Progress. Kind of.

I do Linux. It's a thing now.

This is going to be another short post, I'm afraid. Current progress towards the game is shown above - I've set it up to do real-time colour toning of scenes. It's currently just set to turn Red and Green down a lot, and Blue down slightly, and then switch the Red and Blue channels around (fixing the odd colouring issue I was having at the time of last week's post).  It's also rendering to an off-screen buffer at the same time - which means that the in-game content could all be treated in the same way, not just a raw image as shown here.

For anyone interested, the fragment shader code itself is shown. It really isn't that bad, actually. The code that goes with it (feeding it the data points, textures, etc) is horrific at first sight though. Finer-grain control over colours will be possible, when I write some code to handle one-dimensional textures (multiplying by 0.9, 0,7 and 0.6 were really just to test the concept).

The switch to Linux is an interesting one - I had previously done so on my laptop whilst "revising" - but now it's on my desktop, and it's permanent. On the whole I love the OS - everything is free, without any hassle - installing programs is as easy as typing its name, and pressing "Install". Programming is far easier than under Windows - the entire O/S feels more geared towards it. Even advanced changes only require a couple of lines of text. I'll only cave in and install Windows 7 when my craving to play Portal 2 gets too great, or when I discover that there's no fix for a bug I have with it. (The choice to use a Portal-related texture as my test image suggests I'm not going to last too long...) The only real barriers against wide adoption is the lack of apps like Photoshop, After Effects, and a large library of decent games, the perceived increase in complexity (no steeper than Windows - just not what people are used to), and maybe the self-imposed "free software" barriers (again, not a problem to me - technically formats like MP3 and DVD are licensed, and drivers without source code available throw up a "non-free" warning). That's how my experience of it as my "Main O/S" has been, anyway.

Linux is the one responsible for destroying the performance - it's not actually that slow.
Charlie

What's eating your time?

Despite having disassembled my main desktop, I've found that I still have ample distraction even on a Linux laptop - so I decided to present, in list form, the top 5 web-apps I use to distract myself:

5. Webmasters Tools/Analytics/AWS Control Panel
All are just small apps you can use to check the status of a site or sites and how they are performing - useful tools for analysing your sites. Not so useful to check every half-hour though, since the data is updated daily.

4. Whatever tab is to the left of this one
This rule sadly also applies - instead of concentrating on the contents of one tab, if one starts to lose its appeal, the one to its left starts to look all the more tempting. If I happen to be on the left-most tab then.... yeah, right - like I'd ever make it over there. The tabs on the left haven't seen the light of day since the machine was last booted

3. Grooveshark
Finding new music is easy. Concentrating with said music playing is often harder.

2. YouTube:

With awesomeness like that throwing itself at you, what's not to like?

1. Facebook
This one doesn't need any explanation.

(Twitter, Reader, and a few other sites also feature but less prominently)

There's an entry on the XKCD blog that looks at the procrastination response, which is surprisingly interesting. Essentially, in the absence of a clear way forward in solving a problem, the brain will throw out the potential longer-term satisfaction of solving the problem, for the shorter-term reward gained by, for example, opening up a new tab and browsing Facebook. The new action, as long as it has some novelty value, will almost always be more appealing, because it provides an instant and always-available reward. Hence, over time, more challenging things are pushed aside by the short-term rewards of a quickly-changing social site such as Facebook, which never loses its novelty value because of its continually-current nature. Similarly, sites like Twitter and YouTube can also become ingrained responses when faced with the slightest of problems in your intended work.

As for solving the above? If I find a solution in time for my Chemistry exam, it'll both save me from an embarrassing and complete failure, and will be shared on here next time.

Number of times I alt-tabbed to another window whilst writing this: 6
Charlie