Greetings. Much time has passed but I'm back. Today's item is a mini physics engine with point masses, constraints and damage. It uses verlet integration, basically as described in this article: Advanced Character Physics by Thomas Jakobsen but gradually deviating from it. Main difference so far is that I don't just resolve each constraint in turn, I get the amount each constraint wants the point to move first and then sort of mix them. I basically just wrote this thing to avoid going insane, but I am going somewhere with it. Whether I get there is another matter entirely. Currently the issues I have are that friction depends on how many iterations I run through the solver (since it's not represented as a force) and my constraint breaking feature is, er, broken (deformation is fine).

I was going to put up a video but line graphics really don't compress well, so here are a few screenshots instead.

I've had another attempt at sparse volumes for my voxel-like renderer. A bit late though, I've been thoroughly beaten to it. Not that surprising, considering how many years I've been chipping away at it (and, lately, just plain neglecting it).

This sparse volume is much simpler than previous attempts, and as such, works quite a bit better. I've got a 2048^3 volume working, with floating point radii, and it's taking around a gig of ram. And let me say this: You have no idea how big a 2048^3 volume is. Here's a picture:

You see each of the little squares on the left? They're 8 grid points across. Each 8^3 bunch of radii is coloured like a colour cube. There are artifacts, but I don't care at the moment. I'm tired.

So I've been thinking (boom). Not about the exam on Monday, no way that would happen. I've been thinking about how quite a few people live out of a USB memory stick/drive/key/dongle/whatever, especially at uni. Some people do it because they don't have a laptop and use a combination of lab and home computers. Some people do it even though they do have a laptop. For example me. To the point where I want to get a fancy shmancy memory card thingy that can still be used with USB, so I don't have an 8gb stick hanging off the side of my laptop all the time.

Money sinks aside, I see this sort of portable storage playing a big role in the near future of computing. It already is, you say? Yes, well, that's what tipped me off. But seriously, it's pretty limited at the moment. Most people don't put that many programs on their USB whatchamacallits. The reason for this, from what I've seen, is that a lot of programs just don't handle it very well. E.g. they use the registry (eww) or store stuff in your user or system directories that don't move when the program does. There's been some effort to sort this out, and half-assed operating system support for this kind of thing, but I ignored it all because it would take per-program effort. It seems to me the problem is being solved at the wrong level entirely.

In my staggering around the interwebs, I found that the flipcode image of the day gallery is still online. The site as a whole died years ago. So I thought I'd share with you my only ever image of the day.

It's of the asteroids game I made for christmas 04. I wrote it almost from scratch, which was quite a feat and a great learning experience, but not the recommended way of completing a project quickly. Looking back, I'm proud of what I achieved back then, but I can't help but think: What would the me of then think of the me of now? He was secretly extremely arrogant (thought he was some sort of genius). He'd probably be fine with my job, if slightly disappointed it's not games related, and I doubt he'd have any qualms about my performance at uni. But I can imagine comments like "That's still your only playable 3d game? What the hell man! And don't forget who came up with your only good rendering algorithm". Yeah, well, stuff him. At least my unfinished projects don't leak so much memory.