What I did today

Miscellaneous Topics
#6441

While still working on the tutorials, I was wondering what the end result would be and which scene setup to use for all steps in-between from start to end so that it would still present itself somewhat interesting (aka. “not rendering a simple sphere on a plane…”).
So I ended up looking at various MagicaVoxel models and I like the “rooms.vox” model shipped with MagicaVoxel the most. It has very interesting features, such as some emissive surfaces and all in all interesting geometry while being a voxel model. And it’s not as abstract as for example the “menger.vox” model.
Additionally, the city-themed modular models from https://github.com/mikelovesrobots/mmmm are fantastic as well.
So here is just ray traced hard shadows with visualized normals of the room.vox model
(OpenGL 3.3, GLSL 330 core, everything in buffer textures, model has 82,536 voxels which are reduced to 1,280 merged ‘cuboid’ voxels for which a kd-tree is built and traced in GLSL with AABB/ray intersection tests for the voxels):

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EDIT: Visualization of the difference between previous “voxel merging” which only worked a single y slice at a time (just like greedy meshing only works a single slice of one of the three dimensions) and optimized merging which also tries to merge a xz-slice along the y-direction (first unoptimized resulting in a total of 1,280 voxels, second optimized resulting in 367 voxels):

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Additional seemingly unnecessary splits (missed merges) are due to splits later introduced by the kd-tree build.

#6442

I’d suggest you also to consider the Sponza, more precisely from McGuire (who refined it from Dabrovic). You may find this repo interesting (Sponza here)

#6443

I knew of this site: https://casual-effects.com/data/
Having a voxel model, though, massively simplifies things such as physics and general game-play (if one were to extend it to a playable demo/game) and authoring for custom models/scenes is hugely simplified with MagicaVoxel compared to a mesh editing tool. But thanks for suggesting!

#6444

Yeah, I basically took a snapshot of that. I had some problems accessing it in the past (once not accessible, often slow), and since it was quite valuable, I decided to create the repo and add additional interesting resources.

#6445

Wrote my first serious StackOverflow answer on a topic I was researching further for the tutorials anyways.
So if anyone is interested in what the NDF in Microfacet Theory exactly is and why it can have values between 0.0 and +inf, then this is also for you. :slight_smile:

#6446

Started on a CSS-Styled BoxShadow implementation today (for LWJGUI)!

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#6447

I started learning more about linguistics. I can now speak in 5 languages and can read 6 different scripts. 5 of the scripts that I learned has more than 2000 years of history! Reached a milestone today, that a native speaker of Kannada thought I’m a native speaker, though I started speaking it only in the last 6 months.

#6448

Almost!

My laptop Thunderbird app now can read emails from the Linode email server I set up.
But something is still awry with Thunderbird’s attempts to send emails. Will have some time on Sunday to resume work on this.

I thought setting up Android Studio on an AMD Ubuntu machine with emulator with acceleration was tough (my previous “hardest” task from several years ago). That took a solid week to do. Also hard was passing the Java 7 “Associate” cert. This has been worse.

Hah. Linode has gotten a slew of suggestions for improving their documentation.

#6449

@philfrei

I’m trying to do that on a Digital Ocean droplet. I am able to fetch the mails until I enabled SSL with certbot and letsencrypt. Sending never worked. Are you using Postfix like me? If so, did you check the hostname? I’ve got no clue on that either!

#6450

Added coloured lights to my 3D faux dither

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/ZigzagGracefulCanary-size_restricted.gif(image larger than 102400KB)

#6451

@SHC
Yes, using Postfix with Dovecot, and using CertBot. Are you using Dovecot?

One thing (among many!) that I overlooked about SSL for incoming was that I needed to open the corresponding ports. Are you using 993 for incoming? That is what I am. I will follow up with you after Sunday or whenever it is that I get outgoing figured out.

BTW – very impressive about the languages! That is quite an accomplishment.

#6452

Sorry I haven’t been responding to the posts I’ve made lately guys, QA had to do crunch for the last 2 weeks and I’m tired lol. But, today one of my co-workers gave me a demo cabinet of Street Fighter 3. I guess her husband’s old roommate used to work at Midway and they gave it to him and he moved and didn’t take it, so it’s been sitting in their garage for a while and just wanted to get rid of it. It has a real sf control board but the tv part is like something you would see as a demo at a store. Now we need to borrow a truck because out of 2 VW buses and a Buick Enclave, the damn tv part wont fit in anything. It’s huge. I can’t wait to see if it works.

#6453

@philfrei

Yes, I did change the port to 993. I guess something is wrong with my MX record because I was able to connect via telnet from the server. Just not working from my real PC. My main issue is with SMTP, it is not sending out emails, they are sitting in the outbox indefinitely. Will reply in the personal messages.

#6454

So I hooked up the SF3 cabinet. Its the one that looks like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/Street-Fighter-EX2-Arcade-Game/162483527895?hash=item25d4c5e0d7:g:4ZoAAOSwtZJY-Qoe

To my surprise, the thing actually booted up despite being in someone’s garage for a few years. I think for the most part, it works. The game boots and it gets to the screen to enter coin, which I did, and I think the damn thing works.

But, it’s hard to tell cuz the screen has a blue tint and acts as if you have to adjust the tracking, like an old VCR (the screen kind of continually goes sideways). But when I inserted a coin into player 2, there was a different screen that was also really hard to see because of the “tracking” issue. So I’m not completely sure if the thing works…but it seems like it does (or at least boots). I was thinking it wouldn’t even boot up or the tv would be messed up and not turn on.

I also made a working demo with 2 things to do in my pirate game, but I need to fix the sound in one spot first before I post it.

#6455

Wrote a CSS parser for my UI library LWJGUI. So far it works with tag and class selectors, and a handful of pseudo-classes!

Now I can create my fancy buttons outside of Java!

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I also created html/css-like borders. Before, they were purely cosmetic, and only 1 component (just border-width). Now they affect element sizing on all 4 cardinal directions.

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#6456

OK. The email server on my Linode is done. Finally linked Thunderbird, and can both send and receive email.
That only took the better part of a month to figure out. :stuck_out_tongue:

EDIT: I imported the previous emails prior to hooking up to the new email server. But got a bit tangled up with wanting to use the same name–it will be a bit of a chore sorting that out.

#6457

Great! Congrats! I’ll re-configure with the tutorial you linked. Btw, have you imported your previous mails?

#6458

BlurPane’s can now be CSS styled :slight_smile:

#6459

Never did anything with participating media. So I gave the paper “Importance Sampling Techniques for Path Tracing in Participating Media” a go:

LAZlFvtJQag

By the way, here are two collections of (probably all) papers, dissertations and presentations on “Light Transport” and “Sampling”, assembled and shared by Max Tarpini:

#6460

In the last couple of days I continued my Defcon like strategy game (using only LWJGL and other small libs such as nanovg).

  • Refactored UI system with clickable buttons
  • Zoomable map with cities

According to my roadmap(https://trello.com/b/Hm8M98ah/ww3), 0.0.1 is ready soon.