8 days in, no chains broken.

The chain thing is really working, too... because there have been two days I would have given up on some things if not for that little nag.  And one of those days, I ended up putting in the most time I'd put in so far.  Well above my minimum.

I watch some videos on productivity management on youtube, and one of my favorites is the Pomodoro technique. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically using a timer to say "I'm going to work on this for so long" then take a break, which is subsequently timed, and repeat. I think the model is 25 minutes working, 5 minute break, or whatever. I just felt like sharing.

Anyways, keep up the good work, Paul, and don't push yourself too hard. Just remember how to eat an elephant.

The pomodoro technique is good for work that you do at your desk if you are a certain type of personality that otherwise has trouble focusing on productive tasks at your desk (or don't take breaks often enough).

Unfortunately, it's not going to help me with my tasks that stretch all over the house... but it is using some of the same principles.  Also, in creative pursuits, I find the "take a break now" cut-off better as a suggestion than a rule because if you are on a roll you definitely shouldn't stop.  I spend a good deal of my waking life trying to find those double-productivity waves and I'm not going to interrupt it for anything short of a medical emergency (which unfortunately has happened all too often).

Thanks for the comments, though.

Today was a real test because I didn't want to do any of it... but I still managed to tick some time off of every box except (so far) my guitar practice which I'm about to do.  No chains broken yet.

This is the time of year where I usually get kind of depressed.  It's the time of year that Facebook nags me about my failures in its own special way with "Facebook Memories" of when I started Mythruna oh so many years ago, bright-eyed and full of optimism. 

This year it's especially hard because I've been dreaming about working on it... the same way I was obsessing about building a guitar sometime back.

My main new year's resolution was "one hand for me" in the sense of the old sailing mantra "One hand for you, one hand for the boat".  The idea that if I'm not careful, I'll spend so much energy "righting the boat" that I'll fall off and get swept away.

So I'm trying a thing... my own productivity "hack" set compiled from several things that tend to work for me.

They are as follows, in combination:
1) Jerry Seinfeld's "don't break the chain".  This idea that if you track something on the calendar, you want to be able to connect each day like a chain... if you miss a day then the chain is broken.  I know this works for me because I've currently logged into "My Fitness Pal" 870 days in a row to enter the food I eat every day... and I get physically worried if it looks like I might miss the deadline on some day.  (I once missed at 170 days or something and was really bummed to have to start over.)

2) "small chunks".  This idea is that if you just convince yourself to work on something for a few minutes that you are likely to keep working on it.  But even if not, you get a few minutes farther.

3) "productive procrastination".  I haven't seen this one written about anywhere but I've used it all the time since I was a teenager.  The idea is that you do one thing you don't want to do in order to put off doing another thing you want to do even less.  Eventually, (in theory) there is only one thing left and it's easy to knock that off by then.

4) "productivity diet".  I tried this once before with mixed results on its own.  This idea that like a food diet where doing some exercise can earn you more calories to spend on food... in the same way, doing productive things can earn gaming time or web surfing time.  When I tried this before, it was pre-diet.  I tried to rigidly control the hours +/- and find a good multiplier.  It was just too much friction and easy to "fail".  After having been on a diet for a long time now, (870 + 170 days at least, right?)... I know that just being aware of what I'm eating versus my  caloric budget is enough to keep things mostly inline.  Some days I go over, some days I don't.  But I "know" and that's everything.

5) "gamification".  Finally, package it all up into something that is not too hard to manage and a little fun to update.

What I have right now is a spreadsheet I've created.  It has a top section and a bottom section.

The top section is for my productive stuff.  I can group rows by "type" that count towards a particular chain.  So practicing guitar and going to music lessons are part of the same chain.  Reading a gamedev technical article, working on one of my gamdev libraries, or working on Mythruna are all part of the "gamedev" chain and so on.

The columns are for days.  If I work some time on some day on a task... for at least some minimum amount of time (15 minutes), then I get to fill in the time.  The cell automatically turns green.  If I keep my chain going, the whole row is green.  It makes me happy.

The bottom section is similar but it's for the "red" things like watching youtube or playing Minecraft or Clash Royale or whatever.  Time I could have spent doing other things... but still time that in moderation keeps me sane.  These are the "empty calories".

So far I'm only five days into this but it feels really good.  When the spreadsheet becomes too hard to manage then I may devote some time to a simple web app... but it may be a while.  (In my day job, I manage a way more complicated spreadsheet that I have to recreate every three weeks... so this is child's play.)

I really needed something like this because I was going crazy.  Not even just about Mythruna.

My house currently spends most of its time in a shambles.  If we are going to have company over, I have to spend two solid days wrangling the kids to get their stuff picked up, cleaning, vacuuming, etc... I literally never get ahead of it which is why my office is knee-deep full of crap and you can't see the surface of my desk.  I'm normally a pretty organized and neat person... so this chips away at me EVERY. DAY.

The problem is that whenever I would get large blocks of time free to make significant dents, it was never enough time to truly finish... and then by the time I get time again it would all be back to it's previous state.  (The parallels between this and game development are not lost on me.)

I know the "work on this for just fifteen minutes" thing to chip away at it but the state of things gets to the point where it's just defeating.  If there was no extra motivation then it's really easy to just give up and wait until there is more time.

Five days in and I'm feeling pretty good.  Every day I've done at least 15 minutes of "nesting" to make my spaces more enjoyable.  "Productive procrastination" also works great here.  The past two days, I couldn't see any easy low-hanging fruit in my office so I worked on the piles in the bedroom instead... in only one case did I work the minimum 15 minutes.  In all other cases, I worked for 40 minutes or more just because I was on a roll and I didn't stop.  I've cleaned the kitchen, I've cleared the house of amazon boxes, etc... I feel better even just thinking about it.

Moreover, in the last five days, I've spent almost 5 hours total doing gamedev related stuff... even if it was just reading a technical article for 20 minutes or whatever.  In some cases, I'm doing some hardcore jMonkeyEngine fixes that I've been putting off for 3-4 years... and making actual progress.

It feels great.  Hopefully I can keep it up.  Hopefully everyone's health continues to go in a stable or positive direction.

We'll see.

So Paul, approximately how much of the update do you think you have finished thus far? I neglected to ask after your holiday dev session.

2.3 nanojiggits.

(I will need it... this week has been bad for productivity, lost heat for 3 days, both cars wouldn't start, etc... expensive week.)

Oof. It's like you get jinxed every time you try to work on Mythruna.

Yes, I often feel that way.

Pardon my ignorance on the matter, but what are the difficulties with implementing block-to-block collision versus sphere collision? Just stability issues, or is there something fundamentally different about it?

Sphere-to-blocks... there is only one sphere and many blocks.  Blocks-to-blocks there are many blocks and many blocks... in any kind of orientation.  (A sphere has no orientation, really.)

But I've made progress here also:


In many ways, that's an even worst case scenario because so far in this engine I don't have partial blocks... so I recreated the chair and the table from quarter size blocks.  So each chair leg, table leg, etc. is 2x2 blocks wide.  Lots more work for the collision system to do... and lots and lots more contacts to resolve.

I guess the plus side is that any optimizations I make for stability and performance will be that much easier to see.

Just plopping this here before anywhere else...



You may remember the physics engine work I did earlier in the year... rewriting from the ground up with zone support, etc..

Well, I'm finally getting around to integrating the block mesh colliders and such.  As seen above.  Right now I only have sphereToBlocks() and sphereToSphere() collisions working but it's a start.

The blocksToBlocks() is considerably more complicated but getting this far was quite a chore and lots of problems have now been solved already. 

Having a base framework to build on has been nice because I can build in testing and debugging support as I go.  meaning: I can thoroughly test each piece as I add it.  I even found a collision bug in the balls-and-blocks demo this is based on.

My goals for Monday is to get blocksToBlocks() collisions done so I can throw block objects around as well as the spheres.  Wish me luck.

(I will need it... this week has been bad for productivity, lost heat for 3 days, both cars wouldn't start, etc... expensive week.)

Merry Christmas.

The stars aligned over Thanksgiving break and I both was able to take the week off of work AND there were no new health issues to deal with that week.  This meant that I was able to spend approximately 2-3 hours a day doing game-related coding.

"But Paul, you were off work..."

Yes, but my kids weren't out of school and anyway there's just a ton of day-to-day stuff that I have to take care of now.  2-3 hours just for me was pretty cool.

Anyway who follows MythrunaGame on twitter (or Simsilica on twitter) or is subscribed to my youtube channel may have already seen this, but here is a video of the progress I made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjUa8IvsEI4

Last spring I made a simple networked game application called "The Anarchy Sandbox" to explore some game dev stuff with my kids.  While they never really did anything with it, it does make a great place to prototype libraries like this.  So I used it for prototyping steering behaviors that I will directly use underneath the AI in Mythruna... some day.

It's funny because even when I think to myself "Oh, I'll just create some simple game to keep my spirits up..." I always come back to the fact that the AI portion of my personal toolbox is completely empty.  So these little milestones are pretty cool. 

Already, this level of AI is only one step away from Minecraft style "heat seeking" bad guys.  So it's certainly good enough for the basis of simple creatures and can be built upon at a later time.

I plan to take time off between Christmas and New Years also... maybe I can get a similar 2-3 hours a day during that time as well.

I'd really like to get this basic level of AI finished so that I can have simple prey/predators at least.  Potentially with the opening to support pets.

Then I have to get back to physics at some point.  My simple mphys library is missing proper constraints like joints.  I hacked some in but I'm not happy with how they work... which could be a function of the resolver and not the constraints themselves.  But spring and hinge constraints are SUPER important to a physics engine for Mythruna.  Beyond just things like doors, it will be part of the player avatar itself and is really important for how I've modeled things so far.

Hopefully: no new injuries at my house... and that I can make some decent progress.  These are kind of the last "unknown" bits holding up putting the base engine back together.

We had people from my daughter's girl scout troop make our Thanksgiving dinner for us since my wife is in a wheel chair and has to stay off of her foot/leg.

It was nice.  Lots of food.  It was kind of like eating at someone else's house because the food was all different than you'd normally have... except we were at our own house and we could talk about the food without offending anyone.   Super nice of everyone to bring it over for us.  Sooooo much food, though.

Hope everyone else is doing well.

Wow, I love the way it turned out! Looks very professional.

Thanks.

Up close, not so much... but I learned a lot.  I'm one step away from taking all of the hardware off, sanding, and recoating with clear... but there are still a bunch of more important things to do to it.  So that may never happen.

Just got a 4k IPS monitor.

EVERYTHING'S

SO

SMOOTH.

(Y)  ...no thumbs up emoji here, I guess.

A thing I made over about a month in my nearly-non-existent free time:


I bought the neck.  Made the body myself.

Here is a picture of it on the bench after I got it all together:


And a couple of shots before I painted it with the chameleon paint while it was still just black:




I think it shows the carved shape a bit better.

A nice project to work on in tiny slices since there is plenty of waiting to do between steps.

You sure have a creative mind Rayblon.

Indeed... it's nice to check in here and see someone who has time to be creative.

Man, sorry about that.  I don't have time to check here so often anymore.

A power outage killed the server some time back I guess.  Sorry it took me so long to bring it up again.

Edit: P.S.: For these kinds of emergencies, hitting me up on twitter @MythrunaGame can often result in quicker responses.  While I also don't check that twitter feed so often, it does e-mail me about messages.

I'm still here.... but not checking very often these days.

I hope to reorganize my life soon to get some game development time again... but last time I thought that my wife broke her foot (still recovering)... so we'll see.