GRG's Miscellany

Today I have been working hard at texturing and modeling a cockpit for the dropship I made ages ago . The texture is really low-res, but it's exported from Inkscape , so I can boost that later if need be.  It's also a little bland in places, but I'm no artist - I'm proud of it. I also modeled a really basic cockpit and moved the camera inside.  Here's how it looks: Dull, huh? In the fullness of time, I'll make a texture for it, and model some instruments.  For now though, it's a huge leap forward for my meagre art abilities.

After my first failed attempt, I managed to port the polygon triangulator code into Unity! It struck me how much more difficult it was to write in C# than it had been in Python.  I've always been a bit wary of Python as it isn't widely regarded as a 'professional' language (at least amongst the people I've spoken to about it).  It really showed great strength in exploring the triangulation algorithm though.  If I do similar algorithm work in the future, I think I will turn to Python first. However, now it is ported to Unity, I have a direction choice to make: To plough on to generating terrain from large polygons, to make the code produce a DeLaunay graph, instead of just any old triangulation, or to smooth out the process of specifying the polygon in the first place. Choices, choices...

For my 3D games, I've been playing around with ideas around semi-procedural geometry, by which I mean geometry which is generated from a small amount of authored data.  For example, I could draw out the shape of an island in a dozen or so 3D points, and the actual terrain geometry could be generated from that. A big step along the way to that is splitting up a non-convex polygon into triangles.  The triangles mustn't overlap, nor must they cover any space which the polygon itself doesn't cover.  For example, this diagram . Today, I managed to get a python program* running which took a list of 2D points defining a polygon, split it into sub-triangles and displayed them in a tkinter canvas**. I am certain this has been solved by clever people in much better ways, but I still feel proud to have figured this one out (and I haven't managed to break it yet!). The basic algorithm is: Create a temporary copy of the polygon points list start with the three points fro...

I'm continuing to build scenery in 12" square blocks to allow for depth in the terrain, and I've finished two more blocks: a corner bunker and another straight trench. The Corner Bunker The idea for this block was an objective, defensive position or entry point at the corner of the battlefield. The bunker itself is just cereal card glued to the underlying corrugated-cardboard frame.  I used a scalpel to cut the groove for where the door closes.  The paint is a simple mix of cheap black and white acrylic paint. The road edges coming in are meant to be tracks worn by long-term vehicle use.  I built up areas with a mix of bird-grit , bird-sand , talc , PVA and water.  Then I used sand-talc-PVA-water to smooth it a bit more, then finally talc-PVA-water to try and make some sections look muddier. The colouring is a dark brown spray , followed by a lighter stone-coloured spray , then dry brushed with cheap brown acrylic , blending up with white. ...

An addition to my scavenger Rogue Trader army is this modded Eldar Viper Jetbike. You don't get many Games Workshop things on Freecycle, but a couple of battered jetbikes and some Dark Eldar popped up and I nabbed them. Then I had to make it fit my scavenger militia.  So I ventured into the world of Milliput for the first time. I first attempted the cockpit without a wire armature, but that was brittle and extremely frustrating, so I cut it all off and worked it again with florists wire.  I have since bought modelling wire because the Milliput really did not like sticking to the plastic coating on the florists wire. The pilot is the original Eldar one with globs of putty to make him look a little more Cadian-like. The stippled rust was inspired by this forum post , but I still need heaps of practice. As the clear perspex stands were missing, I decided to attempt to make the bike 'sit' on its own dust cloud.  I glued two pieces of bent florists wire...

I was looking at a game on Gog called Kingdoms and Castles .  It was extremely tempting. But then I remembered that I had already bought SimCity 2000 , which I have always enjoyed.  So I reinstalled it and started it up. I was feeling confident that I could still manage to build up a decent city, but I went in on easy mode anyway because I didn't want to be too challenged. It all started off well.  I survived the inevitable destruction of the power plant, and my budget was in the black.  It was all going well. Then came the earthquake. ...and eventually I realised it was time to start anew.

When I finally realised that actually playing 40K was the worst part of 40K, I decided to just buy and paint miniatures that I liked the look of.  At the same time, my brother was really enjoying making new Space Marine vehicles out of lots of spare parts. In order to give these miniatures life, we decided to start playing Rogue Trader .  It involved making up all the stats and talking things through to make sure we weren't just min-maxing them all.  Plus, we had to make up some house rules to clarify things (and more will follow, I'm sure).  But after all that, we had our first battle: The Rabble vs. Salvage Marines. Salvage Marines (working title) are a lost chapter of Space Marines that get a lot of their equipment from finding old battlefields and strongholds, recovering and repairing all they need.  They have come to an ashen desert world in search of an abandoned Space Marine complex and found that the locals are far from friendly. The Rabble are t...

I decided to spend a bunch of this half-term improving my Blender skills. Amongst my many pipe-dreams is one where I make a dropship sim with mostly-plausible physics and technology.  I love flight sims, and I feel that there is a real void of space games (heheh...pun) between the likes of Kerbal Space Program and the likes of Elite: Dangerous.  So one day, it'd be nice to make something to fill that void. In order to chase that dream (at a snail's pace) I decided to model and texture a trans-orbital fighter-bomber.  This was difficult because I am not an artist (as you can tell from the picture).  Also, I lost patience with the texturing, so a lot of it is solid colour for now.  However, I am still proud of the result. In the fullness of time, the texturing will include some kind of squadron markings, access hatches, etc.  I also want to make animations for the canopy, tail planes, variable geometry wings, weapons bays and undercarriage.  The...

After a long, tedious list of failures, suddenly so much has happened my head is spinning... In the beginning was the new BTEC IT.  And lo, it contained an entire unit on designing and creating database systems (no, not OODBs - education is only just catching up with 1974 :P). So began the list of failures... The prospect of teaching sixth form students how to use Microsoft Access made me taste vomit, so I enthusiastically dusted off one of the department's Raspberry Pis and set up a PostGreSQL server with  phppgadmin  (MySQL has all the hostname guff, and sqlite didn't seem easily multi-user). Everything went smoothly until... the pi's SD card gave out, losing everything. So I set it up again, storing the database on a USB drive instead! Everything went smoothly until... the filesystem kept corrupting, possibly due to overloading the poor little pi. So I got the students into the habit of backing up their work every lesson!  (They were quite amused ...