When I added color lighting, the light propagation added color when going through colored transparent blocks... but colored transparent blocks have other issues.

Not sure what POM is.

Note: the latest version of the "balance" puzzle now has particle animations and stuff.

And for what it's worth, I also poke at a simple puzzle game from time to time.

It's very bare-bones at the moment and the graphics are basically stand-in.  There's no menu, no animation, etc... but it's playable:
http://simsilica.com/Downloads/balance-desktop-1.0.jar

Clicking a node either gives or receives from all of its neighbors.  The object is to get all nodes to 0.  When one level is complete it unceremoniously pops you into the next level... and it loops back to the beginning when done.

I designed it as a mobile game which is why the aspect is vertical.  I can't decide if it's worth pursuing or not... but every time I put in 30 minutes or an hours worth of time into it, I feel better about it.  So who knows.

So how are things going Paul?

Ok.  I fell off of my productivity spreadsheet because of travel and the kids' school starting.  I had no broken chains at all up until August.  I still have a few chains I haven't broken at all (like playing guitar every day) but game development dropped off.

The problem is that this year I have to get up at 5:30 AM to get my daughter up and walk her to the bus stop.  I'm still trying to find a good battle rhythm that gives me time for sleep and working on games.

Over the spring/summer I started working on a jMonkeyEngine showcase game with one of the other team members.  Just a simple FPS to show off some tech.  I was able to solidify a lot of my thoughts about AI, pathfinding, etc. and get familiar with the new physics-based-rendering (PBR) in jMonkeyEngine.  All of these will have Mythruna consequences.  The other developer was helping with the character art and has since become distracted... so now I'm trying to decide if I clean up what I have and publish it for the community or wait.

My next Mythruna related project is to push the libraries I want to open source a little farther along and make a third-person resource+building game to work out town dynamics and stuff.  It would let me publish the mblock block library and the mblock-based physics engine integrated with the SimEthereal networking library.

I've also been 'wasting' some time playing No Man's Sky with the latest updates. 

Random images to whet your whistle...

SpaceBugs splash screen:


SpaceBugs title menu:


Debugging path finding:


Stand-in graphics for soldiers, creepy head-crab space bugs:


Plasma pistol I made myself in Blender... did a lot of good blender learning this summer: (And learning Substance Painter)


PBR is cool... at the right angle you can even see the smudges on the door panel screen:


Testing random level generation early on... that is left as a future feature at this point:


Reminder of where we left off on the Mythruna open source library projects:



...which is what I'll be getting back to soon I hope.

Which version of Java do you have installed?

Sigh. Still no multiplayer world in my life. Paul, do you have a new graphics card yet?

Sorry... I have a graphics card but it's supposed to go in the machine that I do development on since I stole the less powerful one from the Mythruna server to get my dev box running again.

...and I've been too busy coding to want to shut it down.  I will try to get to it this weekend.

Yeah, I totally spaced on wishing you luck at college.  Definitely keep us posted on how things are going.  It's been neat sort of seeing you progress in little snippets on the forum.

Still cranking away on life here.

I have so far not broken any of my chains but it's been a close call on a few nights (see other post on the subject of productivity).

That's all I'm willing to say at this point.  Irons in the fire, etc..

That error indicates that you are trying to run Mythruna with a newer version of Java than it supports.... probably Java 9?

Java 7 will work for sure.  Java 8 may work but I don't know.

I hope to do that this weekend.

I can't connect to your server. I tried again just now and still have the problem. Is there something I can do on my end?

Not really anything you can do about it until I put a new graphics card in it and turn it on.  Sorry.

Hi.
I haven't visited Mythruna for a while and find that I can't start the Multiplayer game. I've turned off antivirus and firewall and stopped the unresponding Java and tried again, to no avail. I'd love to see that beautiful world again.

Can't start the multiplayer or can't connect to my server?

The server is "down for maintenance" right now... meaning: I had to pull out its graphics card to get another machine to work after our 4 hour power outage the other day.

The spam...

Yeah, lately the forum has been sending me e-mails about every new post again.  That was broken for a long time.  The past few days it has not been... so I haven't been able to keep ahead of it.

Welcome to the forum.  Yeah, I post relatively regularly about the progress here.

I'm one of those people who believe that talking about something saps the energy of doing something... so I've been a bit more quiet lately.  I have little energy to spare these days so I keep all of my extra effort for the code.

You can see my most recent post on getting a handle on my life here:
http://mythruna.com/forum/index.php?topic=2373.0

So far, that's still working.  I have not "broken a chain" yet... though sometimes that means I only did 10-15 minutes of work... it's still better than nothing.

Maybe I can start the "cult of getting stuff done".

The cult of procrastination would like to have a word with you.

...when they get around to it. 

Thanks...

Over a month in and I haven't broken any chains yet and I'm still really inspired by this system.  It's passed many tests, too.

There have been nights I just wanted to go to bed but I decided I didn't want to break my "cleaning" chain so I just spent 5 minutes cleaning part of my office... only for that to balloon into 15 minutes of really thorough organization of some pile of crap.  Then finally going to bed feeling much better about life in general.

One of the projects I cycle through as part of my "development" chain is a web app to take over for the spreadsheet.  The spreadsheet is still doing a pretty good job so I'm easily distracted by my other more fun development tasks... but still, I make a little progress on everything all the time.  Maybe soon that web app will be ready for others to try it, also.  I've already had a handful of people express real interest (and another handful express passing interest).

Maybe I can start the "cult of getting stuff done".