Lori M Olson OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
It’s been eight years since my husband and I moved into our ‘forever’ home, and I had kind of forgotten how much moving sucks. I know what you’re thinking…if it’s our forever home, why move? Renovations. Anyway. I’m tired and hot, but we successfully emptied the main level of our house in time for demolition (started today), and moved into a rental for the next few months.
Some people have asked why we didn’t get all the renovations done before we ever moved in, if we knew it needed to change. Honestly, for the same reason that I always tell my clients that they should start small with their apps, and then re-think what they want to add after it’s been out there for a while. Sometimes, you just gotta live with the limitations for a time, so you can really figure out what you need, and not just what you want at first glance. If we had renovated before we moved in, we’d have had a much nicer kitchen, but that’s about it.
After living here for years, and getting familiar with the period that the house was built in, we now have a much clearer vision of what we want, and it’s not just going to be ‘nice’. It’s going to be our very own blend of modern and Mid-Century Modern.
It’s going to be special.
FITS — Featured in the School
Although this tweet was in reference to Unreal Engine “3D creation tool”, we have taken the liberty of updating it because the advice is fundamentally sound and with which we find it easy to agree: take a game with a sizable, established following and then rewrite it (not in Unreal Engine, but rather) using DragonRuby Game Toolkit. We’re guaranteed to write it up in DragonRuby Dispatch if you do. But you don’t know DRGTK you say? Well, we have a fix for that, too: our DragonRuby Game Toolkit Tutorial. And you can enrol in the course for FREE.
TALK — Talk of the Tech
Sometimes rather than feature one item from each of the Discord and Slack chat spaces, there’s cause to pick two from one or the other. This is one of those cases, this time from Discord:
- [Sorting in DRGTK](https://discord.com/channels/608064116111966245/674410581326823446/993467362839900210) — If you think back to Computer Science 101 (you did attend that all the way to the end, right?) likely the last assignment was implementing a sort of some kind—probably bubble, no? Well all these years on and sorting has lost none of its fascination (?), and graphic representations are still being churned out with abandon.
- [Bone-based Animation](https://discord.com/channels/608064116111966245/674410581326823446/994251543039705190) — We have to say that when we were handed this yellow sticky note, the imagination went kinda wild trying to visualise exactly what this might be. It turns out that it's more-or-less what you likely think, particularly when referenced by another name: [skeletal animation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation).
SPOT — Spotlight On…
Sticking with the Discord theme for a moment longer, one of the channels we’re likely to amble around in for a while is #show-and-tell. For example, a recent tweet from Xed brought his walking simulator to our attention. It’s certainly worth a look.
On a completely different note, there’s updates and improvements as well as extensive support for RubyMotion in the Glimmer fork of Ruby Facets, the “premiere collection of general purpose method extensions and standard additions for the Ruby programming language”
TWIL — This Week I Learned…
We were amused by the recent story of a guy digging through other people’s filth in a landfill looking for a hard drive with $181 million in bitcoin. It got us the lengths to which we might go if the MicroSD with our bitcoin ‘fortune’ got zapped with some of that legendary prairie static electricity. Turns out all hope is not lost: this week we learned that they can be recovered. But it looks complicated and expensive—but certainly worth it for the hundreds of dollars we’ll get back.
GAME — All Things Gaming
Regular readers of the DRD will have noticed more than once we’ve made reference to “if you knew [blank] meant you could [blank] you would have stayed in school!” or some such hackneyed truism. Well, we’re glad to say that we’re…going to keep right on with that trend. If the scary sounding term ‘linear algebra’ (which is pretty important in game development) put you off pursuing higher math, you’ll wish you had access to this video series: The Essence of Linear Algebra. All the important stuff on the subject broken down into simple, easy to understand chunks of around ten minutes each. Perfect.
APP — All Things App
You can never have enough icons, right? But if you’re doing any sort of Android development you probably want the original, Material Design icons. Well here they are and they support multiple styles, adjustable axes and other improvements.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
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“The details are not the details, they make the design.” — Charles and Ray Eames