Cities in the Sky

The little cuboid people can now trip over if staying upright is getting too tough for them. I had to do some proper maths-y stuff to get it working, which flummoxed me for a while - who would have thought that the maths I learnt at uni would ever be needed in real life?? I needed something that would allow a continuous random chance of something happening based on some measure of ‘continuous probability’. Turns out a Poisson process is ideal for this, and though the equations look scary I realised that they can be simplified greatly in some cases, including mine.

So, when the island is tilting a lot, people trip up and fall off more often, which is nice (for me, not for them). It looks slightly funny at the moment since it’s only taking into account the island’s tilt, and not the gradient of the terrain each person is on or their proximity to the tilting edge, which would make things look cooler. That’s on my to-do list, but it’s not terribly important right now.

Also, I’ve made the people wander a bit more interestingly - they walk (glide) across the island and turn around when they meet a building or an edge, rather than vibrating about. It’s looking good. I’ll probably put together a video once I’ve done a few more of these tasks I’ve got scribbled on my notepad.

Next on my list is getting buildings to detach properly. Currently they never get detached, and it looks like OPAL isn’t going to be smart enough to do this in a physically-based manner (accumulating joint damage, for example), so I’ll do it in a similar way to how it’s done for people. For now it’s the mechanic that counts, not how good it looks or how smug it makes me feel as a software engineer.

That’s it for today though, I need to clean the flat before my better half gets back, else she’ll beat me or refuse to make me lunch or worse.

Great, I’ve got a completely free weekend with my girlfriend away, perfect chance to get some work done on CITS… but I’m not in the mood, so I’ve only done some minor tidying work (programmers like me love making code pretty) and finished up some bits to do with people falling off the island that I should have done before (they get ‘tidied up’ like the buildings do now). The rest of the day was taken up cleaning my bike, sorting out insurance, calling estate agents and other boring but necessary things like that. Tomorrow will be better, I promise!

Now I’m relaxing with a bottle of Tanglefoot, listening to some Frank Zappa (I’m trying new musics… can be quite good if you listen to the right albums. Lumpy Gravy, Hot Rats and Apostrophe are my favourites so far), and probably playing some more GTA4 and Trackmania.

Note: Trackmania is great with retro red-and-blue 3D glasses. Cheers Joe

The little cuboid people now have something to fear. If they get hit by a building, they fall off the island to their doom. By “doom” I mean “negative infinity in the Y axis”, and by “fall” I mean “get launched upwards for comedy effect”.

In other news I’ve been out and about in Loughborough looking for a new place to live. Seems like a lovely place, if you ignore the North and the South and the East of it.