So, I continue to have little or no time to work on Mythruna. I'm able to eke out some time on smaller projects and I've posted a bit about that here and there. Mostly, my work time is abysmally small.
On the plus side, Simsilica, LLC continues to operate at a slight loss so a) I'm nearly breaking even, and b) the company didn't have to pay any taxes... nor will I have to calculate estimated taxes going forward. There are some up sides to operating at a loss.
Things at home are holding but less great than last time I updated. My wife continues to have more problems getting around and is using her walker 100% of the time now. We even had one trip to the emergency room because of a fall. A friend of mine who is in a really good local band and wanted to help out in some way even organized a fundraising even for her:
https://www.facebook.com/events/414892365313611/ If you are in this area and want to see a good band then this is also a good chance to say hi... I plan to be there. We're not really strapped for cash but we do seem to be bleeding it like a sieve these days.
So, on top of all of this, over Spring Break, one of my kids brought home a nasty case of head lice from school. We immediately went into panic/epidemic mode and started washing everything in site. We went to the doctors that Thursday and while I was the only one who didn't catch it... I did find out I have high blood pressure. So in the midst of all of the washing and treating, I was doing a complete 180 degrees on my eating habits. That Friday night I felt like I had bees crawling under my skin from lack of caffeine.
(On the Lice issue, eventually we hired a service to come and treat the infected and they talked us back from the edge... totally worth it.)
Ultimately, this means I spend a lot more time thinking about and making my meals. Keeping sodium levels down, potassium levels up, etc... On the one hand, I'm eating better than I ever have. On the other, I'm not used to spending so much of my time on thinking about food. I'm starting to get into a nice equilibrium, though. I try to make one or two big dinners and lunches and then just eat on it during the week. It cuts down on decision fatigue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
On the technical front, I spent a good deal of time thinking about my tree generator side project. I ran into this tricky issue with mapping textures to the tree joints in a pleasing way. This occupied my brain for about a week before I finally resorted to graph paper to try and work it out. That got so frustrating I was ready to start making paper models. Ultimately, I'd just about given up and was going to try modeling trees in Blender and chopping them into segments. I started watching a tutorial on making low-poly trees and something about the way he made his trees made something click in my brain. I came up with a solution to my problem that was 1000x simpler and worked better with all of the other stuff I needed to do with it.
Only getting to work on it an hour or two here and there (with minimal caffeination I might add) was very frustrating. This evening I'm finally getting some interesting results.
Here is a most recent example including many of the algorithm's features (in three different views):
You can also see some different variations:
So, I might actually finish that project and get to publish it. These are the kinds of things that I used to finish in a weekend, before... so it will feel good to get it "out the door".
My hope was to dedicate May to finishing new-Mythruna's networking interface... but I'm just not sure I'm going to have the mental bandwidth. We'll have to see how things stabilize out.
Sorry the Mythruna news couldn't be any better.