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[ferreiradaselva]

On a related note, I'm trying out https://github.com/mattconte/tlsf to replace malloc() as my general purpose allocator - primarily because it works within preallocated pools which is something I've wanted from my general purpose allocator for some time now.
It also has nice debugging facilities:

That looks really interesting. At first glance, it's not something that I need right now, but I might use later.


I'm writing documentation (specifically the reference). This is on happy room, because I like to write documentation.

I also forked my own engine, to make a lighter version and especially to require to only include a single header to use it. Having to include and keep track many headers is basically a bummer for any user.

Edit:

Thank you markdown for being beautiful: https://github.com/ferreiradaselva/cgamedev/blob/master/docs/REFERENCE.md

[pelle]

I just (well, 12 hours or so ago) released a new version of my decide-mode for emacs, so you can have more random decisions (like rolling rpg dice or generating some random strings from a table) in your text editor.

https://github.com/lifelike/decide-mode

Most important new feature I guess is the new variable (decide-custom-dice) to add your own custom dice to roll.

Complete LISP noob, but it is fun to play with elisp now and then.

[oahda]

wooh

Server is Asio, client is SDL_net 2. Works everywhere (macOS, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS) except web. Emscripten does have a compiler flag to use SDL_net 2 just like it has one for SDL itself, so it's a bit confusing, but it might be that it supports other features of it, just not sockets (but I expected it to convert it to WebSockets for me). Oh, well. 5/6, not bad!

[JWki]

You can't have websockets connect to TCP endpoints so you'll probably need to have a websocket endpoint in your server /tools side. That's what I did when I used emscripten, there's a header only websocket lib for c++ called websocketpp or something. I also used inline js in the emscripten app to implement data transfer via Web sockets.

[oahda]

Agh. Three libs it is. Thanks for the info.

EDIT:
Two after all. The SDL_net port for Emscripten does seem to be using websockets somehow, and I got it to talk to my TCP server thanks to websockify! It's just a separate program that acts as a bridge that you start, passing to it the address and port of the TCP server and assign an address and port for the bridge server and then you just connect to that from the SDL_net client instead and it just works™, sits there and listens to both and passes stuff between them.

[JWki]

Agh. Three libs it is. Thanks for the info.

EDIT:
Two after all. The SDL_net port for Emscripten does seem to be using websockets somehow, and I got it to talk to my TCP server thanks to websockify! It's just a separate program that acts as a bridge that you start, passing to it the address and port of the TCP server and assign an address and port for the bridge server and then you just connect to that from the SDL_net client instead and it just works™, sits there and listens to both and passes stuff between them.

Ah yeah spoofing would work too I guess. I think that's how icculus made the emscripten port of UT work.

[oahda]

Yeah, it might not be optimal for other use cases, but it was a nice and easy way out of this one.

[Zireael]

This happy programmer made her first git commit from commandline (on a Linux server to boot).

In other news, I discovered Blender supports Python scripting so I spent all of yesterday trying to automate my car mesh generation. I'm running into weird selection issues, but other than that it's working!

[oahda]

Woop!

I really want to get into Blender scripting at some point. I'm sure there's some neat export tool that could be tailored to my purposes. What are you doing with that car mesh generation?

[Zireael]

Woop!

I really want to get into Blender scripting at some point. I'm sure there's some neat export tool that could be tailored to my purposes. What are you doing with that car mesh generation?

So far I'm trying to simply generate a car mesh based on some float parameters set by the user (width of wheel well, height of wheel well, length of hood/roof, that sort of things).

I'm basically following this tutorial:

however by doing scripting instead of manual work (if you have the scripting view on, every action you do manually will show a function call - I haven't discovered a way to copy them so I've been basically typing them in).
I have the outline already but getting the vertical edges is difficult due to selection issues (some old vertices remain selected and then the add edge function just does /shrug and nothing happens)

I've tried referencing some existing blender generation scripts but they're either horribly old (and the API has changed a bit since) or huge and way too complex. As far as I can tell, there's precious few Blender scripters so all I have to go on is some old stackoverflow posts.

About an export script, here's one that exports to CSV: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/51706/exporting-coordinates-of-vertices-to-csv?rq=1

[oahda]

Sounds super useful for a workflow where you need lots of slightly varied cars. Cool! Hope you solve that issue. Thanks for the link, good reference to get started.

[BorisTheBrave]

I've written blender addons. Blender Artists is a good place to go for support.

Just FYI, it's not nearly as fun as you'd think. The Blender Python API is pretty weird in places, and poorly documented.

To copy paste stuff from the info bar, you need to right click to select the lines you want to copy, then hit ctrl-C. But it's not the recommended - for creating meshes, it's easiest to work directly with the mesh rather than fiddling with selections.

[Garthy]

How is Blender going nowadays? I last used it a *long* time ago, and back then it really wasn't the easiest thing to use. I'm guessing it has improved significantly over the years. What is it like to work with nowadays?

[gimymblert]

I never asked, but what's not easy in blender? Because first used was like a glove to me ... And I tried many other along the way before that ...

[ProgramGamer]

I used blender as a kid and managed to make stuff just fine, so I don't understand how it's such a common thing for people to complain about blender lol

[Garthy]

I never asked, but what's not easy in blender? Because first used was like a glove to me ... And I tried many other along the way before that ...

I last used it over a decade ago so that's taxing my memory a bit, but:

- There was a lot of frustration over how unintuitive the interface was at the time, and I tended to agree.
- I had a lot of trouble getting it to produce files that I could actually use.
- I believe it had a rough learning curve.

I'm interested in how people are finding it nowadays. I'm guessing that it is much improved.

[ProgramGamer]

I'd dive into it again, having used it years ago.

[Garthy]

I'd dive into it again, having used it years ago.

Cool. If you don't mind me asking, what sort of things were you doing with it when you last used it? What parts of Blender did you find worked really well for you?

[gimymblert]

I use it since 2.49 and what I do haven't change a bit with new version, they have added some new interface to have direct access to some function, but you could do that with spacebar anyway.

The great thing is that how tight the coherence is, especially if you have enough notion of 3d. So finding function is just a matter to think in 3d. More imporatantly, whatever you learn from one mode, translate in all mode, I took a simple tut on modeling a character, then I did everything else from that, first time I UV (which I couldn't figure out in 3ds max and other soft) I did everything by simply redoing what I learned and reading available function in menu. Also back then rigging in 3ds max was a pain and you couldn't change the bone structure, which you can in blender.

Maybe the hardest thing to conceptualize for people, but fits me, was the shift into different mode, ie there is an object mode, a pose mode and an edit mode which nicely allow recycling of the same basic shortcut, so the same shortcut do similar thing relative to the mode, it mean you have less convoluted shortcut to learn and enforce a shortcut based workflow I had trouble with in other soft, it also allows you to intuitively export knowledge from one mode to other mode, for ex: if it's extrusion like you bet it will be similar shortcut in another mode.

The over thing is the hover a subwindows to make it a target of shortcut, ie if you have multiple windows, the one who have the cursor hovering is the one who will frame the shortcut, that's such a productivity boost I have now trouble with how clunky other soft are. But it's unusual so it might tripped people as tuts don't make a big deal of it as it is seen as old news.

Being able to morph any windows in any other windows at any time, that's a lot of "any" that give you a lot of flexibility to arrange and personalize your workplace in a way that is optimized to the task at hand. Priceless to me.

Other quirks quickly fixable if that the left click isn't the selection click, which trip most people coming from other soft, and there is an option for that in preference. Or the need for a 3 button mouse, which has a workaround in the preference but make the shortcut base workflow as clunky as other soft and why I didn't gel with them.

Basically, blender is workflow oriented toward efficiency, it break some rules to achieve this goal.

[ProgramGamer]

Also, blender tends to optimize things for experienced users, and not for newbies, which is why it's seen as "hard to learn" I guess. But the thing is, that sets you up for becoming way more productive in the long term, because you're not relying on intuition to learn, you actually have to follow tutorials and learn functionality the proper way. Blender just sets you up for long term success if you're willing to dance its dance.

It maybe helps that when I learned Blender, I had a lot more patience for learning new software, so I kinda just read an online tutorial in its entirety to learn how to do what I wanted, which was modeling and animating. I remember looking up the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet often when I used it, which I rarely do with any other software.

Blender made me into a power user lol