Posts

The core piece of functionality in Bookchoy is “tap on a character, see a popup with the dictionary definition”. Sounds simple, but because of the ambiguity in the language it’s not a trivial problem. I think while it can be a crutch, having the ability to not lose your flow in reading/navigating/writing is critical, to avoid just getting bored or frustrated and stopping the session. I want this functionality everywhere: on my phone, in my browser, in my primary text editor (neovim). ...

building random small things At this point we all know that AI lets us build whatever we want when we want it. It’s especially nice when I have small things I want for myseelf and I wouldn’t have otherwise spent the time bootstrapping and polishing them to the point that they’re daily-drivable. The reason I frequently feel the need for such tiny apps is that most things available at the top of whatever SEO optimized search are pretty bloated. For example, a fitness/macro tracker: ...

UPDATE: I made this into a small Go module: https://github.com/stevenctl/deadlog. It is a drop in replacement for sync.Mutex and sync.RWMutex, with the option to call the returned unlock closure if you want to track unreleased locks. Don’t run with this in production, it’s only for debugging deadlocks. Multiple times, I’ve had to debug deadlocks in some Go code. Even though Go’s -race flag when running tests can detect deadlocks, in my experience it hasn’t caught the ones that drive me crazy with flaky or fast tests (~500ms-2s). ...

It’s been a while! My last post was about this app, about a year ago after a couple months of work. I did not expect this to be a long-term project. Studying Mandarin became one of my main hobbies. Using my own app to study was cool, but it had lots of issues so I kept chipping away at it over nights and weekends. At this point I use it daily. After showing my in-laws (who are Malaysian Chinese, and native speakers), they showed enormous support and ended up motivating me to polish it for release as a proper app. ...

I’ve been studying Mandarin Chinese for a few years, starting with basic phrases (Pimsleur) and then moving on to Hello Chinese. This app was excellent for the basics, offering (quality!) gamified lessons and a content of library with a slick reading interface where you could tap unknown words for translation and audio. After completing all the structured lessons, I focused on reading. When I saved new words, they went into a separate review system: flashcards. I found this system, particularly the self-grading aspect, less engaging than the original lessons and their multiple-choice based review system. ...

Introduction I don’t think I would have become interested in shooters if it weren’t for Halo 3’s forge mode. I probably logged 1000 hours in Minecraft when I was a kid (and learned Java because of it!). Games that let you make stuff are the best. Making games is even better. After a few years focusing on my career in network programming I decided to revisit games, this time looking at 3D. ...

In the last post we were able to randomly generate “correct” looking 3D shapes. However, my goal was something that a user or game developer could create levels with. Let’s look at our requirements: The user should have direct control of the generation. BorisTheBrave describes calls this “Driven WFC”. We need a lot of tiles. That would take a lot of time to model for a game developer. This isn’t totally avoidable, but we can optimize our workflow. If the user is going to interact with this, the algorithm for solving the generation needs to be fast. Our naive implementation needs a major upgrade. Driving WFC Initial Constraint Our method of “driving” WFC will be specifying which cells aren’t empty as an initial contraint. ...

During the intro to a game I (perodically) work on, the player starts on a pirate ship. Realistic water doesn’t fit the style, and scroling textures on a big plane looked pretty boring. To make things a bit angrier I needed intense waves, and I needed those waved to actually affect the world. Waves To keep it simple, I just did procedural heightmap; i.e. set the vertical coorinate to be a function of the horizontal position and time. ...

I am not a good artist. One of the reason 3D is a bit more attractive to me is that I can usually build something rather than draw it or sculpt it. Digital art gives you an “undo” button, but being able to undo or redo things out of order makes it even easier to experiment. Most of the terrain tools out there have a destructive workflow. Using various brushes, you write directly to a heightmap. Including the concept of “layers” can help here, but I want something closer to modeling. ...

Triplanar mapping is already expensive, and multiplying that by the samples for paralax occlusion mapping is probably a bad idea. It was fun to implement this anyway, even if I don’t use it in a game. In my current WFC prototypes, I’m re-using models and rotating them. At some point I’ll need to handle also transforming the UVs based on the rotation of the tiles’ models, but for now triplanar mapping is a quick way to get an idea of how things might look. ...