Shed Floof by the Fire, Pawprints in the Snow

What would I like to see in a newer design?

MUSHcode has to go. It's slow, clunky, a royal pain to write and even worse to read. It was fine for simple things but it has no place as a serious programming language. Instead, I'd like to see a compiled-bytecode OO language similar to Smalltalk, but geared for ease of "just trying things out", and without any global state, so one can have good and flexible security policies put in place.

I would like the MUSH to be protocol-agnostic. There's no need for @mail if you have the thing respond to IMAP connections, or for channels if you can use Trillian to connect via IRC, is there? Email and IRC clients are far better at what they do than the MUSH will ever be. But if you want a simple in-game interface, it can (eventually) be there.

I want support for graphics, but telnet is still a useful way to connect (from work, etc). One could start with a completely telnet interface to be simple, but structure the rooms and objects to eventually have dual presentation. That way you get either the @description or say a three-quarter view with some limited physics. Some areas could be text-only or graphics-only, but if you just want to chat you don't want to see people move around anyway, so if most environments are dual it's not a problem. Just have some preset walk paths and sit targets in the room for the text clients. Web viewers could see everything in Wiki format, with annotations. This is kind of a burden, but a good one IMHO, it keeps the MUSH accessible to everyone. Same as web accessibility is an important thing.

In the far, far future this should support adding custom (non-dual) environments, such as sidescrollers, space shooters, or complete 3D engines. That needs a lot of abstraction for the players and clients to adapt, but I don't see why it can't be done. It would be a negotiation, something like, "Please supply avatars suitable for this environment which uses Isometric3DCoords, BoundingBoxClipping, PointMassPhysics and a ThreeQuarter3DView" and they could render themselves (in an area of perhaps limited size) from polygons or pixel art. To be more flexible the environment might wrap these avatars, perhaps in a SpaceVehicle, or the player could supply their own compatible implementation, with fancy bumper stickers and EVIL GREEN LASERS.

Also in the future I would move server-side intelligence into the clients too, to lighten the load. Modern networks are peer-to-peer and share everything using checksums and signatures to handle problems. If the server can depend on clients to share bandwidth, data (for avatars etc) and even notifications then this is a big win. (Need some way to detect attacks, probably by signed messages and some form of ping and sequencing.)

Hrm. Just rambling.

So let's see here...

Word 6:
- Fast, decent program.
- Also uselessly out of date.

OpenOffice 2:
- Nice and fancy. Functionality looks promising.
- Big and slow (it's a word processor, wtf people!!).
- Most of the GUI effort went into the mouse interface.
- Docs are not up to par yet, terse and partially outdated.
- Keyboard appears to be an afterthought--arbitrary shortcuts not assignable, only ones from the list which does not include Alt+*, unlike Word.

vim:
- The classic editor.
- Has a wonderfully rich command set.
- Even does tiled windows and buffers and syntax highlighting to your heart's content.
- After all these years, still runs on a terminal.
- Moreover, still does not support document formatting!

SciTE:
- Wonderful syntax formatting, branch collapsing.
- Understands multiple languages in a source file!! (eg HTML+Javascript)
- Configuration is labyrinthine and really annoying.
- Despite the formatting engine, only edits text files. o..O

Mozilla Composer:
- Great for basic HTML.
- Waaay too dependent on the mouse.
- Badly-integrated CSS support! Only viable way to use CSS is to write stylesheets and then copy and paste text with the right class. :(

Other random editors that bit me:
- Written in Java. Ridiculously slow, awkward GUI.
- Often featurism is adjusted for the author. Buggy in general case.
- Install/uninstall can be an issue (!).
- Sometimes sloppy coding, resource leaks.

Notepad variants:
- Simple and to the point.
- Always available.
- Always, always does what I want (or at least what I said).
- Probably best formatted editor available, if you count HTML. *sigh*

...help? :P

Early one morning, a man walked into church. It was mostly empty, and the service yet to start, so he took his time hedging out a place to sit. It was this that led him to notice the newcomer, another young man in rumpled, warm-colored slacks and shirt.

He was muttering, crouched at the altar with tears in his eyes. "Ah jeez, I beg of you, forgive meh! It is sure as 2 + 2 having worked it, but how else would I have known? The root of all evil is not that square, and certainly far more comp—"

The first man removed his derby and walked up, curious at the gravity of the mathematician's impromptu speech. "For what blaspheme do you repent?"

"Well it is not exactly that...," he said.
"Have you stolen from the village store?"

"Why no, sir!" The suggestion seemed to surprise him. "Still, this is distressing..."
The man scratched his head, wondering what it could be. After all, he didn't figure the guy got out enough to cause any real trouble.

"Have you... forsaken your wife... for God's natural log?"
"Heavens forbid! No, no. Quite a mind you have—I don't even have a wife. But I suppose it is a dark discovery of sorts..." The mathematician grimaced, hoping the man should get it. But understandably, he had no clue.

"Then, whyfor the rains of remorse?"

"Oy! 'cos tan is a sin!"

So it has come to my attention that graphics code has two requirements:

• Needs to be flexible.
• Needs to be fast.

Okay, fine. I have a number of primitives. AlphaBlend, HorizLine (for polygons), TransformSpan, FinishAccumRow (part of the box-interpolated affine transform integral), and all that great stuff. Currently, a lot of these alpha-blend. There is even minor structural support for fallback in case someone doesn't have MMX. (Nevermind that a first-generation Pentium simply isn't fast enough to do what I want...)

But what about other blending modes? If I made a full set of primitives for them all, that really adds up!

Is it more reasonable to pass in MyFunkyBlenderPtr and call it on every pixel? On a K7, call/ret turnaround is at least 9 cycles. Multiply by a reasonable 1Mpixels and you get 9M/700MHz on my machine... 13ms. Half the headroom for something running at 30fps! Although it is not really this bad—K7/P3 can predict call/ret properly. This would still place restrictions on loop unrolling and register usage, though.

Of course it's possible to blend after the fact; today's caches are plenty large enough to hold a scratch scanline or two, and call MyFunkyBlenderPtr on that. I expect the loop and copy overhead would be a little under or equivalent to the procedure call. Maybe less since the shorter loops can be unrolled. I should profile this...

The fanciest option is similar to what FFTW uses. Write a specialized compiler and feed it whatever algorithms and specifications you want. Sometimes a good system even outperforms hand-tuned code.

Oh, and finally there's the issue of rendering to 16- and 24-bit displays. This needs more routines as well, but since those aren't good for internal use, it may as well be a postprocess.

Hm. Just ranting...

  // Pascal lacks signed shift ops--shr clobbers neg values
  TempColor.A := -XC * Sample.A div $10000;
  TempColor.R := -XC * Sample.R div $10000;
  TempColor.G := -XC * Sample.G div $10000;
  TempColor.B := -XC * Sample.B div $10000;

Hey, I wonder if the compiler will replace all this fixed-point math, PER SOURCE PIXEL, with proper shifts! Because there's more where that came from. I have a feeling this is gonna crawl. XD

Ed: Squee! Look at the pretty colors! Hmm, it is spectacularly broken. Dracus go hit code with big stick now!

Ed2: Almost got it. Seems to be some roundoff crap going on, causing pathological behavior (undersampling and pixel junk) at specific values. But it is not too much slower than the axis-aligned zoom, and with some optimization it should be usable. Another nice thing is that I normalize the affine vectors so I sample at the source frequency no matter what. This lends itself to a quality slider, you could sample half the freq instead and quadruple the speed.

Sadly, zooming from 100% -> 90% there is a sudden, slight but noticable appearance of fuzzy. I'm not sure what's causing that, possibly the wimpy lerp eating all the sharp edges. Cubic or Gaussian would be nicer.

So upon looking for codey things to do with my shiny new tablet...

IMPaSTo - A Realistic, Interactive Model for Paint
OMG. I am humbled. These guys have done exactly what I would have liked to do if I was any good at the math! Beautiful volumetric paint mixing, in six degrees of freedom, with 8-component pigments, dynamically bump-mapped and lit under arbitrary spectra! (Which is to say, it's very very shiny.) While it may not be a true physics simulation, you still need to watch the movie. This is miles above your average digital airbrush. O..O

Litigation ensues, tablet programmer APIs pulled
Aaaagh! I didn't just get a $300 tablet to find out I can't write code for it! Die! *mngrrrr*foam*rrrawrl*drool...*
(Well it sure is a good thing I kept their devkit around! And parents wonder why I hoard stuff.)

My dreams are often ever-changing collages of ideas. This is often the way I think daytime, too, albeit to a lesser degree. Take for example, what I just awoke from.

I brought my parents over to Spyro's pretty mountainous residence to show them how to build miniature flyable airplanes out of Legos. I had reassembled this one several times for the game but it seemed someone else had already gotten to it, so I got the fun (not) job of prying all the little long thin half-height pieces apart they'd been using.

They eventually grew impatient and announced their intent, which was to take a drive to the beach! Argh. I was not particularly excited, and even worse, in my haste to pack I left all the good stuff behind--decent books, sketchbook, everything but a Game Boy color with a flavor of Zelda on it. Which, grudgingly, I played on the way. [Ed: Metroid was involved here somewhere but I don't remember what sort of sense it made.]

Eventually we got there, and I found myself wandering around the caves near the beach. Ahh! A twisty maze of dungeon passages. And full of interesting stuff... that I don't remember either. Except that I got to one section and looked at... hey, where'd I get the map? No matter, its pixelly icons denoted two things: A boss cavern, and LOOT! Predictably, as I'd once done early in the Dark World with Titan's Mitt, I snuck in there and ran out with the latter.

Apparently this was a good choice because I had a weapon now, some ubernifty golden yellow sword! It even had the golden sparkly aura around it, so you know it had to be powerful, and that some wise old creature was going to accost me when I got back to the beach.

This was immediately confirmed when I, and the man, did. He told me to take him back to where I found it, a confusing endeavor (with my sense of direction, hah), but I eventually got there with (did I mention?) the help of my young chibi-Linkesque agility and stature. (Probably a first in a dream for me...)

The man led me further astray and introduced me to the alleged Dr. Who and his own (o..O) alleged son. I clambered giddily up on the hood of his banged-up car to say hello. Amidst an exchange of greetings, the plot unfolds...

Except, of course, I woke up.

Brownie points to anyone who can spot the dire problem:

typedef AsmParserRec* AsmParser;

int NewAsmParser(AsmParser* Parser, char* Input, int Length) {
  // Note: New() is like Pascal New, e.g. it modifies the supplied pointer.
  //   Hence pass-by-reference.
  if(New(Parser, sizeof(AsmParser))) {
    (*Parser)->Input     = Input;
    (*Parser)->Length    = Length;
    (*Parser)->Line      = 1;
    (*Parser)->Column    = 1;
  ...
}

Hey, I know. Almost nobody ever comments in here, so reply with the right guess, and I'll get you an LJ icon or something? 8)

This otherwise innocous snippet took up my morning bluescreening Win9x!! If I didn't have access to a box with a real OS I don't know what I'd be doing right now... But fortunately, GDB under WinXP correctly traps the problem even though it runs "fine" from the prompt. Code is happy now.

Is it surprising that the dumbest goofs are the most devastating? Eesh. x..X

Apparently the caveat of growing up with video games is that you acquire their map systems.

Which is not so interesting in itself, but the damn place was dark! So here is my subconscious rendering FPS-esque scenery and a little edge map in the corner. In typical game fasion, it's almost no help at all. Actually I lied, the room I stumbled out into had some open sky. In typical dream fashion it wasn't nearly enough to see much BUT the sky, though I could see silhouettes of the surroundings, and precious little bits of highlight. And of course as I turned around it seemed to match the map.

Arrgh! Can you see the problem?

So here I am stumbling and bumping around trying to get a feel for the local layout, when my subconscious supposedly already has one! That just isn't bloody fair.

By the way, that branch was apparently off of my room-to-be. It seems, lacking better accomodations, we'd moved into a cave. o..O

Double BTW, this music has the best subtitle ever. ♥

Now here's a video series I'd watch!

Nitrogen Triiodide Detonation (quicktime required)

...And some other excerpts, including several more pretty explosions. :D