Kevin Reid's blog

Done.

I have completed my last final exam and my last course project of my last semester. I will be graduating a week from now. I have a job starting in July.

DONE.

I've got the notion to do an occasional Minecraft video series, mainly to show off my mechanism designs and otherwise increase the value (to other people) of all those hours I spend playing. I bought screen recording software just for the purpose.

However, I haven't gotten around to recording an “episode” yet (mainly because I wanted to start with a script to reduce the “um”s, and make sure I have a quiet environment, and that hasn't coincided with enthusiasm for the project). The following video is just a test of recording and uploading to YouTube; there's no voice-over and it's short.

Let me know what you think of this proposed endeavor. I figure to do tours of existing builds with a focus on mechanism, not playing on camera.

Run your program on a platform slow enough that you

1. care, and
2. can feel where the problems are.

(Something — I assume a Chrome update — caused Cubes to run more slowly. Over fifteen seconds of startup time is just not fun for debugging, so I went looking for problems. Unfortunately, it wasn't anything straightforwardly bad, but the heaviest thing in the profile was the color-picking while constructing the default blockset, so I optimized that and got the startup down to about six seconds. Still slower than it really ought to be.)

You've probably heard (if you’re a programmer) about the cardboard programmer or rubber duck debugging.

These days, my rubber duck is the Ask a Question form at Stack Overflow (or another Stack Exchange Network site appropriate for the topic at hand). Writing a clear and considered question serves the same purpose as the hypothetical cardboard cutout or coworker — and if you don’t find your solution by the rubber duck method, then you have the question all ready to go, so no effort is wasted.

I haven’t gotten around to talking about it before, but I’m a big fan of Stack Exchange — it's a great place to get answers and give them, and focused on being a good resource in the long term and for all the web, not just another forum for discussions.

Some new features in Cubes:

• An automated test suite. It’s hardly complete coverage, but at least it exists and so can grow. (I ended up going with Jasmine for in-browser testing. I’m not a big fan of the Englishy syntax, but it does the job reasonably well and has niceties like rerunning individual tests and adequate support for asynchronous tests.)
• Precise collision against rotated blocks: you can now walk up the slope of those funky pyramid blocks, and so on. Stairs, anyone?
• Performance monitoring widget with fancy graphs. (If you click the “[-]” to hide it, then it won’t waste CPU time updating itself, either.)

Today I learned that there is a standard-DOM alternative to the convenient IEism element.innerText (a close relative of element.innerHTML): element.textContent.

It is slightly different, according to MDN: .innerText returns the visible text (omitting scripts and CSS-hidden text), whereas .textContent returns everything, more like walking the document tree.

(This information crossed my awareness while working on Caja, but I didn't recognize it as something I could actually make use of until now.)

[alias]
	st = status
	hw = help -w
	ff = merge --ff-only
	unpushed = log @{u}..

I’ve uploaded almost all of my published Git repositories (previously hosted on a git-only server on on switchb.org, which is down at the moment) to my account on GitHub. Please update your remote URLs if you have any git clones.

The motivation for this change is simply that GitHub offers better visibility — an automatic web presence for each project, including viewing repository contents. I am not intending to depend on GitHub’s continued existence, of course; I still have local copies of each project, and additionally I plan to arrange so switchb.org automatically mirrors my GitHub repositories.

What I've just uploaded to GitHub also includes a project which I have not previously mentioned, timeline-ui:

A user interface experiment. Multiple types of time-series data, variously static/interactive, historical/future, etc. are displayed in a single view. (This was an idea I had floating around and which I used in 2010 for a class project; there is a lot more that could be done with it.) Written in Java.

I was going to write more about the concept, but I never got around to it; this will have to do.

List of projects just moved to GitHub:

• E-on-Java (personal git-svn mirror, not the official repository)
• E-on-JavaScript
• E-XML
• Fire Worms From Outer Space!
• Tile Game
• Timeline UI

[I was asked about Cubes “Where do you think you might take the game play next?” and it turned into this.]

My original motivation for creating Cubes was a combination of the “blocks out of blocks” idea — which itself came from immersion in the graphics of Minecraft — and also dissatisfaction with certain bugs, limitations, and design choices in Minecraft. As a result, I’m not just building a voxel game; I’m building a game that shares what I like about Minecraft.

(What I like about Minecraft, broadly, is survival and engineering — I like building structures and machines to make my virtual life easier.)

Now, creating a Minecraft clone would be lame, rude, closer to using someone else’s intellectual property, and just plain unoriginal. But I don’t have experience with what little exists of a genre of voxel building games to synthesize my own thing, and I myself am looking for something like Minecraft. What can I do? Here’s what I’ve been trying:

• Be different.

  Whenever I see an opportunity to do something specifically unlike Minecraft, that doesn’t compromise what I’m trying to do, I take it and see what happens. However, most of these experiments have failed; for example, Cubes originally had a larger-scaled player character, but this turned out bad because it means tunneling and building is 8× more tedious, and it reduces the apparent size of the world. Also, it leads to thinking “OK, add this feature Minecraft has — but (superficially) differently!”

• Be generic.

  This is my long-term goal, and it is one that ties neatly into the “blocks made of blocks” theme. The characteristics of blocks can be defined by building circuits (programs) inside them. What I’m aiming for is that by creating a blockset (collection of block designs which the player can build with), one is defining the game that can be played, by giving those blocks specific behaviors.

  In this way, I am working towards having a game which can be programmed to emulate Minecraft.

  (I have a working prototype of an importer for Minecraft worlds as well as for Minecraft blocks — that is, turning the terrain.png from a Minecraft texture pack into Cubes' 3D blocks — but I am not going to release that code until and unless I determine that Mojang doesn’t mind my doing so. I still love Minecraft and they deserve my not stepping on their toes that far.)

  However, this means both that Cubes itself needs to be very generic, and that the built-in example uses of such features should feel different from Minecraft.

So, returning to the original topic of “where am I going next”, I need to add the following functionality to the game world:

• Extend the circuits feature so that there can be blocks that are active and interactive (e.g. opening and closing doors, “physics” like Minecraft falling sand and growing plants).

• Add moving objects (for vehicles and mobs). I intend to generalize these so that they are worlds in themselves — this will allow large or unique vehicles, and mean that they can be designed using the same game tools.

• Add some form of resource constraints/conservation laws (as in Minecraft survival mode) — that is, you have to gather stuff to make it into other stuff. I haven’t figured out specifically how I want to do this yet, and this seems particularly tricky to make programmable. One idea that keeps coming to mind is that when you break a block, specific subcubes are “resource cubes” (according to their type in the block world) which you collect, and in order to place a block you need to have the corresponding resources for its type. However, I’m not sure I like the “raw material counter” feel of this.

• Add player attributes that can be modified (e.g. health) so that e.g. death, or other effects-by-the-world can be supported.

Less grandly, I plan to work on one of these specific technical features soon:

• Allowing circuit blocks to be rotated to change their connectivity. (Right now, circuit blocks have specific faces — e.g. on a certain one the +X direction is always the output.)
• Figure out what more circuit primitives I want to add. (Right now, the circuits are definitely not Turing-complete, and not capable of all the effects on the world they should be, but there are also already a lot of different primitives; I may have to invent new block-picking UI just to make them practical.)
• Add moving objects (bodies) — things which can collide with the terrain as the player does. The current code is entangled with player behavior, and the player does not persist in a world.
• Add subworld/multiple-world handling — the ability for more than one world (grid of blocks) to be present in the same space. Right now, there are hardwired assumptions that the player is in the single world’s coordinate system.

Another core feature which is currently missing is the ability to design a blockset and then reuse it for multiple worlds. The problem right now is that we're using a simple object-graph serializer, so each world has its own blockset which is modified independently. To fix this, it needs to be possible to save a blockset under a user-visible name, and have individual worlds which reference that blockset; also, the world generator needs to decouple blockset generation from terrain generation. The “persistence” framework which added support for multiple worlds is a step towards this; the main thing I am pondering is what the semantics of these separate-named-persistent objects are and what the user interface for editing them is.