Alexander Webb's Blog

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.

I suppose this is what living through actual history feels like. When you’re young, you feel like you have an idea where things are going. After a decade or two more, you start to think maybe you know better. But even the oldest human alive has got nothing on Clio, history’s muse, and her comparatively vast narration on human behaviour. Any student of history will see those patterns repeating in all these follies and lunacies, but for some reason nobody ever takes such cautionaries seriously when it comes to steering clear of them.

So we are where we are. I keep trying to tell myself that it’s a senseless waste of effort worrying about things over which I have utterly no control (I don’t think I even have readers, let alone an audience or influence). But that only works so well. Much as nobody has any choice over what they believe (you either are convinced, or you’re not), you can’t really choose what you worry about. You can only distract yourself so you forget about it, and that feels disingenuous at best and downright zombifying at worst. But it is still clearly the case that this overthinking is wasting my time and making me feel like crap, with no potential for positive change to show for it.

Thus I choose to simply list my woes and share the pain. Perhaps in this way I can at least set it straight in my head, so that I can take a clear picture going forward; in case any of it ever does affect anything significantly.

Let’s hope we’re all still here in a month’s time to witness perhaps another entry; I’d like to do these semi-regularly. Also, last week we met our second daughter Zoe; so as you might imagine, I am particularly hopeful that the human race can stave off its self-annihilating tendencies for a little while longer, yet.

The post The State of the World appeared first on Novodantis.com.

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.

The post “… and THAT’S why I left Greenpeace 9 years ago” appeared first on Novodantis.com.

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.

The post A Year Spent Frozen in Time appeared first on Novodantis.com.

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.

How It Plays

So the action takes place from a side-on perspective, in gameplay reminiscent of a blend between Missile Command and Space Invaders. It’s got a classic, retro feel for sure, but to be honest it’s not really a straight clone of anything. That should come as no surprise if you know me and my design mentality, but it’s only surprising because of how very basic it is. The gameplay is frantic, easily-accessible fun for couch co-op (when we can finally share couches again); but there is a subtle tactical layer in terms of things like prioritising targets, or the difference between making an enemy potentially break off with a warning shot and pummeling them until they explode.

Some downloaded asset enemies still remain and shaders are something I’m still not happy with

Currently all these systems are in and working: we have player joining, turret selection, a variety of enemies, their AI, match length and difficulty controls. We have the ability to start battles, quit back to title, start another and so on. So the basics are all down. What’s missing?

What’s Left To Do

Mostly, the campaign and challenges, the “content”, is still in its infancy (isn’t that always the way?). I’ve got plans for all this, big and small, and some sort of basic campaign is not far off at all. There will likely be two modes here: “Classic” and “Defenders”. The former is a simple set of missions in order with increasing difficulty and limited cross-level effects. The latter will be more of a meta map with cities that are being attacked, while you pick what to defend. The more of your city intact at the end of the battle, the better your overall nation will fare in the meta map.

But for the initial release this August 30th, I’m just aiming to include the fourth original turret and a few minor improvements like proper models for the capital ships. When the game’s available on itch.io at the end of the month, I’d love to hear your feedback!

The post Final Defenders it is! – Devblog appeared first on Novodantis.com.

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:

Back in the days when backing things up meant a zip drive, DVD or removable hard drive, I was working on a sequel to the old Games Factory staple in blitz basic; the first 3D engine I ever worked with. I was going all out, with 3D turret models and enemies, a fancy selection screen, damage and debris flying around when things exploded and so on. And although it was certainly never completed, it had a good deal of assets built when I suffered one of the most unexpected and catastrophic of hard drive failures. Those of us oldies will have some story like this, of the time where we learned our lesson about backing up and why modern github is great. But, long story short (too late), I lost Final Battle 2. Completely. No idea how it was missed from my backups, but it is gone to entropy. So it doesn’t exist but… it did, to me, so I’d feel weird calling a new game Final Battle 2.

And so we come to my latest Unity-driven attempt to revive the concept, as well as the reason I originally went with FB3 as the project title. However! However… those of you with the luxury of not living inside my head will probably have the perspective to say “Wait, nobody’s heard of any of these and they’re not on any store. Won’t it just be really confusing to use 3? Why not just release it as Final Battle?” I did consider this point, but felt notability shouldn’t affect a naming scheme. If Final Fantasy retconned all its earlier incarnations when the laters ones become well known, that would have been really confusing okay, you know what, forget it, bad example.

What I’m trying to say is, I get it. It’s a lot cleaner to just say “lets start afresh, here’s The Final Battle“. Nobody would notice the hypocrisy but me. But also, I think I have much better grounds to justify it than the likes of Sim City (2013), Flight Simulator (2020) and Tomb Raider (2018); who were hardly trying to gloss over an obscure blog page-download ancestor to their works.

I think calling it “THE Final Battle” makes me feel a tiny bit better about it, as that is technically different from the original. I just want my references to be unique! Is that too much to ask?

Edit: On completing this article, I realised I hadn't actually checked if the name was in use and obviously it is: with the definite article by an ancient multi-character Atari RPG, and as simply "Final Battle" by a very low-effort RPGMaker game (as a producer of low effort RPGMaker games, I feel positioned to make such a judgment). So in short, NEVER MIND THEN... I guess it will just have to be "The Final Battle : Anidran Defence Force Redux Second Crisis - Dream Drop Distance Measuring Stick". Or whatever. I'll figure something.

The post The Finalist of Battles appeared first on Novodantis.com.

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

Setup is most likely just a matter of a few options to get it behaving in a sane way, but knowing which way around you want things can be confusing to work out. I’m going to assume the hardware is connected and it’s responding to movement of the device, just not in a way that’s usable.

In Blender 2.83, go into Edit > Preferences, then Input.

Find NDOF (short for N Degrees of Freedom)

In here, you will (probably) want the following settings:

Pan Sensitivity: 4Orbit Sensitivity: 4Deadzone: 0Navigation: OrbitRotation: TurntableInvert Zoom: OFFSwap Y and Z Pan Axes OFFInvert Axis Pan: all OFFInvert Axis Orbit: all OFFFly/Walk Lock Horizon: ONHelicopter Mode: OFF

If something still seems off, by all means change them, but these are the settings that worked for me. Hopefully that saves someone a lot of painful trial and error.

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.

ANYWAY. Where was I? Ah, yes. So as you can tell from my brilliantly witty title, we’re talking about automation. I’m really feeling the 2020’s will be a big decade for automation, because we’re finally starting to see big real-world applications of some pretty sophisticated algorithms. Artificial Limited Intelligence—that is, focused on solving one problem as opposed to general problem-solving— is quickly becoming normality. The line between AI and an Algorithm is blurred (and arguably semantic), but under either guise we can do some amazing things: from automatically editing out backgrounds of photos, to asking a smart speaker such as Amazon Echo/Alexa to set a reminder. And though we’re still waiting on those self-driving cars, the mostly-drives-itself kind are already on the streets.

I’ve always been very positive about automation; I would say I still am. AI has three massive advantages to performing tasks over humans: they are faster, they are less prone to error, and they don’t have to endure hating doing it. Automation is one of the only prerequisites to all people on Earth having a very high standard of living (the other being stabilisation of population growth). It does get me thinking on a subject that I will be going deeper into in future posts (and has been brewing for many years); that of the struggle between intelligence and mechanisms. More on that later.

Artificial Intelligence, like so much that is artificial, should not be feared. The important thing is to ensure it is done well. I honestly hope that by the time Alison could get a driver’s licence, she won’t need one.

Then again, if she ends up living in London, probably there already.

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!

Tomorrow the UK will significantly loosen its lockdown precautions and –boy– it’s been a fun few months hey? Feels as though this year is going to be like one of those days where you wait for everyone to be free, spending time procrastinating and not really doing anything; only to have it all fall through and just end up going to bed, making a note to try again tomorrow.

It shouldn’t have to, though. For someone like me with all the resources (besides time) still very much at my disposal for what I do, it should’ve been an opportunity for me to get on unhindered and somehow maximise on the situation. And what is the situation, exactly?

Yes, given that this is the single biggest change to human behaviour to have happened in my lifetime, I should probably say something about it. Covid-19, otherwise known as the coronavirus, crept up on just about everyone. At first it was a foreign news story. Then it was a casually-dismissed threat, laughed off by arrogant politicians. Then it was a real issue, with a creeping wave of precautions. But eventually, it became apparent that containment had failed and we were all going to need to do something drastic.

Far too many ignored the warnings and carried on regardless. In the UK, as in many places, government was eventually forced to bring in a lockdown: no travel except essential, no visitors even family, work from home except if that isn’t possible; in which cases, don’t work at all unless you’re providing essentials for people to live. If you’re reading this today, you probably wonder why I’m bothering to explain it; just about everyone has seen something similar happen where they live; it may not be unprecedented as a pandemic, but as a social change there really has never been anything so sudden, widespread and life-altering. And the crazy thing is, if I’d posted this blog even just the start of this year, it would read like just another weird “what if” science-fiction scenario.

Life Under Coronavirus

A few times in these past months since the lockdown went into effect late March, I’ve meant to lay down a simple account of the strange lifestyle of these times. This aspiration waned as I fought dwindling motivation, brought on by both a constant treadmill of alternating work and childcare with time for little else (due to the absence of any nursery, grandparents or even having friends over to take a break now and then), but also the thought that just about every blog writer in the world is going to be doing it anyway.

That second thought was pernicious. You should never be afraid to undertake a creative pursuit because other people are doing it; so long as you are setting out to do it your own way, it will still be unique. A worthwhile read? Well, who knows. Not for me to worry about.

In any case, the first has sort of been my blocker until fairly recently. I got into 3D art again, made some progress on projects that I’d like to share here (incidentally, I’ve been considering a re-organisation of the site to better display things like that). Not as much productivity as I’d have liked as a result of basically being under house arrest for 3+ months, but hey I’m not a student anymore. I think this lockdown affected people in two very broad ways: you’ve either had lots more time (no kids) or none at all (have kids). But I’ve been lucky; it’s not really been bad for me. Restricting, sure. It feels weird that I’ve gone a month and traveled no more than 2 km, or that I’ve not had to scootch along a bench-seat in a restaurant for over quarter of a year.

The tone of this post makes it sound like this strange time is coming to an end. I’m not under any illusions of that; it’s a loosening and it will allow us the first decent interaction with family outside of the house, but there’s a way to go yet. While the far side of this can’t come soon enough, I will say I’ve enjoyed some aspects that I will undoubtedly miss when everything is back to normal. My daughter and wife are around the house during my working day for much longer than they originally would have been (Alison only recently got to start nursery a few weeks ago, instead of back in March). It was nice to get a little longer to share lunches and see them on my coffee breaks. I was working for home already and will continue to do so, but I imagine this will probably have a strong impact in many other businesses modernising their workflows.

I’m hoping that my adaptation to a strained lifestyle will make it feel like I have lots more free time, once things get back to normal. That being the case, I might be able to get a few more posts up on here, if nothing else.

Another click-bait title? Seriously? (Is it still click-bait when nobody reads your blog, or does that simply make it harder to swallow that you’re doing it for the lols?)

Anyway — so recently I was looking into getting a new compact PC to play Planet Zoo on the TV in the dining room. While researching such devices, I came across this rather severe little asterisk footnote at the end of the specifications block:

“Additional taxes and fees may apply. WARNING: This product can expose you to Antimony oxide (Antimony trioxide), which is known to the State of California to cause cancer. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov”

This would appear to suggest that not only does the industrial chemical Antimony trioxide give you cancer (the State of California knows this), but it is also somehow packaged with the entirely package-less Windows 10 software. In other words, Windows 10 gives you cancer! …says the State of California, anyway. Shots fired.

There’s clearly something not right here, so let’s dig. First, what is Antimony oxide/trioxide? Antimony (III) oxide, also known as Antimony trioxide, is an inorganic compound typically used commercially for its fire retardant properties and as an opacifying agent in glass, enamel and ceramic applications. It’s often used in thermal insulation of electrical components.

There’s definitely literature on its carcinogenic potential too, although much of it goes back quite a way (mostly the 1950s and 1960s as far as anything directly relating to humans). Also, the studies relating to effects on humans seemed to be a mixed bag; with some citing a correlation, others claiming no effect. Often the effect was correlated with a whole host of other industrial contaminants: workers that may well have been exposed to higher than usual levels of Antimony, but also substances like asbestos.

More recent, conclusive proof of its deadliness comes from trials in the 1980s, in which certain levels of Antimony oxide being either inhaled or ingested caused abnormal levels of tumours and premature death in rats. So in other words, I’m fine being around it, so long as I don’t inhale or ingest it in large quantities. Kind of like basalt. Or caffeine.

And what do the State of California know that we don’t, that makes them so certain? WE MAY NEVER KNOW.

But wait, how do I avoid inhaling Windows 10? Of course, I’m being obtuse. This is basically down to poor text formatting; the asterisk actually pertains to just the first “Additional taxes and fees may apply” part–although, I think the fault still lies with the layout of information here. The latter part refers to the entire device, so presumably the chemical is used in making the hardware or casing.

So remember, don’t eat old PCs. Even if you can’t think of anything better to do with them.