December Adventure! Link to heading

2025 Link to heading

This is a cool tradition/idea that you can read more about here.

MON	TUE	WED	THU	FRI	SAT	SUN
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Goals? Ideas? Link to heading

Integrate miniaudio and steamaudio
Paritcipate in 7DFPS
Explore more SCons things maybe?
Do Jai stuff?

1 Link to heading

Off to a great start! Absolutely nothing done today because everyone is sick. 😅

2 Link to heading

I briefly attempted to update ziege to zig 0.15x before my ability to cope with the meaninglessness of the exercise.

4 Link to heading

Nothing today

Went to a show after work with a friend. Most of the bands were ok, but I saw Creeper for the first time and they were super excellent.

Ok! Today I decided I’d make December my EMACSEMBER. :D I really enjoy Sublime Text, it treats me right, it’s fast, it’s simple. But as a former really dedicated Emacs user, it used to be my everything environment.

So what changed? 🤷 But I just stopped using it. And why go back? Because Emacs is doing great, and still open source, and still as capable as it’s ever been. Native compilation for elisp is pretty cool! Treesitter is ok. And when I watch folks like Tsoding using Emacs the way I used to, I remember a simpler time. :D

Also my buddy has been patiently encouraging me to remember the good times.

6 Link to heading

Chose the sketch-white Emacs theme… and began looking at how to connect my content processors to the scons build.

Ok… I spent a lot of time emacs landscaping and noodling.

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Ok! So once again, no code today. The day was spent yakscaping my Emacs config and trying to get comfy again and feel like I can work quickly and fluently. I don’t know if I can. But whatever.

The other thing I did was “unbrick” an old android tablet. I ended up getting it unlocked and reset, and then I promptly installed LineageOS on it. No google! Feels nice.

My only real complaint though is that there isn’t a really good reader app. They all have little yucky issues and work better for one kind of document than others.

Anyway, I definitely keep ending up on these side-quests. My December adventures are maybe not entirely in the spirit. Oh well.

I did sorta work a bit on exploring SCons and getting the content processors hooked up. I’ll start with the *.gpl palette collector. For the content processors, the gist is that some N files scanned in the source tree will generate an *.h and *.c file containing information or (as in this case) values from the files themselves.

*.gpl files are “GIMP Palette” files. They are an ascii format and easily parsed.

An example:

GIMP Palette
#Palette Name: CMYK Printer
#Description: A pallete based on the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key) color set used by printers.
#Colors: 5
0	221	255	00ddff
229	0	255	e500ff
255	242	0	fff200
255	255	255	ffffff
0	0	0	000000

8 Link to heading

Happy Bodhi Day!

Unfortunately another day is over and I didn’t really do anything other than work 9 hours and then tried to relax.

9 Link to heading

Spent more time trying to understand how to hook up my code generators to the SCons dependency graph.

I started with the palettes and while the gist of it was pretty straight-forward I’ve quickly discovered that things weren’t working quite the way I thought they were, and then by “fixing” things, I realized that some fundamental misunderstandings were tripping me up.

So I’m looking at the variant dir stuff and trying to understand things correctly.

10 Link to heading

Not much happened today other than work and family stuff. Noodling a bit more with the build.

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I guess the honeymoon with SCons is over… meson just seems to fit my thought patterns more easily.

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After some early success with meson I’ve taken the plunge and so far enjoy:

A test suite concept so I don’t have to write my own
Built-in unity build… so I don’t have to write my own
Weird, but serviceable options system that I can live with
It’s python-esque.. it’s pretty easy to understand
Automatic scan-build setup!
Automatic ctags generation
Automatic compilation database generation
Was easy to hook up a code generator
Automatic rpath inclusion for the build tree

Some things I might not like but can live with so far:

It’s opinions don’t always match mine
- I want to generate code anywhere I want…
- The subproject system is bulky feeling so I opted out of setting that up
- Subprojects can only be defined in a single location
  - but at least it’s configurable
Rpath stripping on install… not sure how to copy libraries to install prefix yet
… I’m sure there are more to come

My palettes are generated properly now which is nice. I’ll get the audio and tilesets setup next.

13 Link to heading

Started integrating steamaudio and miniaudio today based on the miniaudio example.

14 Link to heading

Success! Noticed that I don’t have the mimalloc stuff wired up correctly somehow as it reports a lot of errors and I end up leaking a bit.

So the first takeaway is that … it’s not suuuuper convincing with only the binaural effect applied. Which means it’s time to start spending more time learning and experimenting… but I wish there was any kind of community to talk shop with. Everyone has withdrawn from the world somehow.

I asked a kagi assistant about some basics and while it’s nice to get some ideas… but who knows if any of that is accurate! Asking on mastodon was just crickets. Maybe on bsky I’ll find some folks.

15 Link to heading

VACATION BEGINS

Took the day off from my hobby stuff and went christmas shopping etc. :D It’s now the evening though and I find myself drawn to wobble back over to Jai and do some experiments there. In particular, I now have my C spatial audio test with both miniaudios basic spatialization, and the steamaudio binaural effect. I’d like to make a comparison to the Sound_Player module provided by the Jai release which implements spatial audio using VBAP.

I think that outside of head-tracked headphones (VR, AirPods), I’ll probably not find some magic definitive “THIS IS 3D SOUND I’M SO IMMERSED” experience. A possibly large portion of an interesting auditory environment is just the hard work and practice of solid sound-design fundamentals, and these algorithmic considerations are like the little punch to push things over the ledge a bit.