Three blogs in a row? Somebody post something before I accidentally fill the entire feed ._.
So, last week I mentioned that I was getting into 7DRL. I did, for a day or two, but then got sidetracked. First by work, then by Path of Exile, and then by other things.I basically ended up drawing most of the week away. I mentioned last time that I was going to do a study on mechs? I did. I basically nabbed a bunch of reference photos, and actually approached the problem of designing a mech from the position of "How would I do this in Blender or Real Life if I was a mad robot maker?", and then again from "Right, now let's draw an unrealistic humanoid mech".I did both. First, I present to you the Robowolf. Also known as The Robot that Boston Dynamics will make just before the robotic uprising that will occur because Boston Dynamics like to kick their robot dogs.
Oh yeah, I decided for some reason to do a purely black-and-white 'pencil' shade of the bots. Mostly to practice detail without leaning on fudging things with fancy color shading. So I spent ages on this, because it takes forever to make tiny crosshatch strokes on a Wacom Intuos Draw and not go insane.It was fun though, I have to admit. I spent a few evenings between both, and it was cathartic.Here's the other robo, more typical of my past work:
I made an attempt at making it seem like it was trudging through sand toward the screen, but perspectives like that are still something I'm working on. It's also incomplete, because I set a cut-off of 'tonight' for this round of practice work.I'm happy with the results though, since it was a fun process.On the programming side, I have no idea what happened (Besides some work, had to fix a laptop or two).I started out on Sunday with libtcod and C++, ended up with libtcod and Python by Tuesday, and for some reason I'm now tinkering with a completely unrelated bit of code in Java (Yes, Java, not JavaScript).That completely unrelated piece of code (in Java) is a Pointless Print library I came up with today after having a random thought, and I want to port it to the languages I use on a relatively frequent basis.See, sometimes when I'm programming and I'm debugging control flow, I'll dump a pointless print statement in a couple of loop scopes to see what's executing, more or less. Usually when I'm being lazy or determine that the problem isn't worth the breakpoints/profiling. Development-time sanity checks, basically.So usually those print statements are pretty random. Like just a "Hmm…" or "Well fuck" to accentuate my frustration that something is firing off that I'm not expecting.The "Pointless Printer" basically just formalizes this method. Observe:
// A JavaScript example
if(data == undefined) {
pointless.print();
}
// Chooses a pointless message to print and prints it like this:
Something happened.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hmm.
HMMMMM.
Well shit...
And so on.
(I think I should also stop being lazy and write an actual blog instead of just random project dumps)