Author Archives: John Croisant

Complicated Code and Creative Blocks

The past several weeks have been a struggle, productivity-wise. First, I spent quite a lot of time working on proto-slots. That may seem productive, but the amount of effort I put into polishing and documenting it was way out of proportion to the benefit I would get from it. I think I did a pretty [...]
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Mini-project: proto-slots

I’ve just released proto-slots, a mini-project I created as part of Ambienome. From the README: proto-slots provides a macro for defining prototypal accessor methods so that CLOS instances will support protoypal inheritance. Prototypal inheritance means that an instance’s slots can inherit values from another instance, known in these docs as the “base object” (but more [...]
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Colored Shapes

I got a bit sidetracked while working on creature components, but still ended up making important progress for the overall system. First, I created a new transform class by abstracting and cleaning up the shape class’s position, angle, and size attributes and methods. I also created a transformable “mixin” class, which can be used by [...]
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Shape Mesh Progress

Yesterday, I completed the code to generate triangle and circle meshes: The triangle looks like it’s too small, but it fits perfectly in the circle, and the circle fits perfectly in the square. Yay, geometry! Of course, when building a creature, they can be scaled to whatever size you like, and the algorithms can produce [...]
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Adventures with the OpenGL shader pipeline

For the past several weeks, I’ve been learning “modern” OpenGL programming practices, by which I mean using a GLSL shader pipeline with vertex and fragment shaders. Even before starting Ambienome, I was already somewhat familiar with the old OpenGL “fixed function pipeline”, using glBegin/glEnd, glColor, glVertex, etc. Ambienome is going to be visually simple enough [...]
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Ambienome – Technology

In my previous post, I described the concept and roadmap for my new project, Ambienome. In this post, I’ll be describing the technology (programming language and libraries) I’m using, and why I chose them. Even though I have seven years of experience with Ruby, and my own game library, Rubygame, already available and ready to [...]
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New Project: Ambienome

I’ve started a new project: Ambienome. This is a game (or, rather, a toy) I’ve wanted to create for years — I blogged about it in May 2007 and November 2009 — and now I’m finally making a serious attempt. I’ll be blogging about my development progress, both to solidify my ideas by putting them [...]
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Sup email client keybindings and filters

Lately I’ve been playing with Sup, a geeky console-based email client written in Ruby. I’ve used it enough to understand it and settle in a bit, but unfortunately also enough to realize that it’s probably not right for me. Along the way, though, I’ve done some work with keybindings and message filters that I’d like [...]
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Nice-FFI 0.4 released

Nice-FFI 0.4 is now available. You can install the new version with gem install nice-ffi, as usual. Please note that Nice-FFI is still not considered API-stable, so if you aren’t willing to update your code when a new version comes out, you shouldn’t use it until version 1.0. Version 0.4 fixes several major bugs related [...]
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Nice-FFI 0.3 (and 0.2)

I’ve just released a new version of Nice-FFI, my convenience library for Ruby FFI libraries. You can install the new version with gem install nice-ffi, as usual. Please note that Nice-FFI is still not considered API-stable, so if you aren’t willing to update your code when a new version comes out, you shouldn’t use it [...]
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