System restarting, wait...
30 Oct 2016
Driving in Washington can be so pretty :)
29 Oct 2016
This is probably the best portable system I have ever tried. Lit screen, clam shell, large rechargeable battery. It also fits in any pocket.
29 Oct 2016
I am not very happy with the quality of the camera in my Pixel C :/
PRGE 2016
28 Oct 2016 - Tags: expo, gaming, gaming, portlan, retro
Another great Portland Retro Gaming Expo :)
Dev Blog 161011
11 Oct 2016 - Tags: battlevr, prototype, vr
I have not written an update for a few weeks but several bugs have been fixed and progress remains steady. I algo got to take this game to the VR Meetup in Seattle and it was a great time. The overall feedback was that people were excited to see a multiplayer game. But still the graphics and UI were very unimpressive.
I remain focused on fixing remaining bugs and adding the needed assets to present this as a valid prototype game.
Dev Blog 160918
18 Sep 2016 - Tags: battlevr, programming, vr
This iteration has been a bit slow because I had to do some refactoring and fix some fallout from enabling LOD Groups. After doing that I proceeded to change all assets in Unity from binaries to yaml files, which will make it much easier when merging changes.
Since I am in Alpha-1 stage I am espending more time thinking about the actual gameplay and how the UI should look. Now that Github also added the Projects tab, I have been creating card and linking issues in the board.
Changes
Project improvements
The big change here was changing from binary asset files to yaml ones. This change involved a nasty rebase between some changes had across multiple machines and as a result I had to link some assets. The other big change was that I added the UnitySampleUI package to the repo. This is big not because there were big changes but rather becuase initially I was not going to include packages into the repo. At the end, this Package is free and availabel for devs to use it so I guess there is no damage in including it. Eventually when I start working on final assets it will be removed anyways.
Improving look and feel
Now that I am going to be showing the game to people I thought it was time to start working on polishing some edges. I have been going over the issues I have and cleaning some low hanging fruit, things like moving UI around and adding particle effects. This changes do not require lots of code changes but give the game a much better look.
Next Items
I will be demoing the game to people during the Seattle VR meetup on Thursday 22nd, so for that I want to clean up some issues, mostly the damn crash the only happens when leaving a game in VR.
Other change I would like to look into as well is the hability to make builds via the command line. I want to have a command to make builds for the platform I want. This would speed up my development so I will not have to be changing build platform by using the UI.
Dev Blog 160913
13 Sep 2016 - Tags: battlevr, meetup, prototype, vr
I finally got to show the prototype I have for BattleVR in this video as well as a Reddit thread. The reaction was overall positive with some discussion, which is always good. What I am showing is the milestone that I call Prototype 3. The idea with prototype 1-3 was for me to get familiar with Unity and to code the basic systems that would power the game. Basically a POC with most of the core components of the game.
Now that the code and the word is out, my plan is to do weekly iterations along side with a blog post. I have also update the Roadmap and the Milestones page. Now the project is moving into Alpha-1 stage.
Changes
Added Support for LOD - e9c75d9f397bb5c42ec6bad7f874fc07ed7632ad
This is the first change after moving into Alpha-1. It involves replacing the main meshes(player ships, capital ships, space station) with LOD(Level of Detail) Groups. This are basically an abstraction that allows me to provide different meshes of different complexity based on the distance of the camera. I added support for LOD groups in the PlayerPrefab and the respective AssetManager methods. Also some enviromental objects are using LOD Groups like Capital Ships and the SpaceStation in the middle of Level1.
That all for last week. Thanks for reading.
PAX 2016
10 Sep 2016 - Tags: PAX, gaming, photos, seattle
The weekend that a lot of people were waiting happened from September 2nd to the 5th. PAX 2016 was my second PAX and now this time I decided not to miss any day. All the pictures are uploaded to the Facebook page with a separate album for Friday, Saturday and Sunday/Monday.
Still Integrating This Blog with IFTTT
23 Aug 2016 - Tags: blog, facebook, ifttt, twitter
I am still working on integrating this blog with IFTT. The goal is that every time I post something here both my Twitter and Facebook page will be updated.
So far the IFTTT<->Facebook integration is working fine but the integration with Twitter did not work. This post is also another test to see if it is working. My assuption is that the Twitter interation did not work because I accidentaly turned off the IFTTT recipe rather than trigerring it. As a result the post would not be considered “new” anymore.
If the Twitter recipe works, the next step will be to fix how I am handling images. Currently I am adding <div> and tags around all the images. Instead I will move to use markdown syntax for all images and then the style will be applied with CSS.
This is just a test, please ignore
20 Aug 2016 - Tags: IFTTT, blog, test
This post is a test for testing the new IFTTT recipes for posting to Twitter and Facebook.
First time to the Seattle Retro Gaming Expo
25 Jul 2016 - Tags: expo, gaming, retro, seattle
On Saturday July 23rd was the 2016 Seattle Retro Gaming Expo in the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. I have been to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo a couple times and I know that SRGE was a smaller and more local event. Despite of the much smaller size and limited number of vendors, the prices I found were really good and the collection was diverse. As always, the people were very friendly and I got to talk to a few guys about technical stuff. I could not stay very long because I had to leave at around 3:00PM but this is what I ended leaving the expo with:
- Alone In The Dark(DreamCast)
I wanted to get another DreamCast game and Alone In The Dark is a game I have heard a lot about. I got it from the great guys at Game Over Videogames.
- Future Cop L.A.P.D
This game was one I really liked as a kid but I had completely forgotten its name. It happened to show up for very cheap so of course I had to get it.
- Gex 3 Deeo Cover Gecko
Gex 3 featuring Marliece Andrada, I think that is all the description that this game needs.
- Phantasy Star Online Episode III Card Revolution
I already happen to have this game but this game is complete with all manuals and a gase in great condition.
- Metroid Prime 2 Echoes
The sequel for the awesome Metroid Prime for GameCube.
- Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles
When I first got my GameCube as a kid, I had the option to get either this game or Star Wars The Clone Wars. Since I wanted to play something with my brother we descided to get Star Wars, but now I will finally experience what I could have had.
In between buying stuff I also got the chance to meet a few people. The first one was Joe from 8Bit Heroes , he described the project and the documentary that he and his team were working on. He also showed the tool they developed to work with NES hardware and limitations.
Then I had the chance to speak was Dan and Terry Diebold, the current owners of the Nintendo-PlayStation.
I chatted with both of them and they told me about about how they ended up with the console and what their plans are. It was great been able to see what could have been had the partnership between Nintendo and Sony worked out.
Overall, even though I didn’t spend much time in this convention I had a great time. I will totally be attending next year.
My experience with Pokemon Go
13 Jul 2016 - Tags: mobile, nintendo, pokemon
Few would have thought that Pokemon Go would be the hit that it has been. It has only been a few weeks and Pokemon is all the craze again, with people catching pokemons everywhere you go. As a pokemon fan of course I had to try Pokemon Go and I have spend several hours walking and catching pokemons while going and coming from work. The first few hours were really fun, looking for pokemons around me and trying find which ones live around my usual route, but as I keep catching them I started to feel that maybe my nostalgia and love for the Pokemon franchise was the reason I kept playing.
Pokemon Go is basically a simplified version of Ingress but with a pokemon theme. The first time I tried Ingress I was overwhelmed by the amount of content, data, text and quests I had to do, to the point that I stopped playing because I felt I could not commit to this parallel world. But now when I see Pokemon Go I feel that is such a bare bones game, no in-game chat, no trading, no PvP, lame battle system and such a horrible grind to evolve your pokemons. I understand that for this game to be successful it had to be adapted for a more casual crowd, but may(just maybe) they went a bit too far.
I feel that Pokemon Go has all the characteristics for it to be just a fad. It’s initial appeal came from the use of the Pokemon trademark and It’s popularity exploded thanks to social media and the mouth-to-mouth. Pokemon Go has achieved a very large player-base, but we still need to see what the retention rates will be, specially given some aspects like the amount of grinding required. The problem of when something becomes such a big hit so quickly is that there is the risk of burning out your players. The timers in mobile F2P games are used to prevent players from over- dosing in the game, Pokemon Go does not have this mechanic and instead it always has activities you can do. Even though this may sound like a positive point, on a game with no clear end-game, it can easily lead to players exhausting themselves and leaving the game.
I really hope Pokemon Go will be a success and not just another Periscope or Peach. If Niantic can improve the social features, fix the bugs and add more content, it can really become a new juggernaut in the gaming world. Only time will tell.
More Data Gathering
03 Jun 2016 - Tags: iot, programming, wemo
This is the project that has been sucking my time lately, a lightweight hub for data that is collected in my home. The project started as a service to keep track of the energy consumption from two WeMos in my apartment. But When I was done I noticed that there is no reason why this wouldn’t work for other kinds of data.
The application is divided on three parts, the server, the API and the modules. Let me explain what each part does.
The server
This is a python script that uses the scheduler to trigger events to poll devices. The server will import all the modules in the ‘modules’ folder and then it will instantiate an object for each module enabled in the senson_station.cfg file. Each module imported has the logic to check if a device is online and
The Modules(Tentative title)
I say tentative title because it is a bad idea to call something ‘module’ since it is such a common word.
To handle multiple types of sensors, each module is a self contained python class that provides information to the server about how often should the polling happen as well as the logic to do the polling itself. Other pieces of information in each module also include a database version and also the format of the data to be retrieved.
The API
And in order to get the information out of the database there are two endpoints, a JSON endpoint and a simple HTML page. The JSON endpoint allows other application to get the summarized data in JSON format. While the HTML page is just a front-end that formats the JSON data into some ugly HTML tables.
For some more information you can look into the README file from the repo at sensor_station.
This has been a slow year
19 May 2016 - Tags: iot, raspberrypi, wemo
This is a reminder for myself that I should stop ‘investing’ into increasing my productivity. I am at a point in which if I were to actually work on something I would get it done much sooner than if I were to work on achieving 120% productivity.
A few weeks I uploaded a new repo which I am calling Sensor Station. Basically the idea is to have a low powered device gathering data from other low powered devices and providing a way to access that data. The current implementation is two python daemons running on a raspberry pi, although it can run on anything really. One of the daemons is constantly listening and checking the status of WeMos in the network and saving the information locally to a SQLite databse. The second daemon is exposing the information in the database via a JSON endpoint or a HTML page. The data is gathered every minute and then you can see a breakdown of usage per WeMo.
There are still a few bugs to fix before I can post it somewhere, specially dealing with network errors but the project was short and fun.
This blog has moved... again
14 Apr 2016 - Tags: blog, github, jekyll
After a long time debating with myself I finally made the decision to move this blog from Github Pages to an AWS EC instance. The reason I decided to do this is because Github Pages was a bit limiting in the capabilities I had and it also didn’t provide an easy way to upload and manage blobs. But the main limitation was the inability to deliver E2E TLS support, there were some solutions using CDNs, but this does not ensure encryption from Github’s servers to the user.
After I migrated everything to a dedicated instance I remembered how much I enjoy managing and tinkering with Linux. It is just so much fun for me to host it myself rather than using GitHub.
Thank you Github for this year of free hosting, it is time to part ways. :)