Coding History: 3D from Mode7 to DOOM

First video live!
over 1 year ago – Thu, Jul 06, 2023 at 01:30:26 PM

The first video is live now! I'll be sending out the digital download for backers at that tier tomorrow. It took a little longer because I commissioned some cool music for the outro, and we had to work out a workflow for making OPL3 (AdLib) tunes.

I've also been working on the next video, so here's a gif from that work. It shows how you go from a rotated and clipped overhead view (left) to a projected 3D view (right), going from orthographic, which matches the layout on the x-axis of the walls on the left hand side view, to perspective (which does not, but adds the depth you'd expect in 3D.)

Credits preview
over 1 year ago – Mon, Jun 05, 2023 at 12:06:22 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

I hate Excel, actually
over 1 year ago – Sun, Apr 30, 2023 at 10:50:28 AM

Hi everyone! So uh, turns out that adding the end slate crediting was significantly more work than I thought it'd be...

It started with Backerkit. I figured I'd be able to get a spreadsheet of basically the Kickstarter info plus survey answers, but nope. Nothing that easy. They apparently let you export various things, some as CSV and XLSX, and some only as CSV, so that's cool. In order to get a spreadsheet with the credits ordered by tier I had to go back to my college days and relearn how to use Excel. One of the problems was that Backerkit basically gives you one file of SKUs, which has a record of the quantity of each of the rewards everyone gets, and then it also gives you one file with the freeform survey answer results, and the only way to cross reference those is by user ID. It took hours and a spreadsheet file with 4 work sheets, because Excel is not a database and oh god I wish it was, but I have all the credits lined up at least.

That's of course on top of the usual shenanigans of trying to import a CSV file into any modern spreadsheet and trying to get it to not mess up the text. Which isn't that hard to do, just select UTF-8 (if you can find it in frickin' Excel that is) but it's easy to miss and then you gotta start all over. I'm not bitter. Honest.

Then it turned out that there's enough credits that my plan of simply outputting an image and scrolling that turned out to be... problematic. I tried doing it in Blender with actual text poly objects and somehow that was even worse. So I think what I'm gonna have to do is write a little program that just renders the credits crawl for me and I'll capture that footage live. That should only take an hour or two to put together so clearly I should've just done that first. One clever person put a taco emoji in their crediting info and I don't know how I'm gonna solve that one, I think I might just have to special case their name to insert the taco emoji from Twitter's twemoji set? Anyway, thanks Taco! You've given me extra work. >_>

In the process of putting this all together I noticed some missing super backer credits and one producer who gave a single, lower case 'n' as their credit name, and since every one of them put down a lot of money I feel like I need to chase them down first via email to get missing credits and to make sure the one producer wants to be credited simply as 'n' or if that should be something else entirely.

There's also some patrons still missing their crediting information. If you haven't submitted your survey results please do that soon!

On the bright side once I do have all this crediting figured out it'll be trivial to add it to future videos, so at least this will only slow things down exactly once.

1st video ready! (March update)
over 1 year ago – Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 11:03:08 AM

Hi everyone, I'm happy to announce that the first video is ready! The video will be out in public sometime in April, as I want to give stragglers the chance to get in their crediting information. If you haven't already filled out the backerkit survey, please do it soon! You can use this link to recover your survey: https://codinghistory.backerkit.com/

If you backed at the $45 or higher tier you should have received a backerkit notification about a new digital download being available for the preview of the video. I've never used this system before so please let me know if it arrived okay, or if I goofed and it's not showing up for you. If you have comments or suggestions for the video, please leave them here. Please note that there's no crediting in the preview video because I'm still waiting to hear back from some backers, but the final public version will have crediting.

EDIT: I've just added the link to the unlisted preview video on YouTube to the instructions for the digital download, so if you have issues with the video file, you can watch it on YT.

The next video will be the 3D 101 video which will explain the high level concepts involved in (pseudo) 3D using little code and almost no maths. The prototype for that video is already partially developed.

Coding History update for February
almost 2 years ago – Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 05:29:20 AM

Hi everyone. Unfortunately I don't have a lot to report for February. Right after I posted my previous update I was hit with a big deadline for March by our copublisher that's had me working overtime trying to get all the work done in time (March is a big month for events and press) and it hasn't left me with any time to do anything outside of my day job.

I'm pretty bummed this cropped up right as I had good momentum, but at least this push will be done at the start of March and I'll be taking some time off from my day job to rest and get the episode edited and out.