I'm making stuff and doing things - some of this may come in handy for platemail in the future, though that is admittedly a slightly different scale. I bought a gemstone because it was really pretty. The label claims it's a petersite. I have no idea what this is, and the only bit of info I've found on the 'net is that it's a mixite and contains yttrium. Or ytterbium. Or one of those. The Y one.
It's really really pretty. It's like an ogre, see. It's got layers.
Sent a rant to my ex. Four ICQ messages. (ICQ allows you to send messages offline - they're stored on the ICQ central servers until delivery. Limited to 450 characters each. Limits like this always make me wonder - the only net effect is that people write multiple messages, including things like "continued next" and also adding more message overhead.)
I apologize for all the short posts, but . . . browsing my friends page, I note something interesting about the "day" headers. At the top of the page (as of writing this) is a header for "Thursday, June 28th, 2001", the entry being written at 1:52AM. Next, another day header, for "Wednesday, June 27th, 2001", entry at 11:18PM. Next, *another* day header - for thursday again! Entry written at 12:25AM. And finally, yet another day header for Wednesday, written at 11:09PM. Why?
Time zones!
heronblue's on the east coast, and can therefore post an entry at 12:25 AM before Kareal, on the west coast, can post an entry at 11:18 PM.
I can only wonder about the weird data structures they've got in the databases - they must have "post time" and "displayed time" or something. Leads to some weirdnesses in the friends listings.
Lot of mults. Be a bit slow :/ And I'll have to shift things closer to the origin, otherwise all those squares will overflow . . .
bleah. they'll overflow anyway. maybe I'll have to shift them down 8 bits too. Assuming max speed is 32 bits, and subpixel is 16 bits . . . then . . . if I want this to fit into 64 bits, I'd better restrict it to 30 bits of location. Yeah. I'd have to translate to near-origin and shift down at least three bits. eight would be good. Loss of precision, but at least I don't have to try to code 128-bit arithmetic! >_<
But, yeah. It's solved. Just compare the two roots. Not only that, but it tells you where they'll hit period, so I can integrate it into the AI for collision thingies.
now, how can I rig it to compute closest-approach? . . .
FINALLY! Someone who shares my feelings on this whole discrimination dealie - someone who's not in the "majority" who agrees with me, too!
Grrrrrrrr.
Go here and read this, they do a better job of it that I can . The contrast on the page sucks, true, and the font's not the easiest to read in the world, but raise the font size (ctrl-mousewheel) and it's fine.
Some days shoutcast seems to be telling me something appropriate, sometimes it just seems to be making it worse >_<
"You've found the station with the 'net's best rock and alternative! Visit our website at www.netrockradio.com! Thanks for listening! *click* -and I may find, in time, that you were always right, were always right . . ."
closest approach would require calculus. take the derivitave (sp?), solve for nil, that's the lowest point. yeah. it'd be a linear equation at that point . . . or it should be . . . yeah, it would. constant terms would blink out. that'd be kinda nice. probably be fast.
Next project: intersection between polygons. And I think it's doable! Because, see, what I'm looking for is the earliest moment at which one of the points touches one of the lines. AKA the point at which - bear with me here - the line segment that runs perpendicular from the contact line to the contact point has a length of 0, and the contact point is on the contact line. Which might be computable . . .
just tricky.
And it starts risking a LOT of CPU overhead - because you have to check each point with each line! In *theory* - I can do a few optimizations to make that unnecessary. Might have to precompute some stuff. And I might have to restrict it to convex shapes, but that's not a problem because any concave shape can be expressed as some number of convex shapes.
And I get locational damage! *real* locational damage!
This could be unbearably sweet - it would be a truly beautiful damage model. I could even implement bouncing . . . hmmm . . .
Thought: a collision is simulated by a high-speed frame-by-frame check. Pull the frame speed ten or a hundred times up - the calculations get easier because, if they're moving fast enough that they'll go through each other, they *will* go through each other. Thrunch.
Hrm. I'm gonna have to make gravity sensors more accurate along the primary hyperspace axis. Otherwise spacedust minefields become too powerful. And I'll need long-range wedge deflector shields.
This has been the most entries I've ever posted in one day ^^;; gomen!
