Recently I’ve been playing around with gaming engines, I haven’t spent too much time in the 3D graphics world but rather 2D.  Mostly due to nostalgia, being able to develop games and effects that I recall from my past, this gives you something to shoot for while still learning.  I find it much easier to stay motivated if you have small goals to aim for.

Needless to say I eventually came across the Godot game engine.

Thus far I’m pretty impressed with it, the system requirements are extremely low, installation extremely easy and there are tons of youtube articles on how to be productive.  I used a long old game I played on the Amiga called Omega Race as a guide to learn how to do 2D programming using an engine.  In the past I had simply created my own engines (many moons ago) but it’s clear that most game development done now uses an engine to simplify a lot of the gory details.

You can find the link to the game here:

https://pr0cs.itch.io/omegarace2021

I recently picked up an Oculus Quest 2, I am a pretty big VR mark but wanted to wait until PC-centric headsets had bumped up another level of resolution and/or FOV.  Even though the Quest 2 has been out a while now I still planned on skipping it for the resolution alone.  The screen-door effect on my aging CV1 was driving me crazy but it didn’t feel like the Quest 2 was enough of an upgrade to consider moving over.  The thing is Oculus kept improving the headset seemingly every quarter suggesting that they planned on selling the Quest 2 for a while.  I think the best products are those that get consistent updates both firmware and software so on a whim I went out and grabbed the Quest 2 and thus far I’m really impressed.

The screen-door is much improved, it’s not perfect but it’s a huge step up from the CV1.  The FOV isn’t great but I can overlook that for all the other features.

• No more external cameras, no need for active USB3 cables which were a PITA
• Lots of accessories, I changed my Quest 2 headstrap for a ‘halo-style’ head strap making the headset a LOT more comfortable
• Quest 2 is wireless, not only for Quest 2 titles but is also capable of streaming PCVR titles over WIFI to the headset, allowing you to use your PC software wirelessly
• Simple set-up, seated, standing, different rooms, different light in each room, it all just works.  Simplicity is one of the major improvements to the software side of things when comparing against the CV1
• Easier access to curated VR content, the Quest 2 has a nice dashboard where you can quickly access new content
• As I mentioned, Oculus is updating the Quest 2 software/firmware consistently, offering new features, improvements, for free

It’s not all roses and puppy-dogs, the headset isn’t perfect but for the price it gets you access to a lot of great content for cheap, at least when comparing against legacy PC only VR.  Some things I don’t like about the headset:

• The default head strap is pretty bad, not much different than the CV1 but it would be difficult to go back to the default strap after using halo-style
• battery life is not great.   Wireless is nice but the headset eats battery life, luckily it was easy to add a small battery pack which also helped balance the headset a bit more
• Gigantic gap between PCVR and Quest 2 native titles, not surprising since native titles need to use less graphical options since the GPU on the headset is still a mobile processor, this is more of a note than a negative

Well, it’s probably safe to say that no one will be sad to see 2020 end, what a disaster of a year.  While personally it wasn’t too terrible, some changes made with my career made my life much easier, all the negatives probably outweighed the positives.  I won’t say that I expect 2021 to be much better and I’m not convinced that we’ll ever see “normal” again but there isn’t too much point in being negative about the whole situation so I’ll just bid farewell to 2020 and look forward to the challenges that 2021 brings.

I haven’t worked on any new dev projects since Oct, I’ve just been enjoying my time with my family and gaming more as the weather turns less pleasant (the joys of the seemingly endless Canadian winters).  I upgraded my PC finally.  It was time, the 980 was showing it’s age and just couldn’t compete, especially in VR anymore.  I managed to find a RMA 2080TI on Kijiji for a reasonable price after waiting months for a 3080 or 6800XT to appear in stock.  I wanted a brand new GPU but COVID put the dampener on that idea.  Thus far the 2080 has worked out well but not before I BBQ’d my CPU in the process of rebuilding my machine so I sadly had to upgrade the CPU and mobo as well during Christmas.  The Haswell-E CPU I used to have worked well and I hadn’t thought about upgrading it but after hooking some pieces up wrong I fried the mobo (and maybe the CPU too) so I had no choice to effectively start over again.

Thankfully Windows10 is much better at allowing you to migrate licenses over from machine to machine so I didn’t have to reinstall or repurchase Windows, keeping the cost down.  I went to a Intel 10600K and B460 motherboard since they were both on sale at the time.  I wanted to switch teams to AMD but again, COVID killed any chance of getting a Ryzen 5600X so I stuck with what was available in my local area.  The overall cost was much cheaper and for what I’m doing the 10600K is more than adequate.

I managed to finish Half Life Alyx which was really well done, it’s a shame Valve hasn’t made a lot of games recently because clearly they still have their game dev design and dev chops.  Alyx is probably the best, most cohesive VR experience I’ve had to date and well worth the price of admission.  The developer commentary is also very good giving insight into their design philosophy around making a pure VR experience.

I haven’t updated in a while but the world has basically changed since Feb, what with COVID and other crap injecting itself into our lives it’s not surprising that so much has changed.  It was clear that COVID early on was going to have a serious impact what with lock-downs, social distancing, mass layoffs, entire businesses that still haven’t really gone back to work.  For me though luckily COVID has been mostly a good thing, work wise anyway.  COVID encouraged companies to ‘work from home’, and I believe initially that the thought was that the company would lose productivity not being in the office but within a few weeks it was clear that most of management’s fears were unfounded.  I can’t help but think it was difficult for management to let go of the concern that people wouldn’t do their job, but with the full time move to AGILE and weekly sprints there really wasn’t much to worry about.  It was clear that if people weren’t doing their job that it would be easy to tell who wasn’t pulling their weight, with weekly retrospectives it was clear what issues were holding people back so being in an office or being at home really makes no difference.  Now people can be comfortable working at home, the company usually gets more time out of it’s employees since they no longer have to potentially spend hours travelling to the office and overall most people’s outlook improved as the work from home concept has helped a lot with the work-life-balance.

My office basically shut down, we moved all the IT infrastructure to AWS (Amazon Web services) and for the most part the overall day-to-day work process has improved.  Yeah sometimes AWS is unreliable, getting IT support can be a mixed bag, voice comms and meetings can be a mixed bag, mostly because I despise Microsoft Teams but I can tolerate it if it means I don’t have to travel on the cattle car daily to downtown to an office cube that is noisy, disruptive and effectively spirit-crushing.  Probably didn’t help that I had to switch offices 4 times in the span of 2 years, each switch worse than the previous.

With COVID and the lockdowns I had a lot of time to improve my knowledge of Angular, bought a few online courses and revised my long-standing game prototype from Thymeleaf and Bootstrap to a pure java REST servelet to an Angular front-end.  The code is a lot easier to understand and maintain as Angular is a great framework as opposed to loose and raw HTML and javascript everywhere.  I did have to relearn a bunch of things that I was familiar with Bootstrap, some things are harder to do (stuff that expects to run on bootstrap javascript) but overall I found work arounds with Angular that work well.

I also found Selenium which I have playing with recently.  In using Angular and Arquillian I was pretty confident that I could unit test a lot of functionality but with Selenium there is no reason why the entire application couldn’t be tested as well.

On the topic of gaming I will likely skip the new console launches this fall, there just isn’t enough compelling software for either machine at launch.  COVID likely put the hurt on a lot of dev houses so it feels like a lot of software won’t really be available to 2021 so I can wait until then, consoles should be a lot easier to come by then as well.

I do want a new GPU but considering how hard it is to get a 3080 I might have to wait until 2021 for that too which is a drag.  I’m hoping AMD has a competitive product so I could skip Nvidia this gen but I’m not convinced yet.  I’ll happily eat crow if the new Radeons are as good as the Ryzen CPUs at being competitive.

I’d also like to pick up the Quest 2 or the Reverb G2 however without a new GPU there isn’t much point, my current 980 just isn’t up to snuff for the beating some of the newer headsets would put on it.

I took the last few months off doing development at home, spent some time with family and friends and taking a break from development at home.  I find that I get burnt out programming all day then spending a large part of home time programming as well.  It’s not that I don’t love programming and learning but I personally need that good work/life balance to stay sharp.

In the meantime however I’ve finished the Witcher 3, I had it in my backlog for a long time but didn’t want to start playing it because I knew it would be a significant time investment and not really something you can pick away at without forgetting story-lines, characters or the myriad of controls required to be any good at the game.  I finally finished Witcher 3 and all the DLC which clocked in around 125 hours which was good value if you’re talking cost/vs time spent playing.  I enjoyed the game a lot, it feels like it’s been a really long time since I’ve played a good RPG, I’ve started others but abandoned them due to either boring combat, silly storylines or some other game coming along that caught my fancy.  I had tried previous games in the Witcher series however the combat in there just felt dull so I never did get very far however Witcher 3 is significantly better from an action point of view and the storylines were really memorable so it’s worth your effort if you’re considering it.

I also got invited to the XCloud beta Microsoft is putting on.  Overall I’m pretty impressed, I can’t help think that much of companies cloud offerings have been a lot of hot wind (Looking at your Stadia) however XCloud has been really stable and really easy to use.  If Microsoft packages XCloud as part of Gamepass they will have a winner in my mind.  It’s biggest downfall is bandwidth used.  Playing for around 45 mins used 1.6gb of data (when I was on WIFI) which is pretty crazy.  You’re not going to be using XCloud when you’re on mobile anytime soon, certainly not with how overpriced mobile data is here in Canada.

I also starting doing courses on Angular .  Last year I spent quite a bit of time learning Thymeleaf and Bootstrap as well as familiarizing myself with javascript so I thought it would be interesting to approach web development from a different angle (see what I did there) and since Angular is well recognized it felt like a good topic to learn on.  I’m still very early into my research but thus far I’m excited.  I like how typescript has a lot more type-safety than regular javascript however I find it’s still pretty easy to chop your feet off in Angular and get into a state where understanding where your bug is pretty difficult.  It’s pretty easy to mistype something or poorly name a field or method and have the code break without a lot of feedback why it isn’t working.  Much of that I’m sure is related to my inexperience however.  We’ll see as I get further into my online course if I am off base and being too critical of the tool after being spoiled by using eclipse/intelliJ for so long where I’m very familiar with finding and fixing bugs.

I guess I’ve as usual been slacking and not updated my blog for a while.  Busy at work, enjoying my life.  I haven’t been working on anything for a while but I did find a useful guide that hopefully some of you might find useful.

I have a laptop that I need to keep clean, I won’t go into details but the device is very locked down but is also pretty high end and would be nice to use for other computing reasons, it’s designed for 3D graphics however so locked down that I can’t install any new software on it.  I wanted to install Windows 10 on it but via bootable USB (SSD) but the standards Windows installation doesn’t allow for that, until I found the following post:

https://decryptingtechnology.blogspot.com/2015/09/install-windows-10-on-usb-external-hard.html?m=1

Yeah it’s old, a posting from 2015 but it still works thankfully.

I did have a similar problem that another person had in the comments

I can’t find the file “install.win” in sources but I find install.ESD in the CD of windows 10

however as mentioned, you can google how to convert .ESD to .WIN and continue from there, it’s another step but relatively straightforward.

At this point most of the problems I have is forcing the laptop to boot from USB, the bios on the device is finicky and often won’t boot via USB all the time, but it does work and that is more a side effect of the laptop’s bios rather than a problem with the blog posting guide.

So for the longest time I’ve been avoiding web development, not because I thought I wouldn’t be any good at it but rather I find that front-end web coding required a lot more artistic skills than programming skills, and since I have difficulty drawing stick men I would struggle making something look good on the web side.  It’s not like I’ve never done web programming.  When I ran my PixelSystems consulting company I wrote some java code that built my HTML website whenever I got new pricing from my hardware vendors.  Yeah that sort of thing isn’t done any more, most systems now build the HTML on the back end, certainly the content specific stuff anyway.  But when I wrote my translator stuff I didn’t have access to hosting that allowed for a java servlet and at best I could only really use PHP for server related functionality so it just was the best way to get a dynamic website and grow my business.

Things are changing now.  There aren’t really that many of us old school ‘application’ developers left.  Most everyone these days are ‘full stack’ web developers, with everything moving to ‘the cloud’ and the notion of ‘SAAS‘ the need for actual application developers to write both computational code as well as UI code in Swing or SWT is lessened. Back in September I forced myself to start looking into servlets, how to develop them, how to connect the front-end to the back-end, build dynamic modern websites, how security, OAUTH works and tying an overall idea into an over-arching website.  So far I’ve learned a lot an am actually having fun.  I’m attempting to re-create a pen-and-paper RPG that I played many moons ago but turn it into a web service/website that allows users to come in, build their content using tools I developed then run through scenarios using the pen-and-paper rules built on the back-end having the server drive and enforce the rules.

It’s slow going because as expected the learning curve is nearly vertical.  Thankfully though the internet is a fantastic source of information.  Sometimes I wonder how I grew up in an age that didn’t have such easy access to information.  How did I actually learn to code without a debugger, without instant access to a search engine that can point me to a problem I’m fighting with in code or ways to troubleshoot issues I’m having with my software?  I don’t think new developers today (the ones I’m trying to learn from now) really understood how much harder things were in the old days, when the only way to really debug your code, certainly on some of the more archaic platforms, was to println or console.log variable contents and try and mentally visualize what was going on in the code and why it wasn’t working properly.  I have NO interest to go back to those days but I do think it’s what made me so resilient today when it comes to troubleshooting problems.  My project has a long way to go before I start talking about it.  I would be lucky if I am 10% done and I have been working on it for about 6 months already.  That being said I am a lot further along with it than I expected and much of that is due to having access to the internet as a resource as having so many years experience in finding solutions to difficult problems.

I also had my 25th anniversary at work this month.  Hard to imagine, working at one place for 25 years.  Well, I suppose it hasn’t been at one place since as with the software industry, even from the beginning, we got bought out lots, but thankfully with each buyout I was allowed to keep my seniority so March 14th was effectively my 25th year there.  Even more strange is that there are 5 of us left that have been working together for all those 25 years.  How many people these days, in the computer industry, can say they’ve worked with the same 4 people for 25 years?  I’ve known some of these people longer than I’ve known some of my family.  I guess it helps that for the most part I get along with them well, that after 25 years we know each others strengths and weaknesses and we are a fine-honed machine for producing good code that the company can sell.  All of us at this point are patented developers, my patent isn’t actually official yet but as with most things government related it will take time but I suspect within the next 2-3 years it will be official so that will be another feather in the cap.  

I suppose I’m simply lucky, to have found something I’m good at, that I enjoy and that I can do to make a living at.  We have to spend so much of our lives working to survive and I was lucky enough to find something I actually love doing that actually puts food on the table.

So in fall 2018 a new title by Rockstar (the developers behind the infamous Grand Theft Auto series) released their new project. Red Dead Redemption 2, a sequel to their first Red Dead title released 8 years ago on the XBOX 360/PS3 generation. They had been working on the sequel for 8 years which to me is a good thing, not only because the first game was so good but because RDR2 is amazing.

I won’t go into too much details on the premise of the game, there are enough reviews and blogs about the title that if you want to know more Google can help you, in general though the game is an open-world title set at the turn of the century. Cowboys, robbers, villainy… that sort of thing.

I really enjoyed the title, I upgraded our XBox One S to the XBox One X and RDR2 runs very well on the X in 4K. The HDR support is pretty bad, enough so that I turned it off on the console but the game is so pretty and believable that HDR off didn’t impact the visuals in the game. What actually stands out about RDR2 isn’t visuals, it’s how the game world is so seamless. Often playing sandbox games you can see the hole in the game, where the AI or gameplay or activities feel ‘gamey’ or clunky but RDR2 didn’t have that feeling. It plays more like a ‘cowboy simulator’ as opposed to GTA set in cowboy land. What also really stood out for me were all the random events that happen in the game. Strangers met out on the road, fist fights that break out in the saloons, people asking for help that you meet organically playing the game.

Some of the controls and aiming in the game aren’t perfect, some of these issues are likely due to all the animation they implemented in the game but none of this was something that I couldn’t live with. I didn’t get too much into the online option of the game, after finishing the single player story clocking at 97 hours, I felt I got what I wanted out of the game.

Many moons ago I used to be pretty proficient at 3D programming.  Not really for work but more side projects, fun, to learn.  I wouldn’t say I’m artistic, hell, I can barely draw a stick-man.  I do know what looks good though thematically, a side effect of 25 years of UI and software design I suppose.

I haven’t kept up with things though, which is part of why it’s always difficult for me to understand people who say “I’m bored”.  There are simply so many things to learn, to spend time tinkering with and have fun playing with that I never have enough time.  I suppose I’m used to the old days, the pre-internet era where you had to learn everything the hard way, going over endless books, chatting on BBSes, finding examples in magazines and so on that I find it extremely easy to find side projects to play with on the internet and relatively quick and easy to become proficient at those new toys and techniques.  Not saying I’m an expert in everything I mess around with but I usually get enough knowledge to have fun and feel like I learned something quickly.

Anyway, back on topic… In one of my numerous daily meetings I found out that there are a number of projects that plan on using the three.js system for 3D rendering.  While listening to the presenter discuss their techniques I loaded up the information on three.js and saw they have a ton of pretty cool demos as well as a very cool example page that shows off the myriad of features the engine supports.  I was impressed.  How is all of this possible inside a browser window?  When did that happen?  I always found web pages rather .. bland.. when compared to the demo/intro scene of yester-year.  This ability to render 3d objects and effects in a browser window seemed like fun.  I hate the logo you see at the top of the screen and wanted to try and replicate it but animated, using this three.js system.

Well, after experimenting and reviewing their examples I had a bunch of things working and was excited to play more but hit a roadblock.  Well not a roadblock stopping me from work but something that I’d fight with every step.  Javascript.  Javascript is the back end language you use to leverage your three.js content.  You might say “well Will, you write java code every day, you have been for more than 15 years, why would you consider Javascript a roadblock, surely you can apply some of your daily practice and be proficient at javascript instantly”.  Well sir, you’d be wrong.  I suppose after 25 years of professional development and countless years learning in grade school I’ve been ruined by structured programming languages.  Javascript is the wild wild west, the rules are so loose that you can chop your feet off and not even know it until you start running.  I found it very difficult to organize my ideas into logical pieces then have them communicate with the code effectively.  I’m very sure it’s an experience thing but I like having organized ideas that are totally encapsulated.  Where the concepts do not contaminate each other except for what you wish to expose.. With Javascript you can do anything anywhere, making the code, in my opinion, messy.  If I try and code up nice tightly composed ideas I find with my idea of keeping the ideas separate and easy to use.

I can work around javascript, its just a matter of relaxing the years abuse of writing small cohesive pieces of code and being more relaxed with my designs.  Sadly though the WordPress CMS backend I’m using for this website it’s exceedingly difficult to embed javascript elements without re-writing much of the theme you’re using.  I wanted to change the logo above to make it animated but realize that I’d have to rewrite the theme I’m using to accommodate for doing that and I’m lazy so I’ll just post my example to a supplemental web page instead you can visit here:

http://www.pixelsystems.net/proto/logo.php

It’s not really a 1-to-1 translation of the graphic logo animated but just me learning how to load 3D fonts, implement tweening, how to programatically fill a cat-mull spline polygon and so on.

What is impressive, after all my complaining is the cost of entry to start learning and having fun with javascript and three.js.  The cost of entry is nothing, beyond the time required to read and experiment.  I was always impressed what you got for free with Java (free language, free IDE, tons of source code), with Javascript it’s even easier, there are tons of good editors out there for writing code, many of which interface with libraries like three.js and offer code completion, running right out of the IDE and other niceties that we take for granted now.  It’s very easy to write code, save it and run it instantly.  You can debug it instantly in your browser so very quick access to the data structures, their contents, console logging and so on, with nothing else to install and set up.

I’ll likely add this stuff to the endless parade of “play more with when I have free time” items on my plate.

Just a little update, my last post was detailing how I’ve renewed my Minix Box, however I’ve since then essentially retired it.  It was still usable (and I may still use it at a different location) I did come into an inexpensive laptop that works flawlessly for driving my TV.  Since it has an SSD it starts significantly faster and with the extra horsepower doesn’t chug like the aging Minix.

I have started a few new side projects worth noting, I’ll discuss the one that’s taken up most of my time recently.  In the past I picked up a few inexpensive WIFI low light webcams.

For the better part of 2 years I ran them with some commercial software called WebCamXP which allowed me to configure a wide range of motion sensing security for the cams, off-site storage of security footage, notification and so on.  It worked really well, hence me using it for 2 years but… It required a dedicated Windows PC to JUST sit and monitor and detect camera footage.  It’s not like I don’t have spare PCs lying around but it did use a significant amount of processing power to do complex frame comparisons to provide accurate motion detection.  The cameras also, like most things that are inexpensive, were not terribly reliable, they would often need resetting.  Most likely due to the sheer amount of traffic they were generating (5-12 FPS of a 720×540 feed running 24/7 on wifi).

For the last 6 months or so I sort of just disabled the system and the cams sat idle.  Until I came across a inexpensive deal on DDR around a Chinese home monitoring system, “Xiaomi Mijia 6 in 1 Smart Home Security Kit“.

It arrived without issue from China and thankfully works pretty well out of the box.  The initial gateway configuration was a bit strange considering the gateway ONLY speaks Chinese, the prompts however aren’t that important and it integrated with my WIFI fine and was able to detect all the supplemental devices just fine.  The Kit I got came with the gateway (which acts as the hub for the sub devices), a motion sensor, door/window sensor, remote switch, Chinese specific AC WIFI plug and temperature humidity sensor.  The nice thing is that it’s ridiculously easy to add new devices and the devices that came with the package were easily discovered by the gateway and instantly added to the Android app without issue.

I used the MIHOME kit for a few months, happy with how it was working.  The sub devices run on coin batteries, can be placed pretty much anywhere in the home and work flawlessly.

One day I must have just been killing time and happened upon OpenHAB2.  The premise is that it is a self contained package that runs on most systems (Win/Linux/RaspberryPI) which brings together all your internet type devices into one easy to use and manage location.  Since I am running a Linux machine at home to manage my media and other services it made sense to install OpenHAB and see if I could get it to drive the MIHOME as well as the webcams and other devices.  After some installation and configuration I had OpenHAB talking to the MIHOME kit, my garage door opener, Orvibo wifi socket, webcams, cell phones etc.  The system allows me to write some pretty complex rules like:

“If no-one is home and I detect the garage door open then send Will an Android notification message saying….The Garage Door is open, did you leave it open?”

or

“If I detect motion from the MIHOME motion sensor on the main floor and no one is home, turn on the WIFI socket and lamp, start recording the main floor webcam and send myself an Android notification message that motion was detected”

I’m still experimenting with it, I do wish it had a better remote viewing type application that was easier to use than configuring a VPN or other security type layers.  I like that it uses significantly less power, less bandwidth with a lot more flexibility on what activities the devices are available to perform.  I do like that OpenHAB is developed in Java, something I’m familiar with so making changes or investigating improvements is pretty easy, though the build system is quite complex.

I’ve since ordered a few more motion and door sensors for the MIHOME kit which will easily integrate with OpenHAB to provide better coverage for my home.