A Belated Reopening Celebration

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Well; after much blood & sweat and no small amount of tears, the website is operational again. Actually it went back up 2 weeks ago, but things have been so busy I just haven’t got around to celebrating it.

For context, back in January my site got taken offline by an automated scan on my previous hosting provider. This kicked off a series of tiresome circumstances that resulted in my site being down for the best part of 5 months, and culminated in me leaving my old host after some 14+ years. But now we’re back, we’re up again; and I want to get things moving with renewed vigour (actually, I’m not 100% done as I still haven’t got the Azimuth wiki fully running again, but we’re getting there).

So what’s going on? As ever, my project list is longer than the Danyang Kunshan Grand Bridge, but the only way through is forward!

First up, I’m going to get the Crystal Archives wiki operational again. Next, I’ve got more to post on TOPL, my physics battler couch multiplayer game. I’ve got a Back to the Future Time Travel Simulator, a 2D third-person sh’mup, Final Defenders, Flo Praxis… and I’ve lately been messing about making an Octonauts game for my kids. To say nothing of the upcoming 10th anniversary of publishing my first novel Cloudgazer.

Let’s get cookin’.

Why does Pluto persist?

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For a not-so-recent birthday, I got given a lovely T-shirt with very cutesy renditions of all the planets on it; with each one sporting a friendly face and a colourful label. It’s the perfect blend of astronomer & dad nerd. But one thing about it that I almost totally missed when I first saw it, was the sneaky inclusion of Pluto, hanging out with the rest of the gang; partying like it’s 1999.

The shirt is a recent design —newer than 18 years, at the very least— and I would argue Pluto’s planetary declassification is probably one of more better-known bits of astronomy trivia in the mainstream. So really, whoever had included it had to be aware of Pluto’s non-planetary status and did it deliberately. The question is, why?

Pluto is not a planet, but don’t take it personally. (image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University APL)

It turns out that quite a lot of people are remarkably loyal to this ball of ice and rock 1/6th the mass of the moon, hanging out on average about 40 times further from the sun than we are. How loyal, you say? Well, aside from a (admittedly not completely serious) pledge by the state of California that Pluto will always be treated as a planet, there seems to be a general, grassroots sentiment that Pluto was short-changed by a stuffy scientific establishment, out-of-touch with the people. “Make your mind up, scientists!” & “I was taught there was a planet there, so that’s what I’m going to keep believing.” And so on.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the fanaticism is about the rock. This phenomenon seems to have a whole lot more to do with distrust of science, anti-authority, conspiracy theory and generational solidarity.

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The State of the World

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It seems that there needs to be some sort of fundamental shift in the global geopolitical picture in order to get me to write a blogpost nowadays; and the last one, on the collapse of Afghanistan, I didn’t even get around to publishing. The time for that seems long passed, now. We’re in yet another future—one where not only is Britain not in the EU; not only did our lives get upended by a global pandemic; not only did the previous insane US president incite a mob to attack his own capital; not only did the republican government of Afghanistan collapse like a cold soufflé; BUT the Russians have just gone and invaded Ukraine for basically no reason, and turned pretty much the entire world against them.

I must not be alone in feeling this sensation: viewing the world with the kind of uncomfortable ache of watching everything being undermined and going to shit. Kind of like I were George Lucas, having just sold Star Wars to Disney—only unlike Lucas, I have to keep going to the cinema to watch them butcher everything I thought I knew.

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“… and THAT’S why I left Greenpeace 9 years ago”

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If it were possible to make something required viewing for the world, it would be this:

Kurzgesagt : “Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?”

Why, you ask?

Climate change won’t be stopped without lowered emissions. Lowered emissions aren’t possible without Nuclear taking a large amount of the burden off fossil fuels*. That in turn isn’t possible with all the reactors being taken offline instead of making new ones.

Yeah, I know… yadda yadda climate, but this is probably the single biggest component of the single greatest challenge to the current human way of life.

Probably important, then.

(*) - The video diplomatically puts the chances of renewables meeting this demand alone as "very unlikely", but that's a huge understatement. As it does point out, it's not just replacing fossil fuel electricity generation, which it has failed to even catch up on, but all the sectors that aren't even electrical yet.

A Year Spent Frozen in Time

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It’s like time is paused, that’s how it feels. As we head into another lockdown, I found myself absently sifting through my games library on Steam. It has the ability to sort by date last played, which is a harrowing experience that makes you realise actually how little time you have for games in your life these days. Some of my favourites have gone unplayed for literally years. There are games I have been big into lately and feel I played “the other day” that I haven’t touched since this time last year.

But it isn’t just that, of course. The rhythm of the day has settled into a kind of mantra: keep working, stay home, don’t socialise because it’s not worth the hassle. The patterns are starting to etch permanence onto how I think. I forgot there was a time when children could stay with other people if they actually wanted them there. I forgot that normally, I don’t need to sidestep back a meter if my dad wants to pass me in the hall.

In any case, the sensation is like time isn’t moving. Or–it is, alarmingly so, but nothing is changing; as the months fly off the calendar. I feel like the stress has aged me ten years. We’re all holding out for a return to normality, I know, but it helps to remind oneself that there is such a thing.

Speaking of returning to normality, it’s the US election. I wonder if there’ll be a return to sane & actually respectable statesmanship too? I’m not holding out much hope on that one.

Final Defenders it is! – Devblog

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In my previous post I explained how I was having some titling issues with my current project: the remake of my first proper game. Well, I finally settled on the new name: “Final Defenders“. So without any more unnecessary ado, let’s take a look at where we’re at!

Final Defenders title screen in its current form

I’ll start with a recap of what the game is. In Final Defenders, you are one of the brave volunteers of the Anidran Defence Force tasked with holding off an invasion from a big consortium of interplanetary ass-hats: the Five Worlds Legion. You, and up to 3 of your friends, have only a trusty turret with which to defend the skies above your cities from this menace.

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The Finalist of Battles

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So the subject of numbers in titles has popped into my head again and the trend of erasing them is just as prevalent and irritating now as it was then (The upcoming MS Flight Simulator is particularly silly: its official name is actually more vague than its shorthand nickname, “MS Flight Simulator 2020”, which is necessary to figure out what you’re actually talking about). But while this annoys me, the reason it comes to my attention lately is because I might end up being guilty of it myself.

See, I’m working toward releasing a game: the current plan is to get the new version of Final Battle out to itch.io by August 30th (hold me to this, people). And when I say “the new version of Final Battle”, I’m deliberately skirting my dilemma. Because internally, I’ve been calling it Final Battle III, but I don’t know if I should. In fact, I might even call it The Final Battle. WHhhuuaaaa–

OK, so there are currently multiple versions of the Final Battle. There is the very first original one I made in Games Factory but never quite finished. There is the “remastered” version; overhauled many years later and released as Final Battle Remastered on this site only. As this is the first one to see daylight, it’s effectively “Final Battle 1”.

Final Battle 2… is a gravestone. Allow me to explain:

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How to set up the Space Navigator in Blender 2.83+

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It’s about time this blog started being a source of actually useful knowledge, and I’m going to start simple. This is something I struggled to find just about anything on when googling recently: the 3DConnexion Space Navigator is a neat little “3D Mouse” I’ve had for many years now; useful in any program where you want to get around a 3D space via multiple directions and angles at once. So, for the other 7 people out there with a Space Navigator, looking to use it on Blender but can’t seem to configure it out: fear not! Got you covered.

The 3DConnexion Space Navigator in its native habitat; an idealised infinite plane of whitespace
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Anything you can do, (A)I can do better

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Aha! When I said I was aiming to post more regularly, I meant it this time!

Part of the reason for slow updates here are the length of my posts. So going forward, I may be making them a little snappier. Shorter, less substance, more viewings… the, uh, Youtube paradigm of content creation.

Oh no, nope, wait, that’s a terrible analogy. I don’t want to do that at all. And I’m being unfair to Youtube. Many content creators there are doing a great job of producing longer, more in-depth videos. I mean, I’m assuming. I don’t know, I don’t watch them; they’re too long.

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хаппи индэпэндэнс даи!

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Yesterday’s post may have made it seem like today was all about the lightening of the UK Coronavirus lockdown, but there was one other big aspect of today’s date! Yes, you guessed it, celebration of the liberation from unscrupulous tyranny Alison’s first birthday! A year old already, good grief. Happy Birthday, poppet.

Also, I recently realised that you could automate the process I use to write Azbuka, the “fictional language” of Cloudgazer (actually just transliterated English written in the cyrillic alphabet). Thankfully, I learned my lesson here and instead of launching into yet another project to make said tool, I had a look to see if someone else had done it already. They have!