Plot twist: Theres still hackers in multiplayer even with all that crap plus rootkit they bundle with.

NOPE NOPE NOOOOOPE fuck that man.

Ive been wanting to dabble with digital music production. All software ive tried has so many menus and buttons and switches I get overwhelmed.

While looking up instruments on amazon I came across these pocket synthesizers called stylophones and similar like theremin that entry for about 40-50$.

These seem like cool little gadgets to toy around with and maybe get a foot in the door to learn how to do digital music production. Does anyone have experience with these things? Are they worth messing with?

I have an old mixer for my condenser microphone that plugs into laptop I think I can plug aux line in from these mini synths to the mixer.

Charlie is a stray that somehow got attached to me years ago. She decided that her home is wherever the Pap Pap Lap is.

I am practicing my skybox creation skills for my game. This is the most complex piece i've made so far.

This surreal desert skybox explodes with psychedelic energy and impossible geometry. The sky itself becomes a living canvas, filled with luminous geometric patterns that pulse across the horizon in radiant rings and cosmic spirals. Vibrant clouds drift in unnatural colors, deep purples mixing with acid greens, soft pinks, and smoky blacks that streak across peachy orange skies.

Two massive stone bridges dominate the distant landscape, their dark archways framing glimpses of palm trees and distant terrain beyond. These monumental structures feel ancient and otherworldly, standing against the crimson red desert floor that stretches endlessly in all directions.

The volcanic mountain rises with menacing beauty, glowing with internal heat while the pyramid stands nearby in rusty red tones, creating a powerful axis of mystery and ancient power.

And yet even in this harsh seeming environment, an oasis temple carved into the rockface becomes a sanctuary of life. The classical columned entrance sits majestically in the stone, flanked by waterfalls that cascade down in ethereal streams. Bright turquoise water flows outward, feeding the vibrant turquoise terraced croplands below. Cacti stand sentinel.

The radial sacred geometry dominates the sky, transforming it into a metaphysical mandala. Concentric circles and radiating lines create a flower of life pattern that bathes everything in soft, diffused light. The entire world feels like it exists between dimensions, somewhere between dream and reality.

https://git.lolcat.ca/lolcat/4get/commit/ce75cbda812a31b5654be755d3b7436f853d8c40

My old 7000 btu single burner stove gave out. Decided to upgrade to a Coleman triton 2 burner 22000 btu.

So far it starts up nice. Need to see how it fares with some daily use in long term. Need to be mindful of extra fuel consumption too

Please help me understand what went wrong and how I can fix it?

Got this laptop back around 2016. Its been sitting a while due to dead battery and old failing hard drive. It still turns on but dies if unplugged. The 17 inch touchscreen looks really good all these years later and is the nicest portable tablet type screen I have laying around. The laptop folds flat so it really is like handling a big slightly heavy tablet.

Ive been getting back into reading comics. Going out and buying single issues was fun at first but its starting to be a hassle so I'm exploring options to comfortably read some digitally on the cheap with open source software and cbz/CBR files.

So I Ioaded the laptop with Linux Mint 22 XFCE and installed koreader. Its my favorite ereader software glad its a flatpak. Let's you switch page orientation easily for wide spreads, isolate panels to zoom in, tweak to your liking.

Ive been enjoying it so much I think I may invest in a replacement battery and solid state harddrive to bring it back to life. Amazing that it still looks so good.

I had one previous space-age run that stopped a bit into Gelba. If im honest I really didn't care for the spoilage mechanics. Finally getting to the point in current run that planet explorations on the horizon. Want to try something different. Please recommend me a good planet to try next without spoilers (or spoilage).

Explanation:

I wanted to have visual proof/aid to model the total amount of microstates a finite binary system is able to access is related to the binomial coefficents and pascals triangle.

Each horizontal row of pascals triangle corrisponds to a computational system of N bits. The amount of unique distinct microstates they can represent has a structural founding in algebraic combinatorics.

The central binomial coefficents represent average states of high entropy while the outer coefficents corrispond to more ordered unique states of information that are harder to get to computationally.

Really neat shot, this overlapping took some work to code in.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36742987

Mapgen

While not the main focus of this post, I did want to share mapgen stuff. Im still learning and figuring out how to get stuff locked in visually. I learned how to create schemantics with world edit and use as decorations for first trees, I created some models in blender and decorated the ground with some sticks and stones.

Weather

I did start to play around with weather. I want to tie rain triggers to skybox changes and have like 'stormy days' that start cloudy and have a heightened chance to trigger rain or storm. Of course tie it into the seasons api too so that spring has lots of rain and winter triggers snow storms that freeze water.

On Skyboxes

The first big development project after wrangling the basics of world generation actually ended up being about skyboxes and celestial stuff. I want my game to stand out visually and one of the ways to do that is to make good use of skyboxes. They add a touch of beauty and realism. If you've ever played with shader packs in other voxel games you might associate them with a kind of "premium visual experience" that usually requires modding and performance losses with acompanying dynamical shadows. Luanti Handles these very well completely seperate of any dynamical lighting so even low end systems can enjoy

It seems there arent many luanti games or even luanti game makers players that know you can put skyboxes in. I just learned about it by chance searching on a whim and finding an 8 year old developer video by one of the old Luanti devs SoFar..

Stage 1: Basic Day/Night toggle

The first stage was just to get the skyboxs in the game and to not be static anymore. Thats the concept at its most foundational, get the skyboxes to change and the most simple way is to do that via swapping the textures on some trigger event. SoFars SkyBoxes module was released under a commercially permissive license (LGPL2) and so was used as a foundational base to build out from.

The obvious trigger event to me was the in-game time that determines day/night cycle. Day time should have a daytime skybox and night having a nighttime skybox. Simple as.

This was relatively straight forward though some bugs needed to be ironed out like the skybox not triggering automatically on reconnect. After that was adding in a few more like sunrise, sunset, and midday triggers

Skybox Image Modification

Adding back in the in-game rotating sun and moon made the skybox sun and moon feel a little wierd. To start I wanted a sun-less daytime sky and moon-less nighttime skybox so that the in-game sun and moon looks natural as it rotates.

The skyboxes are cut up into 6 tile sides that get projected onto a rotating cube. To take out the moon or sun we just find the tile that has them and do a little bit of bad photoshopping with GIMP

New Celestial Bodies In The Sky

Doing this gave me a kind of epiphany. While the engine doesnt allow multiple sun, moon, planets, we can hack in the illusion of them by creating custom skybox profiles that swap out individual tiles. Two key insights.

1. Swapping tiles mechanic save us from needing to copy whole skyboxes for each little variant edit. We can potentially even use alphas and the engines texture overlay system to optimize the process instead of whole tiles just a skybox with a hole cutout for different celestial overlays.

2. Combining the function of hot swapping textures in game with smart triggering conditionals paves the foundation for advanced scripting (moon visible during some days, supermoons, blood moons, alien planets, two stars of different size on different days)

So while we can only have one actual in-game moon and sun, we can edit skyboxes and swap sun+moon to custom textures based on scripting events. create a suprisingly convining facade. I really like when fantasy and sci-fi planets have two suns or three moons or a ring world, im hoping taking some inspiration there can help make TerraManic feel fresh.

Stratosphere Layer

If you aren't familiar with luanti but are familiar with something like Minecraft theres a big distinction that needs to be understood with how worlds work. Minecraft is many millions of blocks from one limiting x,z end to another, however its only a couple hundred Y levels deep from deepest point to highest buildable point. kind of a wide as a ocean deep as a puddle situation.

Luanti is the opposite. Its only 64,000 blocks from one limiting end to another (still plenty of room for exploration), however its also 64,000 blocks deep from highest to lowest point Y level wise. You spawn at Y=0 and can move up +32,000 or down -32,000 and build to your hearts content.

The challenge is of course making good use of all this new dimensional room. I have some really cool gameplay ideas cooking I dont want to spoil yet but a quick and easy win was implementing Orbital layer that triggers a skybox change at a certain altitude and alters gravity.

Im thinking of creating some asteroids or sky islands that generate up here in the first layer of the stratosphere. An interesting thing with the space skybox is that sun is always visible the two orbiting bodies appear to be moon and the strange planet. Its really cool!

Visibility Woes

The Orbital layer reveals that the bare bones day night cycle luanti engine provides has some visual wierdness. By default skyboxes either have something or they dont simple boolean toggle. If its visible it never really disappears though it will go under the horizon. When that horizon disappears it becomes hard to ignore and kind of immersion breaking seeing the moon go down below your feet into the earth or the sunrise texture teleport from one horizon to another.

So, the next API step was to add a way to make textures invisible based on predefined time of day triggers or custom defined cycles.

Orbital Rotation

The last celestial thing I played around with before writing this was orbital rotation axis. Having the sun and moon go directly over your head is a little boring and predictable. I wanted to make it so that theres some variation in tilt based on season, planet type, or distance from the equator. Thats some future plans for scripting!

Mapgen

While not the main focus of this post, I did want to share mapgen stuff. Im still learning and figuring out how to get decorative elements locked into mapgen. I learned how to create schemantics with world edit and use as decorations for first trees, I created some models in blender and decorated the ground with some sticks and stones.

Weather

I did start to play around with weather. I want to tie rain triggers to skybox changes and have like 'stormy days' that start cloudy and have a heightened chance to trigger rain or storm. Of course tie it into the seasons api too so that spring has lots of rain and winter triggers snow storms that freeze water.

On Skyboxes

The first big development project after wrangling the basics of world generation actually ended up being about skyboxes and celestial stuff. I want my game to stand out visually and one of the ways to do that is to make good use of skyboxes. They add a touch of beauty and realism. If you've ever played with shader packs in other voxel games you might associate them with a kind of "premium visual experience" that usually requires modding and performance losses with acompanying dynamical shadows. Luanti Handles these very well completely seperate of any dynamical lighting so even low end systems can enjoy

It seems that skyboxes aren't widely talked about in luanti community. I just learned about it by chance searching on a whim and finding an 8 year old developer video by one of the old Luanti devs SoFar..

Stage 1: Basic Day/Night toggle

The first stage was just to get the skyboxs in the game and to not be static anymore. Thats the concept at its most foundational, get the skyboxes to change and the most simple way is to do that via swapping the textures on some trigger event. SoFars SkyBoxes module was released under a commercially permissive license (LGPL2) and so was used as a foundational base to build out from.

The obvious trigger event to me was the in-game time that determines day/night cycle. Day time should have a daytime skybox and night having a nighttime skybox. Simple as.

This was relatively straight forward though some bugs needed to be ironed out like the skybox not triggering automatically on reconnect. After that was adding in a few more like sunrise, sunset, and midday triggers

Skybox Image Modification

Adding back in the in-game rotating sun and moon made the skybox sun and moon feel a little wierd. To start I wanted a sun-less daytime sky and moon-less nighttime skybox so that the in-game sun and moon looks natural as it rotates.

The skyboxes are cut up into 6 tile sides that get projected onto a rotating cube. To take out the moon or sun we just find the tile that has them and do a little bit of bad photoshopping with GIMP

New Celestial Bodies In The Sky

Doing this gave me a kind of epiphany. While the engine doesnt allow multiple sun, moon, planets, we can hack in the illusion of them by creating custom skybox profiles that swap out individual tiles. Two key insights.

1. Swapping tiles mechanic save us from needing to copy whole skyboxes for each little variant edit. We can potentially even use alphas and the engines texture overlay system to optimize the process instead of whole tiles just a skybox with a hole cutout for different celestial overlays.

2. Combining the function of hot swapping textures in game with smart triggering conditionals paves the foundation for advanced scripting (moon visible during some days, supermoons, blood moons, alien planets, two stars of different size on different days)

So while we can only have one actual in-game moon and sun, we can edit skyboxes and swap sun+moon to custom textures based on scripting events. create a suprisingly convining facade. I really like when fantasy and sci-fi planets have two suns or three moons or a ring world, im hoping taking some inspiration there can help make TerraManic feel fresh.

Stratosphere Layer

If you aren't familiar with luanti but are familiar with something like Minecraft theres a big distinction that needs to be understood with how worlds work. Minecraft is many millions of blocks from one limiting x,z end to another, however its only a couple hundred Y levels deep from deepest point to highest buildable point. kind of a wide as a ocean deep as a puddle situation.

Luanti is the opposite. Its only 64,000 blocks from one limiting end to another (still plenty of room for exploration), however its also 64,000 blocks deep from highest to lowest point Y level wise. You spawn at Y=0 and can move up +32,000 or down -32,000 and build to your hearts content.

The challenge is of course making good use of all this new dimensional room. I have some really cool gameplay ideas cooking I dont want to spoil yet but a quick and easy win was implementing Orbital layer that triggers a skybox change at a certain altitude and alters gravity.

Im thinking of creating some asteroids or sky islands that generate up here in the first layer of the stratosphere. An interesting thing with the space skybox is that sun is always visible the two orbiting bodies appear to be moon and the strange planet. Its really cool!

Visibility Woes

The Orbital layer reveals that the bare bones day night cycle luanti engine provides has some visual wierdness. By default skyboxes either have something or they dont simple boolean toggle. If its visible it never really disappears though it will go under the horizon. When that horizon disappears it becomes hard to ignore and kind of immersion breaking seeing the moon go down below your feet into the earth or the sunrise texture teleport from one horizon to another.

So, the next API step was to add a way to make textures invisible based on predefined time of day triggers or custom defined cycles.

Orbital Rotation

The last celestial thing I played around with before writing this was orbital rotation axis. Having the sun and moon go directly over your head is a little boring and predictable. I wanted to make it so that theres some variation in tilt based on season, planet type, or distance from the equator. Thats some future plans for scripting!