Happy Halloween everybody! I didn't even think about dressing up since we're still staying home, due to the plain fact that coronavirus is as bad as it's ever been here (for several definitions of "here", including say, Earth). I hope you're staying safe, keeping others safe, and if you're in the US, have already voted or have a good plan!
This is the busiest time of year at work, so I haven't had much spare time, plus as you know my project efficiency is low this year. But I did accomplish a few things:
Have kept up the running, averaging about 6.5 miles a day. I've been doing some silly Garmin badges too, like I just finished a 60-day 10,000 steps/day streak. One thing this caused me to notice is how few steps I get other than the running... it's typically around 600 when I head out for a run at 5pm!
One reason I have been putting off finishing Pac Tom had been that I wanted to capture some running video (plus footage of my process on the map software), for the commemorative short film I plan to make. With a burst of motivation last week (probably due to an overdue vacation day) I managed to do all this stuff. So now there is no real hazard to continuing that, except maybe that I should have something in mind for the very end. On that run I finished the neighborhoods Perry South, Fineview and Central Northside. 7 neighborhoods remain, but each has only a trivial amount of cleanup left.
destroyfx.org is now hosted on my own server, and the plugins continue to shape up. I have the never-released classic BrokenFFT working; I mostly just need to build a GUI for it now. We're going to try to reskin the ones with some questionable design choices or outdated assumptions about what constitutes a readable size.
I went on a spree improving Aphasia 2, mostly building a bunch of optimizations in the compiler backend. This is something I find fun. My benchmarks went from taking about 3 minutes to about 2.6 seconds! This was mostly because I was able to get the memory consumption down to the point that the benchmark stopped swapping, but that does make a difference in real practice too because this virtual server only has 512mb RAM. Maybe a fairer stat is that the compiled code size for all of the apps dropped from 2.4mb to 1.7mb, largely by just doing things with less code. Done with this for now, though please let me know if you spot anything weird on the site (bugs so far have all been mistakes I made when porting code, thankfully not compiler bugs, though those can be fun too!)
I beat Spelunky 2 the easiest way (shortcuts) and then also without shortcuts. Took a while to stop feeling rusty! Now I'm working on the various alternate harder things. I've come very close (like the last few levels) on the speedrun and moneyless runs, which are two I enjoy (they are generally faster than the "do everything" runs). The "do everything" endings are still somewhat outside my grasp, although I've at least done most of the parts in separate runs.
Almost monday so I had better get back to that! | 