For the most part I try to spend at least an hour every day on personal projects. By doing so even when I'm not in the mood, I keep on track sufficiently that I have a good chance of actually finishing things. Today I'm making an exception: it's LAN party day. Non-stop Warcraft III until our ears b…

I cranked out a few textures for the dodecahellspawn. Right now, I'm using the faux stained glass look. By using different gradiants to generate backgrounds and differing central motifs, each piece should be recognizable as part of distinct faces. Hopefully.

I've got about half the textures done. R…

One vaguely interesting thing about me: I have a greater than average propensity for breaking things. On one hand, this is bad: I go through hardware more frequently than your normal geek, and not because I mean to upgrade either. It also comes up in my coding style; I generally need to use a stron…

Well, I finally sat down and coded a simple renderer for a dodecahedron with SDL and OpenGL in C++. I did a couple of really bone headed things while putting it together, like completely borking the normals, and at one point using a cosine instead of a sine. But, it's looking pretty good now.

I thi…

So back to the personal code library for a bit. What with concerns from real life and dodecahellspawn, the code library has been on the back burner for a bit. I'd like to share some interesting tidbit about C++, design philosophy or developing in general, but today I just did basic work: commenting…

Well, I tried upgrading my Python installation today, and only succeeding in borking things so badly I can't get *any* pygame or PyOpenGL programs to run, so I guess the dodecahellspawn rewrite is going to be in C++.

Maybe in a few months I'll try reinstalling the entire mess.

This next image for dodecahellspawn is fairly subjective. It just shows a numbering for faces and vertices. When you get right down to it, almost any numbering scheme will work. This one exploits a few regularities that makes the numbers easier to generate in a few spots. For example: faces on opp…

Gah. I've decided that I'm going to move back to the desert one of these days. No allergy problems and far fewer thunderstorms that cause nice unhappy power failures.

I just got a new job offer. I've worked with these people before and enjoy the environment. There's something great about a group that takes a three hour lunch every day. Of course, if I take the offer I'll be actually working real hours again instead of consultant hours which I'm doing now. That'l…

So, as promised, today's entry is about dodecahellspawn. I find it useful for any project bigger than "Hello World" to lay out as much as possible on paper before actually coding. And since I'm such a nice guy, I'll spare you my handwriting and put up nice pretty versions drawn up in gimp instead.

F…