every day I'll really be doing the best I can. I do have some vague ideas of writing a bit more organized thoughts than just journal writing, such as going over some of the programming projects and ideas for them that I've had.

My main goal will be to acclimatize myself to sharing what I think to a potential audience, something I can point to and say I made that. I hope I can write some interesting things but like my journal, that I'm writing anything at all is an accomplishment in itself.