Last Month's Projects
Following my emerging pattern, it is well into April but here's my attempt at a round-up.
Physical make: Tiny OpenWRT-based server. Nothing material has happened on this one. I have done some research into the different packages available for OpenWRT (there are loads). I'll probably want to switch from mercurial to git if I want to have an internet-visible source-control server without compiling my own package. The tiny machine might even have enough grunt for a Nextcloud instance, so long as it's a really small number of users.
Coding make: I never even started coding for the Dungeon Crawler Jam. I decided to try and implement Wave Function Collapse in the latest Gotm.io jam so I could get to grips with it. Turns out WFC is far from trivial if you want a guaranteed solution in a reasonable time. I spent so much time working on it that I failed to enter for either jam.
However, I do have a working solution in Godot's GDScript which takes a template .tmx from Tiled and produces a tilemap grid (8x8). The next stage of development for this would be propagating adjacendy rules from a finished 8x8 grid to its neighbour, thus being able to grow the map as required by generating new 8x8 grids.
I also have ideas about how to reduce the combinatorial explosion as the number of available tiles grows (e.g. adding water, stairs, bridges). That probably warrants a blog-post of its own though, once I've managed to implement it.
Reading: I'm still reading that book I picked up in a charity shop: 'Faith in the City...'. I've got past the review of the situation of Urban Priority Areas in 1985, and I'm into how the commision recommends the Church of England changes in order to be more relevant in those areas.
I'm finding unexpectedly strange the emotional experience of reading this book. Back in the '80s, I was a young middle-class Christian attending Church of England services most Sundays. In my teen years during the '90s, I became increasingly disillusioned with the Church - especially its general attitude toward women and homosexual people. And not just the institutional attitude of the Anglican church in the U.K. and worldwide, but my perception of the attitudes of many of the individual church-goers around me at the time. Over the decades since, I have lapsed to the state where I would not identify as Christian any more - even to the extent that I now find the doctrine really creepy.
So this book is proving to inspire a very reflective journey through my teenage years and my ever-changing opinion of the Church of England. Even though the subject matter itself is actually proving quite dull.
April Projects
Physical make: I'll likely be moving house in the summer, so my focus is switching towards pending projects that are not easily package-able in their current state. So this month, I plan to build a case for the 386 machine I bought months (even years?) back. I want it to properly physically support the sound and network cards I have for it, whilst also leaving the parts visible as a spectacle of ancient tech. I also want the case to have a 4:3 monitor physically attached so I don't have to mess about with cables and finding a 16:9 monitor that will display 4:3 without stretching. So that is my plan.
Coding make: I am going to continue to make what would have been my entry to the Gotm.io jam: a simple top-down dungeon crawler with an effectively-infinite number of WFC-generated levels.
Reading: The same book, but I've started skimming the details because I'm getting a little bogged-down.
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