Zorba the Hutt

I have absolutely nobody to talk to at night.

Anyone on here who's often on at 1-2 AM PST and wants to chat about random stuff? There's almost never anyone around :/

another day and I could have gone mad
another day and it might have gotten bad
another day and I might have betrayed every scruple I had

which is a curious set of lyrics to empathize with, especially because I'm not sure "could have" is the right phrasing.

times like this . . . it's a tornado inside. supercollider wrapped around the cerebellum. it won't slow down. holes in reality, holes in logic and emotion and sanity, shortcircuits all through the system.

I get flashes of something else. of someone else. not the same person, but it feels like something is trying to break through as I break down. and of course I won't let it . . . I'll resist even if it kills me.

Which it might.

So it goes.

Our automap code in our game used to have a gigantic bitmap of the level, and just display it. Nice, simple, inefficient. Completely broke with the random maps - the bitmap ended up being far larger than the hardware could handle, and while we could have broken it up into pieces, we'd be looking at 4mb RAM usage on a platform where we've only got 32mb to begin with.

Our new automap code divides the map into blocks, then assembles those in realtime on the screen. That's what the image above is - the blocks it's divided the level into. In theory, we can represent any of our maps by slapping enough of those pieces together. Unfortunately the image you see above doesn't actually work - due to memory bandwidth constraints and how the microcode in the hardware processing works, we're limited to one byte per coordinate. 256x256 maps at most, and the above map is larger. Luckily, we can do flipping and rotating in hardware (which we're not taking advantage of) and we can merge very similar blocks (which, obviously, we're also not yet taking advantage of.)

On the other hand, it looks kinda neat this way. Reminds me of tilesets for ancient games.

Yes, this level has a pipe network.

Set up a 100% transparent router - no port redirection, no blocking, doesn't even have an IP. In theory, it should be utterly impossible to even see that there's a computer there. Have it log all connections going through it.

Wonder how well this would work, or how helpful it would be. Wonder if anyone's doing it.

Someday I'm going to write a real-time strategy game where the player is the leader of the "Department of Offense".