Lane's Blog

A New Dawn?

Lane — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:10:08 +0000

This is what I imagine a very cold (~2000K) red star might look like at sunrise. I’m not sure if it matters whether it is a red giant or red dwarf — the system tries to size the star semi-realistically according to the temperature of the star and the climate of the local planet, so it should have about the same apparent size either way. A blue star would always look very small, even though these stars are always giants, because if you were ever close enough that it looked big, it would just sterilize you.

The mysterious green object in the upper right corner is a cyborg planet killer. It’s really big and powerful, so don’t **** it off.

In other news, for my United Statesian readers, it’s election day! All you have to do is show up, wait in line a little while, and draw a little line to the right arrowhead, or pull a lever or however it’s done in your state. Try not to **** it up. Unless you have electronic voting machines, in which case the cyborgs will take care of it, so don’t bother.

If you have astrophysics brains and don’t mind feeding them to my zombie code monkey, maybe I can make more realistic stars?

Good Morning Planet Haskell

Lane — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 05:44:01 +0000

Here’s something I’ve been spending waaaay too much time on, but I wasn’t happy with the results the first try, or the second try, or the third try and . . . I can be very stubborn.

This is actually very low resolution. It uses a simple media ray tracer that can handle some common atmosphere models. The tracer runs in a background thread and the result is just pasted onto a sky sphere.

More shots as I refine the lighting.

ANN: Roguestar 0.2.2

Lane — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 03:00:36 +0000

Roguestar 0.2.2 is up correcting various minor issues, and eliminating the runtime dependency on netpipes.

$ cabal update
$ cabal install roguestar-engine
$ cabal install roguestar-gl
$ ~/.cabal/bin/roguestar

There are no new gameplay features, although I expect to have some interesting screenshots up in the next week.

ANN: Roguestar 0.2.1

Lane — Sun, 18 May 2008 03:55:27 +0000

Website: roguestar.downstairspeople.org
Tarball: roguestar-0.2.1.tar.gz

Thanks to gwern, roguestar has now been cabalized and is available on hackage.

ANN: Roguestar 0.2

Lane — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:20:21 +0000

website: http://roguestar.downstairspeople.org
darcs 2: darcs get –lazy http://www.downstairspeople.org/darcs/roguestar
tarball: http://www.downstairspeople.org/roguestar/roguestar-0.2.tar.gz

After much delay, I’m happy to announce Roguestar 0.2.

Roguestar is a science fiction themed roguelike (turn-based,
chessboard-tiled, role playing) game written in Haskell. Roguestar uses
OpenGL for graphics. This is still a very early release and several
important things don’t work.

This initial release allows you to play one of six alien races. You begin
the game stranded on an alien planet, fighting off an endless hoard of
hostile robots.

RSAGL, the RogueStar Animation and Graphics Library, includes a
domain-specific monad for 3D modelling of arbitrary parametric surfaces,
as well as an animation monad and arrow, which is more or less like YAMPA
as a stack of arrow transformers. RSAGL was specifically designed for
roguestar, but every effort has been made (including the license) to make
it accessable to other projects that might benefit from it. Performance
is an issue, but there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in this area.

Roguestar is released under the Affero General Public License version 3.
However, RSAGL uses a permissive license.

I would be absolutely thrilled to receive any feedback anyone may have on
the design and aesthetics of the game, especially in the form of source
code.

Reptilian with Trees

Lane — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:16:20 +0000

This is a reptilian standing among some trees. The trees need work.

But, this is the last feature for what is going to be the 0.2 release. There is nothing, coding wise, left to do, only documentation.

Parasites?

Lane — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:11:17 +0000

Here’s a Caduceator:

These squishy aliens descended from swamp-dwelling parasites, and have squishy little suction cup hands. Despite this, they are quite friendly.

Only one reptilian race left, and a tree.

Ascendant

Lane — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:24:16 +0000

This highly evolved Ascendant has no need for a physical body.

I have two species left. Three if you count trees.

He Said She Said

Lane — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:01:22 +0000

Donald Knuth says: If people do discover nice ways to use the newfangled multithreaded machines, I would expect the discovery to come from people who routinely use literate programming.

This is called Haskell.

Androsynth

Lane — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:23:54 +0000

Here’s the next creature, an Androsynth. The head is ok, the body and limbs need work, but I’ll tolerate them as they are for now.

Androsynths were created to house the disembodied minds of the Ascendents (next), before they evolved beyond the need for any physical form.

Based on this guy, who I did four or five years ago: