Categories for Uncategorized

New Website?

December 13, 2018 by

I’m really really not a big fan of WordPress (running my current site) so I’ve been looking for alternatives and recently I’ve found a new CMS that’s caught my fancy.

It’s called October CMS and I’ve already slowly begun building a new site and adding/moving stuff there. I’m trying to collect knowledge and usefull information, also gained from personal experiments.

A different CMS will obviously not make me create more content, but my developer heart feels better working with a nicer framework.

So, until I’ve moved enough stuff over, I’ll just have a link to the new content:

http://october.lychesis.net

…and yeah, I also crave for a custom self made design, but I’ve got to be realistic with my available time.

Atom Editor

August 23, 2016 by

The Atom editor is a very versatile and extendable coding editor made by the folks from GitHub.

https://atom.io/

Being extendable also means that the functionality out of the box is pretty limited. I therefore have a personal collection of plugins that I find interesting:

  • atom-beautify Code Highlighting for a whole bunch of different languages.
  • file-watcher Detects file changes outside of Atom and notifies you.
  • keyboard-localization Fixes inaccessable hotkeys for people using non-us keyboards.
  • less-than-slash Automatically closes HTML tags.
  • minimap Visual minimap of your code – conficts with symbols-list.
  • pigments Tints color values inside the code.
  • symbols-list Lists functions and methods of the current file in the right sidebar – conficts with minimap

Construction ahead

August 5, 2015 by

It’s been much too long since the last update, and since the design is also getting quite rusty, I’ll now be upgrading the whole site. This will probably break things here and there along the way, but bear with me.

Improved Trucking Physics

June 7, 2012 by

Had another go at the WheelCollider, as I wasn’t convinced that completely custom built vehicle physics would save that much time, and I have made a couple of improvements. Most of all the Suspension is now correct, as I was doing it wrong most of the time:

  • The best way to start is to set “Spring”, “Damper” and “Target Position” to zero.
  • Set “Suspension Distance” to the distance you want the wheels to drop when the vehicle is in the air.
  • Set “Spring” to something high (try 10240, depending on the weight and number of wheels of the vehicle) and start the game. Tweak the “Spring” value until the suspension is strong enough to keep the body of the vehicle from hitting the ground.
  • Now set the “Damper” to roughly 1/20 of the “Spring” value and tweak it until the vehicle stops bouncing (depending on how much you like it to bounce)
  • Note that everything you attach to the vehicle as well as the center of mass will affect the suspension behaviour and you will probably have to tweak it all over again

Here’s the new version with the improved settings.

Trucking v02

Trucking Physics

May 20, 2012 by

I experimented a little with the Unity physics and wheel collider features to try to get a working truck + trailer configuration working for rough terrain.

As I had already done some truck and trailer physics for a farm simulator at work I wasn’t expecting this to be that tricky.

I uploaded my current state with still quite a number of problems and my research in forums has only resulted in finding many other developers not really happy with the build in car physics, saying you should do your own or use one off the Asset Store.

Trucking v01

I’m not yet ready to give up on the built in system (but close).

Not working at the moment are:

  • Suspension isn’t following the ground properly, especially with the twin-axles. Resulting in one axle having ground contact while the other is hanging in the air. I may have to reduce the real twin axles to a single virtual one, driving the visible twin axles.
  • The truck tips over to easily. Lowering the center of gravity will fix this, but when tipping over the truck will then flip back to it’s wheels, looking pretty weird. I may have to animated the center of gravity so that it will rise if the truck is tipping over and lower it while it is going normally
  • The trailer sometimes drags the truck pretty violently. It uses a configurable joint with restrictions but these sometimes pull very hard on the truck (or it may lift the truck into the air when braking hard).
  • Sometimes the truck will not be able to gain speed. Very strange, I can only think of there being some large friction between truck and trailer leading to this behaviour.
  • Grip and slip isn’t configured properly. Either the wheels simply spin or the wheels stick so violently to the ground that it tips over. It would be nice to get more information out of the wheel collider. This again speaks towards using a custom made system.

Happy new year!

January 6, 2011 by

I decided to to do something about my homepage again and switched from LifeType to WordPress. The old site was having issues and has also been spammed regularly.

Most work went into transfering most of the content and comments from the blog. I also added and updated a couple of images and I finally added my gallery again. Luckily WordPress is able to reroute the URLs so I am confident this switch will not break too many of the old links.

I am still filling it and I am planning on adding new stuff to it. Let’s see how long that new years resolution will last 😉

Partially new

March 4, 2009 by

Sooo, the front page is new. Something broke my website and since I was to lazy to find the problem I redid the front page with a nice slideshow which will do until I rebuild the rest of the site. The blog survived unscathed and I used the occasion to update it’s software, hoping that nothing broke on the way.

I also relaunched the Amiga Graphics Archive with my own gallery system because ZenPhoto got a bit too cumbersome for my taste.