My obsessions ebb and flow like the goddamn moon was tugging at them. It's not that I don't have the attention span, it's just that the further you dig into something, the more you discover. The deeper you dive, the greater the chance you'll find some gem that puts everything else on the back burner. Maybe not the back burner, but certainly applies a gaussian blur with a sizable kernel.
I've become enthralled with reverse engineering visuals. You know, looking at some nondescript collection of pigment or concrete, and feeling an overwhelming need to pick it apart. Not in a critical sense, just in an algorithmic sense.
During a cleaning spree in the not-too-distant past, I started scanning my old notebooks so I could throw them away. The high-school era ones were filled with squiggles like the following.
They're pretty ugly, and scream of being bored to tears, but I can't stop myself from dissecting their rules. The bands have a particular z-ordering. The curves have a pattern. The pen on paper produces a certain bit of semi-random noise. The kind of thing you start drawing on napkins and discussing with your girlfriend over dinner.
As silly of an exercise as it may be, it needed to get worked out. And, of course, once you've approximated the algorithm, you can take it far beyond the original.
When it comes to free time, I'm a big fan of taking something only as far as it makes you happy. This is such an example. It's not exact, but I've gotten the enjoyment of looking at it.
I'm thinking about writing a book about reverse engineering things. Mainly visuals. Not because I have any talent for it, but because I find it so interesting. It also seems to be one of the few things I've ended up working on that I can explain to anyone at all.
I don't really want to sell a book, I just want to write it. Cohesively. Seeing as my writing skills are so poor, I'd need an editor. I can dump information to a certain extent, but I'd never be able to assemble it.
For example, I wear a lot of hats at my current place of employment. I gave lookin' around notice pretty recently. Among other things, I started assembling a huge document of everything one would need to know to do my job. It's an absolute mess. All cross-references and bullshit.
Ramble.
P5Sunflow Things
This is the first project where I've had to eat my own dog food in regards to P5Sunflow. Let it be known that, embarrassingly enough, it leaks massive amounts of memory between frames. If you're rendering one frame, there's not too big of a difference. If you have rendered multiple in one shot, I apologize profusely. That slightly-more-than-linear growth in your render time wasn't ray-tracing magic, it was your garbage collector. My bad.
Another glaring bug...if you were getting out-of-bounds exceptions occasionally, that's also my fault. After looking at the code again, it's a really, really obvious bug that no one could have ever conceivably written. The most astonishing part is that it ran at all.
I wanted to have a lot more glitter and glitz when moving the code from proof-of-concept to 0.0.1, but this is going to have to be a premature release. I'm going to try to find the time this weekend to track down the former. Observe! Subversion prowess! Regardless, I thank you for your enthusiasm up to this point.