Sculpting Voxels In Monocrome

 Modifying the world at run time is now possible. The primary difficulty was minimizing which parts of the world needed to be rebuilt.

Yeah, I made this- what is it? No idea.

Giant letters, hoarding tiny balls

 In the following image, each of the balls is actually a separate voxel structure carved into the form of a sphere. They each have a spherical collision shape associated with them, and are able to move about within the larger world voxel shape.

Voxel balls barreling down the mountains side

 Unfortunately for this project I am heading down to South American for a few months and won't be working on it during that time. Ciao.

Shadows & Progress

• 12x faster world generation speed
• Added a soft shadow pass





Sun at shallow angle for long shadows





The space boulder from afar.  

• 
  

Left:Shadows casting across the entire rock/planet/placeholder I'm using

Cavern shadow!

let there be noise--

  Was on a trip for about a week so didn't get much done.  Added basic  noise support.  The noise is applied to the sphere here.

Some parts have noise, some parts don't.
Formula:(min (add sphere noise) (repeat donut (repeat hexigon (repeat sphere))))

Everything has noise here
Formula:(add (add sphere noise) (repeat donut (repeat hexigon (repeat sphere))))

Formula:(min (add sphere noiseRMFBillow) (repeat donut (repeat hexigon (repeat sphere))))

Formula:(min (add sphere noiseRMF) (repeat donut (repeat hexigon (repeat sphere))))

Formula:(sub (add sphere noiseRMF) (repeat donut (repeat hexigon (repeat sphere))))

Graphics are pretty bland right now, but I've got more important things to work on for at least a few months. Might touch up the graphics early next year.

LuaJIT info & links

 LuaJIT

• Size of coroutine: 400 bytes 
• Each VM requires ~10k physical, 128k virtual memory
• JIT disabled on iOS because Apple doesn't support run time code generation
• JIT disabled on Windows 8 for ARM for the same reason
• LuaJIT interpreter(no JIT) is ~3x faster than standard Lua
• LuaJIT with JIT enabled is ~20x faster than standard Lua
• Lua C API  prevents JIT compilation
• LuaJIT FFI is much faster if compiled, but if not compiled(like on iOS), it is slower than the Lua C API
• LuaJIT FFI cannot be safetly sandboxed, do not use for user scripts(Mike Pall recommends process isolation)
• LuaJIT GC considerations by Mike Pall
• 1 to 2GB/ memory limit(depending on OS and x86/64) for current LuaJIT, extended to 2-4GB whenever the new GC arrives , but you wouldn't ever want to allocate that much memory
• All LuaJIT allocations must be within first 2GB of address space
• LuaJIT 3.0 will have a brand new GC, optimized for real time applications
• Tracing compiler discussion with Mike Pall(LuaJIT) and Brenden Eich(Javascript), worth reading the entire thing
• Design of LuaJIT: optimization, register allocation
• Lua 5.2 __gc metamethod not support for tables yet in LuaJIT, can use newproxy, an undocumented Lua function, to work around this
• LuaJIT bytecode 40% smaller than standard Lua

C++ Variadic Templates

 I've been using Visual Studio 2013 RC which supports C++ 11 variadic templates.

 Here are a few things I've noticed.

Good

• Compile time reduced. Replacing my N duplicates of a template with a single instance means less work for the compiler
• Less code. Is some cases *way* less code. This is great! Can replace manually duplicated templates with 1 instance, can also replace Boost Preprocessor generated templates with variadics

Bad

• If you step into a variadic function in the debugger it does not always allow you to see what values were passed into the function.  I did see it work once, so perhaps it is just buggy/incomplete and the final release for VS 2013 will fix this.
• The following code does not compile, to work around it, as far as I can tell, you must resort to C++ 03 code(boilerplate). You couldn't instantiate this type because it doesn't map to a struct/class, but it would make it easier to pass type information around.  

edit: Looks like there is a proposal to fix my last point- N3728

CDT

 So I walked into Canada on September 5th.  To see all the places from Mexico to Canada along the Continental Divide was pretty amazing.

In the New Mexico desert always on the hunt for the next water source(cow troughs mostly)
In the Colorado San Juan mountains struggling to make 20 miles per day in the snow and altitude.
In Wyoming the Wind River Range is possible the best mountains I've seen, and I've seen many
In Montana crushing out its 900 miles with my friends SweetAs and Aquaman.
And then walking into Canada with Balls and Sunshine, whose journal you can read if interested

My first Grizzly bear encounter was about 10 miles from the monument that marks the US/Canada border. Only saw three bears on this trail, half as many as on the PCT.

 Here are a few pictures, nothing can really capture a 4.5 month/3000 mile hike, but this will have to do

Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range

SweetAs and I in the Wind River Range

Climbing up to the top of the Divide

Fetching water from a cow tank in New Mexico

Hiking with Breeze in Burglar across the wasteland around Lordsburg, NM

Grapple and Thunder along the CDT in southern Colorado

 Another hiker this year kept a detailed blog of her hike. Her name is Wired and she was a few days behind me for most of the trail(until Montana).  You can find her blog here.  It has tons of pictures and is high quality.

CDT

 Hiking the Contential Divide Trail(CDT) for the next 4-5 months. It is a 3,000 mile trail running from the US/Mexico Border in New Mexico to the US/Canada border in Montana.

 I'm starting April 20th at Crazy Cook, NM.  Will walk across New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, and some of Idaho.