JOGL & Developer Friendliness
This is kind of a note to myself, after searching around quite a bit to find out what the hell is happening with JOGL. I found this link: http://download.java.net/media/jogl/builds/archive/ Last week I visited my friend Sam and got him set up with his development environment on his fresh macbook pro, and found out that it was quite a challenge these days to find and install JOGL for development. It seems a little confused, so I'll have to make it clear somehow in documentation how to proceed once I figure it out myself. Also, it became obv

Catching Up - Getting Closer
There has been a lot of coding between the previous podcast and this one, just not a lot of podcasting. Time to do a little catching up. It's not that it's so late at the office, it's that the winter solstice is approaching so it gets dark pretty early. In this podcast episode I try and summarize the work I've been doing since the summer. It has been fairly difficult to get all the parts working but the results are satisfying. This is a side project, although I've been able to invest a whole lot of time in it the last while, so I don't feel terribly guilty about having release dates slide. A toast, to enjoying the process and to hopefully getting it

Long Live JOGL!
Wow, I hadn't realized that the Sun Microsystems takeover by Oracle had thrown the JOGL (Java-OpenGL) project off the rails, at least until it returns in another form somehow. Unfortunately I depend upon it. This thread shows what's going on: JOGL is Dead, Long Live JOGL!.

The Tensegrity Egg?
I just worked out an idea that I had a few days ago when thinking about tensegrity spheres on the surface of the planet. I had them appearing already, but I didn't really know how to fit them into the "story". Then it occurred to me that it might be cool if the tensegrity sphere were to act as a kind of "egg" around the critter while it is growing. I already set it up so that the bodies grew while hanging, so that they always kind of land on their feet even if they grow legs upwards, so I just made them hang at the middle of a bouncing wobbling tensegrity sphere In a way it's kind of gruatuitous to

Spherical Universe : Land and Water
I really need to do a podcast to talk about all the things that have been happening in Darwin at Home development! I've been working steadily on it for quite a while, and although I haven't been blogging or podcasting enough, there have been some big advances. The planet is generated on the basis of a seeded Mersenne Twister random number generator, so it can be re-generated anywhere and anytime. I have to be able to do that on both client and server. One of the things I kind of added on a whim while playing with physics is the separation of two different kinds of surface on the sphere.