Oh, wait, forgot to say hi. Hi. Been a long time, I know.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Marriage...
Kind of excited for it, actually. 33 years seems to me about the right length of time to be single, and since I turned 33 just a few days ago... well, here I go. Thing is, a lot of things will change. I will stop doing a lot of the silly stuff I've been doing to pass the time, and I'll start doing a lot of silly stuff that I used to do and stopped doing in favor of other, sillier, stuff. The long and the short of it is, I've started once again dusting off all of my various projects, firing up Code Blocks, and re-teaching myself how to program. Yes, it's been that long since I even thought of compiling a block of code, that I've lost a great deal of my familiarity, not just with my rambling code-base, but with the art of programming itself. Fortunately, in this respect, you really CAN go home again, and it feels like putting on an old favorite hoodie that you thought you lost, and discovering that it still fits and still smells slightly like barbecue steak from that one really fun cookout you had. Feels awesome, in other words.
In the interim, I haven't touched a programming tool but I have thought quite a bit about some things. My interests pretty much stand unchanged; I'm still really into the random generation of things game-related. The break, though, has given me a fresh perspective on some of the things I was working on, and I see some things a bit differently. Hard to quantify, but none the less real for that fact.
Anyway, as a refresher course on the Accidental framework and all related stuff, I jumped head first into creating a front-end (or maybe back-end; heck, I don't know) layer fitting my Accidental generation stuff on top of POV-Ray. Something that I was struggling with in my labors is that the Golem3D engine I subsumed into Accidental was not a full-fledged 3D engine, and has some severe limitations when it comes to easily exploring certain things. I figured that if I built a layer of code that allows me to instance level geometry, terrains, and so forth into a .pov file, then I can utilize the far greater capability of POV-Ray to render scenes and see what they look like. So far, it's been fun. I hadn't realized exactly what a great visualization tool a raytracer such as POV-Ray really is, allowing me to dynamically generate entire level maps, from mountain ranges to farmlands to castles high upon unreachable bluffs, and quickly run a render from various angles to get the 'feel of it'.
After all, instancing level geometry in POV-Ray isn't a whole lot different from instancing level geometry in an actual game engine, if the game engine is sufficiently well-designed. And if I plan to continue writing articles (I do; and I really want to finish some of the many that I left only partly written) it might be easier to do so on top of POV-Ray rather than having to maintain stable releases of my own game engine for people to download. A script that generates a .pov is certainly more compact, efficient, and easily-downloadable than one that requires the Golem3D framework to utilize, and is thus subject to the limitations of the Golem3D engine. Toward that end, I may end up revamping the Accidental page once more, taking down all the old articles and old Accidental stuff in favor of the stuff I'm working on now. We'll see.
I was going to post some screenshots of what I've been working on, but for some reason my web space management page simply will not load in a reasonable amount of time. (By reasonable, I mean 'before the heat death of the universe') Maybe next time.
Hi again, guys.
