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2002.05.07 ~04 Q3 libc
My reimplementation of various additional Standard C functions for Q3VM is
growing large enough to be its own project. I'm thinking of moving the
files into a directory of its own, in both the CVS and (home) web trees.
The game/ directory is starting to fill up with too many bg_* files.
2002.05.06 ~08 Spider-Man the Movie
Yesterday I watched the Spider-Man movie. Overall, I was very impressed and
satisfied. I think sticking to the original comics (story-wise) really helped
with the quality; this particular movie displayed a level of cause/effect,
consequences, and reflection deeper than the usually Hollywood cruft.
I am very *UN*familiar with the whole Spider-Man story. My exposure to
Spidey have been primarily limited to offhanded remarks, a handful of cartoon
episodes, and hours of watching "Marvel vs. Capcom" (1 and 2). Still, I was
quite aware the original Spidey was created a few decades ago, definitely
before 1985. In light of this knowledge, the "era-syncing" in the movie
really impressed me: cellular phones, car models (no years shown :),
ubiquity of computers (somehow everyone could afford LCD flat panels...),
and the newspapers listing of Help Wanted for computer jobs when Uncle Ben
browsed though it (Comp. Analyst, Comp. Salesperson, S/W Engineer, etc.).
The opening scenes in the movie (opening credits) were quite engrossing,
despite the fact it was minutes upon minutes of miles upon miles of CGI
spider webs. Later through the credits, though, are flashes and scenes
of characters, buildings, and swinging flight paths between buildings.
A look at things to come, sort of.
I do recall [original] Spider-Man resulting from the bite of a radioactive
spider. The movie slighty modifies the spider to being a genetically-
engineered spider (broken free from its cage), inducing a DNA alteration
in Peter (but overnight transformation is still pushing it, puberty or no
puberty...). I find this more plausible than $random_radioactive_object,
but I think the significant theme in this part of the story is $freak_spider.
Sort of reminds me of the way the ancient Greek mythos were passed by word
of mouth from generation to generation, with the details being updated with
whatever was contemporary at the time of telling -- radiactive then,
genetically-engineered now.
I certainly think the field trip scene vastly differs from the original
comics -- 40-ft scanning electron microscopes certainly weren't available
in '85 (at least one dedicated to arachnology). Although what arachnologists
need with a such a huge SEM is beyond me (direct DNA observation is about the
best I can think of). Still, the lab scene gave interesting foreshadowings
to Spider-Man's ability: insane jumping (hunting spiders), obscene web
strength (never mind the organo-vs-mechano webbing flamefests), and
short-term premonition ("Spider sense"). The gen-en'ing going around
in the movie certainly made me think this fantasy world would've somehow
gotten all these abilities wrapped up in one specimen. Oh yeah, and the lab
was decked out with LCD flatpanels and plasma screens.
Peter's first day of Spider P0W@HZ was enjoyable to watch. My particular
favorite is all the eye-candy slow-motion right before Peter dodges a
locker-denting punch. Also, the explanation for Spidey's wall-crawling
ability cleared up one of my biggest questions, even if it isn't the
original's: retractable bristles/quills (they reminded me of barbed bee
stingers, actually) on the hands that cling (in)to surfaces. After the
movie, I did some very raw mental calculation and concluded that each
"quill" would be sustaining roughly 0.5 to 1.5 lbs (220 to 680 g) each
if used as the sole means of support. Not too unrealistic, IMO.
The stretch of experimentation was also fun to watch and ponder. I suppose
the process of discovery and experimentation is something that piques the
interests of introverts everywhere. This paragraph may have been unnecessary.
Then there's the webshooter. I was very certain (original) Spider-Man had
to construct mechanical webshooters; something about fooling around with
formulas and one time really f*cking things up with his webs as a result.
The movie has "organic webshooter"; "built-in" webshooters as a direct
result of the spider bite. The rest of the movie flowed pretty well with
the organoshooters, but organo raises a few [other] questions for me.
Such as: that's a helluva lot of web -- eat hearty dude; normal spiders
have a web sac that contains liquid that turns solid upon hitting air --
does his arm have enough room for both sac and muscles?; how does Spidey
reel back into the rafters -- sucking the web back into his arms? And so on.
Costume. Peter goes to a ["pro"-]wrestling match to nab an 'easy' $3K with
his new superpowers. He goes with a dorky-looking outfit: pants, silk-
screened sweater(?), balaclava. This despite Peter having finished his
concept drawing of the outfit commonly associated with Spider-Man. Then
his uncle gets killed. This is the part of the story that had me notice
the depth of cause/effect and consequences was deeper than most of the other
movies out of Hollywood I've watched. Later on, out of the friggin' blue,
Peter somehow obtains the "real" Spidey costume... with raised embossed
lines and whitish plastic eye ports. This is just screaming "I am f*cking
expensive!". Yet this kid just starting college and working his way through
obtains this costume without anyone noticing. And it's tough material: it
takes a point-blank shrapnel grenade to even tear off half the face mask.
Seriously, the Spider-Man outfit literally pops out of the fscking blue.
One day he doesn't have it, the next day he's swinging around among highrises
with the trademark Spidey suit going crime-busting.
Green Goblin. Some reviewer said the GG (costume) was a bit cartoonish.
I agree somewhat. Much of the facial form is (understandably) exaggerated,
but little of the face inside is viewable, nor shows through (at least
Spidey's mask deforms as his jaws move). This would explain why the movie
had a few times the Goblin's mask's eyes open to show the person's eyes
underneath. And the movie's Goblin mask is (thankfully) much less scarier
than most clown faces. And in another one of those Great Unanswered
Questions... where the swutting heck does that costume come from? I've
never seen it exist anywhere but when Osborne gets all pissed and suddenly
appears in that costume/armor. At the end of the movie, I expected a Darth
Vaderish laying down of the mask next to the dead body. But the GG costume
just ups and disappears. Like the way it appeared. Really irritated me
for some reason. I expected at some time during the movie to see the entire
vacated armor in a closet or something.
Green Goblin's glider/flyer/whatever. Enjoyable back story to it (result of
human performance enhancement widgetry research [hovercraft airfoil], which
conveniently was done within the confines of Osborne's/GG's company Oscorp,
and thereby provided a convenient mechanism by which GG obtains a means of
transportation), except... good grief... I don't think even Star Trek had
devices so gaudily packed with widgets and whizbangs.
The Sadistic Choice -- love or duty with death(s) on the line. Seems every
superhero faces one. Is this some kind of running gimmick among all comics
or something? I know Batman faced one, I'm pretty sure Superman faced a
couple, and heaven knows how many the members of X-Men faced. When GG was
giving the speech on "The Sadistic Choice", I was wondering if he was talking
about the entire superhero genre in general. Actually, I think he was,
but it sounded more like he was preaching to some vague audience than to
Spider-Man in particular. The scene was borderline cliche for me.
The final showdown. About when the tides turn, I'm reminded of a quote
from some place -- when you have your enemy/ies down (but not out), don't
ever give them time to build up a second wind (especially by gloating or
excessive taunting). In any case, Green Goblin's final strike was about
as predictable as Wile E. Coyote's attempts as soon as I saw the glider
levelling with Spidey's back. Let's see... I face Spider-Man square on...
I try to sneak up my massively huge glider right behind him to try to impale
him full speed... all three entities are colinear... gee, I maybe I'll be in
the line of fire. Looks to me that Osborne never used a gun (rifle in
particular) seriously, otherwise the concept of "overpenetration" would've
dawned on him before calling for his glider. Or maybe he was going for
kamikaze: "I'll take you out even if it takes me out as well".
On the whole, an enjoyable movie, especially since I don't know enough to
be nit-picky, but knew enough to have a clue where the next few minutes
were likely to be headed. In the meantime, I'm pretty certain the first
dozen hits for Spider-Man on Google are inundated, so I'm avoiding hitting
up any Spidey-related info for a week or two.
This movie just screams sequel. I just hope the title won't wind up corny.
2002.05.01 ~09 Ogg Vorbis in QVM
Nailed the problem. It was a faulty ldexp() [re]implementation. Decoding
sounds MUCH better now. Now for the commit...
2002.04.27 ~04 Mod development using Scheme, prospect not good
My goal was Scheme in QVM mode. Unfortunately, the layers of interpretations
causes Scheme to be extremely slow, even in the JIT(?)-compiled. I wrote
a set of accessor routines in Scheme to modify the values of various C structs
involved with gameplay. On my K7/1200 (hardware which I consider to be
excessivly powerful for just a mere dedicatd Q3 server), in compiled QVM mode
(vm_game 2), just *loading* this file takes 30 seconds. In interpreted QVM
mode (vm_game 1), this explodes to 180. In native SO (vm_game 0), it's a
relatively speedy but still slow 3 seconds ('Hitch Warning' is 0.5s). And
this is just loading this particular set of procedures, not even getting to
the other support functions and then actually *running* any Scheme code.
Trying an entire mod in just extension form is out of the question. I feel
the optimal tool would be a Lisp compiler targeted to QVM bytecode, but I
doubt that exists, and doubt it'll exist until Q3A goes GPL, and even then,
I doubt any Lisp maintainers would really want to bother targetting QVM.
Another alternative is a Lisp->C compiler (like CLiCC), which then uses the
existing toolchain to compile the generated C file to QVM. This approach
may be a better one than tacking Scheme onto the mod as an extensible
language. At least the speed-critical/impaired functions (like, say, struct
accessors) can be made speedier. I'll need to look into this approach.
Still, QuakeScheme in its current form is still useful for "build-up" stuff,
implementing new features -- prototyping. The set of routines established so
far is useful in poking and prodding the structs, to see values were inserted
properly, or to see what values were inserted, or to force the proper values.
Although the Scheme code is slow, prototyping in Scheme precludes the need for
a C compiling. And despite a complete recompile taking less than six seconds,
not having to quit/restart Q3A means I don't have to rebuild session states
(players, bots, entities, etc.) for testing/debugging. Once the Scheme form
is stabilized, the routines can then be rewritten in plain C for speed.
CLiCC may help make that last part automatic, though... hrm.
2002.04.21 ~03 Documenting MD3 and MD4
http://www.icculus.org/~phaethon/q3a/formats/formats.htmlPartly I was bored, partly the forums at quake3world.com had me realize
documentation on MD3 and MD4 formats is pretty sparse. My documentation on
MD3 format were based on the files from the Q3AToolsSource package, and my
personal experience wrestling with the format for my Blender MD3 import module.
I have no personal experience rangling with MD4. My words on MD4 are mostly
shots in the dark, based on patterns from MD3 and Blender. Still, it's best
to get familiar with MD4 at some level, even if I am spewing hogwash as
I look over the header files.
2002.04.15 ~00 TinySCHEME
Poking around with Google, I came across TinySCHEME. It's a really tiny
Scheme implementation without all the setjmp/longjmp doohickeys I've had
problems with in other Scheme implementations. TinySCHEME is derived from
MiniSCHEME, (heavily) modified to work as the extension language to a mini
web server frontend. TinySCHEME compiles into QVM bytecode with some minor
modifications and a few extra libc function reimplementations.
I may wind up using this as the primary Scheme core.
In other news, I finally got around to slicing down the size of my .plan,
now that I have attained "hugest fscking plan file":
phaethon@gamehenge$ ls -s * | sort -n | tail -5
8 theoddone33
12 vogon
16 chunky
24 yoda
36 phaethon
2002.04.13 ~10 Depressed over tail-recursion
I'm still depressed that my Scheme implementation isn't properly
tail-recursive, and that I still haven't figured out how to make it T-R.
It's been a real showstopper.
Life: No Life found.
Project:
1. Project FI, Quake 3 mod (
http://www.icculus.org/fi/)
a. provide an extensible environment for a Q3 mod. The intended notion is that of "mutators" in Unreal Tournament.
b. FI:WFC, a more faithful reproduction of Q2WF for Q3 than WFA.
2. QuakeScheme
* Extensible language for Project FI.
* Builds on TinySCHEME (
http://tinyscheme.sourceforge.net/)
* Deal with idiosyncrasies of Q3VM not handled by most other Scheme impls.
3. QS GUI/widget set
a. Need to research advanced OO and GUI of Scheme derivatives and Common Lisp.
b. Replication/extension of boxy widgets in Q3TA (Q3 PR 1.27+).
c. Pie menus -- just to annoy theoddone33.
4. PalmOS stuff
a. PiNGer (gfx viewer)
* generalize interface to a "any-gfx" viewer (libpnm?)
b. ZBoxZ (file manager)
* beef up its appness: menus, dialogs, pen actions