ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
Well, it seems this thread is still not doing too badly relative to the other regular threads, so let's stay on a weekly pace.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers. We can coordinate weekly standup type meetings if their is interest.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
Last week's thread was quite a bit less active than the original one, but I think this is an idea worth continuing, so here we are. Though one thing that might be worth discussing is the pacing of the thread. If there's not so much activity, maybe we can go from weekly to monthly, and if anyone want's to give weekly reports, they can do so under their project's top level comment. Let me know what you think!
Aaand we're back... yet again!
The goal of this thread is to coordinate development on our project codenamed HighSpace - a mod for Freespace 2 that will be a mashup between it and High Fleet. A description of how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.
General Status of the Project
Between just being busy with life, and my general predisposition of jumping into a project and not really finishing it, I can't really promise that this time around will see more consistent updates than the last time. The good news is that if you kind of thought this project is cool, but you're afraid of joining and flaking out - don't worry about it. As you can see I'm no better, and the half the reason for this project is to have a community activity for TheMotte's tinkerers and artists.
The biggest update is a change in the approach to writing / art direction. Originally I was hoping we'll get enough people to hop in, divide jobs according to our strengths, and manage the project by some dialogue / mindmeld / flat-hierarchy mechanism. Writing specifically not being one of my strengths, I figured I'd leave everything vague, so someone better can have more freedom. That didn't pan out, so it became obvious that I'll need to take charge here, but the other problem was - I really didn't know where I want to go with the story, or even more broadly with world-building. Then, the other day, when I was stuck on a flight with nothing better to do but to daydream, I was hit with a sudden bout of inspiration. Ever since I had that thought about all my favorite space operas boiling down to Americans talking about their place in the world, I thought someone should make a non-Western Star Trek. I even had some vague ideas for a Gulliver-Travelsesque "fly around the universe bumping into various civilizations that satirize current-era humanity" story, but I never put pen to paper, and it's not really the kind of thing that works well with a space shooter, so it was of no use here. I don't even remember how I made the connection, but somehow I thought about Attack On Titan, and how well they pulled off the feeling existential threat, and I figured that that's the missing piece - some good old fashioned existential horror wreaking havoc, and a scrappy pack survivors trying to make it through.
So here's the setting: Sometime in the far far future - no one even knows when anymore - humanity conquered the stars and colonized the galaxy. All was well until the aforementioned horrors showed up. No one knows what they are, and what their greater goals are - not least because nearly all historical records were lost to the apocalypse they brought - but they do seem to seek out sentient life and "consume" it, assuming it's shape and behaviors in the process, but never getting it quite right, leading an uncanny appearance, as if to mock their victims with their existence. The once-glorious empire of humanity was annihilated, all that remains are nomad fleets and deeply hidden colonies. Several generations passed since this apocalypse, and the survivors got quite good at surviving, either by deploying superior tactics, or by becoming expert at hiding. Their current situation is stable, but they must maintain iron discipline at all times, and any slip will likely result in tragedy.
...and then it struck me that a post-apocalyptic Eastern European (that's where I'm from, so that's what you're getting) Star Trek with incomprehensible horrors looming at every turn is, yet again, a mashup between Freespace and High Fleet. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.
Updates
Not much to show off yet, but the whole Demo Scenario is getting revamped to reflect the changes in the setting. The current idea is as follows:
Someone did make a slip. A logistics taskforce flew right into the hornets' nest, and are now being pursued by the Incomprehensible Horrors. Captain Playername receives their distress call, and as the nearest ship, rushes in to help. Reinforcements are on the way, but will need time to assemble. The logistics guys can't jump to another system due to [McGuffin, or some clever Subspace jump mechanic I'm yet to come up with], so they opted to scatter throughout the system in an attempt to buy time and minimize casualties.
The player is in command of a mid-size carrier, and has to rescue as many friendlies as he can find, before the IH's get to them. Each successful rescue gives the player a new ship at their command (in case it's one of the escorts), and/or resources like bombs/specialized ammo (when it's one of the transports), but generates more aggro (which itself has trade-offs - more aggro on you means less on the relatively defenseless friendlies). All this culminates in an assault on the IH super-capital ship, that is the source of all this trouble. This will resemble an arcadey boss-fight, where fighters will need to take apart some critical components of the enemy ship, so the friendly capital ships can approach it safely and finish it.
I think a scenario like this will be more manageable. The previous one (where the player would have to hunt down pirates raiding freighters coming to/from a mining colony) would require a pretty complex AI, while here I'm planning to go with a pretty basic "chase the thing with the highest aggro" approach for the enemy.
Actual changes since last version
I started writing the map generator. Currently rescuable ships are spawned randomly throughout the system, and I'm now working on having the enemy spawn in their pursuit (far enough away from the friendlies to no immediately detect them, close enough that they'll get picked up by patrols sooner or later). I fixed a few bugs, but apparently introduced a whole bunch of new ones (random crash to desktop with a mysterious message, for example).
Now Hiring:
Slapper-in-chief
Do you have a sadistic streak? Did I get on your nerves while posting here, and now you really, really want to slap me? This is your opportunity!
If you're not up for joining in a creative capacity, one thing that I think would help me greatly, is someone to smack me if I start slacking around. The feedback I got from @netstack helped me a lot before, so like that guy that hired someone to slap him every time he opened Facebook, I figure that regular interactions where I report on what I did, what I'm planning to do, get screamed at for not meeting my deadlines, and get some feedback on what I accomplished would help me to stay focused.
The usual
Other than that I'll still need help from other creatives, including:
- developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
- artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions) (@FCFromSSC, still interested / do you have more time nowadays?)
- writers: worldbuilding / lore, quests, characters
- testers: the way the any program works always makes sense to the developer, so feedback from people who aren't me is always appreciated. This is a pretty easy way to get involved, though it does require an initial investment of buying Freespace2, at least until we manage to turn it into a proper total conversion, and use only our content.
A small note for potential contributors:
Don't be afraid to ask questions however small, or silly you might find them. This is literally one of the primary functions this thread has. The Hard Light documentation is... there... but it's not great, and between that, the peculiarities of LUA, the FS2 scripting API, RocketLib, and other parts of FS2 modding, it really might not be obvious how to resolve issues you run into. I might not be able to answer all questions, but I've dabbled in all these things, so there's good chances I'll be able to help.
I'm sorry HighSpace, I love you, I really do, but something about this project has been calling my name.
It all started with an idea for a decentralized recommendation engine in the vein of stumbleupon.com (I posted about it, but I think it got sucked into the vacuum of that database stroke we suffered a while back), but it has since took on a life of it's own. Originally the idea was to collect all the content I'd normally click “like” on, across various platforms, and present it as a curated feed of cool stuff I saw. The decentralization would come later on, as other people would hopefully join in, and we'd aggregate the results, and present them to each user according to their preferences. I wasn't convinced it's that great of an idea, so it languished for a while, until I remembered an old setup I had with Miniflux and Nitter that I'd use for keeping up with some people I followed, without opening a Twitter account. I thought Miniflux would provide a nice scaffolding for what I wanted to make, and Nitter would be a good start for a source of recommended content.
Nitter's dead, long live Nitter!
As we've all heard Nitter is dead, or is it? At one point I saw someone here link to privacydev's instance and after the core Nitter team gave up, I was using it every once in a while. It sure got slow, and it sure got unreliable, but not unreliable enough for me to believe the core functionality is completely crippled. I suspected it's a question of them not having enough accounts to make all the requests to Twitter, to serve all the people using the instance. Lo and behold, turns out I'm right, even though guest accounts are gone, you can still use it with a regular account, and there's even a script for fetching the auth tokens necessary to make nitter run. So I set the whole thing up, at first mostly just to have a Twitter frontend that's not absolute garbage, and it works like a charm! It's probably a good idea to add a few more accounts to avoid rate-limiting, but I've been using it on a single login without really running into issues.
Nitter's fine and well, but one of it's annoying limitations is that you have to look up an account directly. Timeline support is on it's roadmap, but they never got around to it, and it looks like now they never will. But what they do have is an RSS view, so you can add all the accounts you're interested in, and put their tweets together into a single timeline. For this, as already mentioned, I've used Miniflux. This has a lot of advantages that I really like. First, the tweets are in chronological order, and you can use an “unread” feed to only check the stuff you haven't seen yet. I find it much better than Twitter's “slotmachine” feed that shuffles tweets, lies to you about new content being available, and promotes people you haven't even followed. Secondly the tweets are automatically archived. Some people delete their spiciest takes, and even on Elon's Twitter accounts get occasionally yeeted, but since you're storing the content locally, all their bangers are safe with you. Thirdly - searchability. Twitter's search isn't even that bad, but what's missing for me is the ability to search the stuff I followed or liked. My memory is decent, but vague - “I saw that in a tweet I liked around X time”, “someone I followed used a phrase Y”, etc. Limiting the search to only people I follow, or to bookmarked RSS entries helps a lot.
I also had some issues with the setup. Miniflux only renders the titles of tweets, not their content. On the other hand, for some reason, Nitter renders the whole Tweet in the RSS entry title, which you'd think is a solution to the previous problem, but if you add a feed from non-nitter source, you end up with inconsistent rendering - you can read the tweets without clicking on each entry, but you have to check every entry from other feed types manually. So I made some adjustments! Nitter only renders basic info in the title (tweet author, who they're replying to / retweeting) and Miniflux actually renders the entire content on it's feed pages. The commit also includes the script to get the auth tokens. You can now happily scroll through all your content.
But wait, there's more!
So as I was happily using this setup, it occurred to me that images are quite important in the Twitter ecosystem. Sometimes people post memes with very little comment, sometimes they post screenshots of articles, sometimes they post images of text to get around the character limit. That's not an issue, it all renders fine, but since archiving is an important feature for me, I thought I need to do something about the images in case of banger deletion / account yeeting. So I made further adjustments! When the RSS entries are downloaded, their content is scraped for image tags, and they're automatically saved to Miniflux' database.
But that's not all! Since search is also an important feature for me, I thought “what if someone posts one of those wall-of-text images containing something interesting, and I'll only remember a phrase in the image, but nothing about the text of the tweet or it's author?”. Don't fret, another adjustment I made was to use gosseract, a Golang (which Miniflux is written in) OCR package, to automatically scan and transcribe the images, and to extend the search feature to look up the transcriptions as well! No spicy screenshotted headline will be able to hide from you now!
We're quite far from the original “p2p recommendation engine” idea, but I'm quite happy with the result. Back during one of the dotcom booms there was a saying to the effect of “just make an app you'd want to use”, and by that criterion I feel like I struck gold, so I thought I'd share it. There's potential to develop it further, both Substack and Youtube (still) offer RSS views of their content, and both have relatively-easy-to-access transcriptions. Automatically downloading audio or video content might be a tall order storage-wise, but it definitely will help with my chronic “I know I heard this on one of the several 5-hour long podcasts I listen to daily, but don't know which one" problem.
Now, if you're thinking, "that all sounds nice in theory, but I fell asleep reading the README of the repositories you linked to, and there's now way I'll bother setting any of this up" - you're in luck! For my next performance, if anyone's interested, I might set up a demo server.
If you want to take a stab at setting it up for yourself, and need help, I'll be happy to assist.
Aaaand we're back!
The goal of this thread is to coordinate development on our project codenamed HighSpace - a mod for Freespace 2 that will be a mashup between it and High Fleet. A description of how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.
Who we have
-
@FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist
-
@Southkraut, @RenOS, @netstack - Interstellar Warfare Consultants
-
Me - developer
Who we need
The more the merrier, you are free to join in any capacity you wish! I can already identify a few distinct tasks for each position that we could split the work into
-
developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
-
artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)
-
writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters
-
testers: the way the any program works always makes sense to the developer, so feedback from people who aren't me is always appreciated. This is a pretty easy way to get involved, though it does require an initial investment of buying Freespace2, at least until we manage to turn it into a proper total conversion, and use only our content.
A small note if you want to contribute:
Don't be afraid to ask questions however small, or silly you might find them. This is literally one of the primary functions this thread has. The Hard Light documentation is... there... but it's not great, and between that, the peculiarities of LUA, the FS2 scripting API, RocketLib, and other parts of FS2 modding, it really might not be obvious how to resolve issues you run into. I might not be able to answer all questions, but I've dabbled in all these things, so there's good chances I might be able to help.
What we have
-
An official Highspace Github Org and Repository
-
An official Highspace Wiki
-
Even more concept art for ships, curtesy of @FCfromSSC:
-
A proof of concenpt for “strategic” system map we jump into on start of the campaign. It contains a friendly ship and 2 enemy ships, you can chose where to move / which enemy ship to attack.
-
A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.
-
A somewhat actual-game-like workflow. Attacking a ship launches a mission where the two ships are pitted against each other. If you win, the current health of your ship is saved, and you can launch the second attack. If you clean up the map you are greeted with a “You Win” message, or “You Lose” if you lose your ship.
Updates
November was a mess for me IRL, December was Christmas time, and even though January was busier than I would like, I managed to get some work in. The biggest change is the Battle Group split / merge feature. Also did some refactoring because there were way too many ship lists to keep track of whenever any ship is was added / removed, but of course that's not the kind of thing that lends itself to flashy gifs. Another change that I managed to get in back in November is setting up debugging with EmmyLua which helps in development a lot.
Bugs found
- Cannot jump into mission without “Alpha 1” being present in group
- Crash on win/lose of the game
- System map targetting is off - sometimes the target ship moves on before you reach it
What's next
-
Improve the simplified orbital mechanics
-
Fixing the bugs
-
AI code for System View ships, first for plotting the course, and if time permits for some basic enemy movement as well.