Weekly Report (2024/05/12)

Current Improvement Project (Piano Chords)

This week I managed to practice piano on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I focused on training my absoulute hearing. I still don't know if I have that, but I managed to remember all the notes by heart, at least from the C major scale. So yeah, idk.

This week I'll try to practice relative hearing, a technique everyone can learn where you recognize the space between notes in semitones. I think I can manage that, as my process to learning all notes from the C major scale was to remember short melodies that started with each note. It shouldn't be that hard, and it will level up my ability to take what's in my head and translate it to fl studio or lmms.

Weekend Projects

This weekend I spent some time trying to do a 3d renderer in pico8. Its really hard and I don't know if I can do it to be honest. I wanted to use traditional rendering techiques but the pset function is super not efficient.

I technically managed to do everything: a camera, triangles and texture mapping using barocentric coordinates. But when I run it the project runs at like 10 fps if I get close to any geometry.

I also tried another approach like the one in the original doom and wolfestein. The problem there is that I can't texture the ground in a realistic way. I tried using the tline function and use the map to texture the floor, but it made this weird fisheye effect. After a while I realized that the way light rays bounce of the ground cannot be simulated with that function, even if I transform its results with trigonometric functions.

In short, I have no idea how to texture the ground in pico8. My only hope is to go back to my original approach with the triangles and use quads to map textures. The only problem there is that I would be making too many calls to the tline function and it may also be pretty inefficient.

Well, my final final hope is to fake the 3d effect all together. Just use the map as an unwrapping of textures and draw that in the editor. It shouldn't be that hard to do that by just having it as a 2d deformed polygon. I guess I'll do that.

Projectea

I'm working one or two hours a week on a game with some friends called projectea (Project Tea). Its a rougelite about serving tea to barbarians so they can conquer towns. I'm there as technical support and asset maker.

This weekend I made a template for github pull requests so its easier to review the code that goes to the main branch. I also left some comments regarding the gameloop graph so everyone can discuss. We were going to discuss that in a meeting but I couldn't go because of mother's day.

Out of the Routine and into the Unknown

On thursday this week my bus ride home was incredibly noisy. So I got out of the bus halfway through because I couldn't take it anymore and went to eat at a nearby restaurant. It was a restaurant from a chain I have gone before that sells sandwiches.

I got myself one with eggs, meat and caramelized onions, it was pretty good. The place also had 4 sauces you could try, I tried them with the bread of the sandwich. The sauces were: ketchup, chilli pepper paste, seed mustard and traditional mustard.

The ketchup was my favourite, it was very good ketchup, tasted like tomatos and it was just sweet enough. The chilli pepper paste was ok, typical chilly pepper paste. So was the seed mustard. The traditional mustard felt a bit bland, but eatable.

Other

I started watching Mashle today (Sunday) because my brother recommended it to me. Its pretty good, very funny. I may keep watching it during the week, when I'm eating at night mainly.