I realised that in 2024 I made no updates to this website! There are a number of reasons for this:
- I didn't get round to it
- I felt compelled to say something about Israel's genocide in Gaza before talking about other things, but couldn't find the words.
Contents
October 2023
Murder Mystery
Much of September and early October I spent working on a murder mystery party game.
Gaza
Then began the still-ongoing genocide in Gaza. I've felt obligated to say something about it on here ever since, but what words would be adequate, given what is being done with the full-throated support (and material and military aid!) of ones own country? So I ended up not posting anything at all.
Aside from going to one of the protests in London (perversely labelled 'Hate Marches' in our execrable and complicit press by the cartoon-villain then-home-secretary Suella Braverman), one thing I did was to learn more about the recent political history of the Middle East. An invaluable resource for this was the excellent Thawra podcast:
a miniseries on 20th century Arab politics. Over the coming 16 episodes, host Daniel Denvir and historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti delve into the history of the diverse political radicalisms and revolts that have swept across Arab lands in the past century. Denvir and Takriti demystify the fundamental coloniality of the modern Middle East—including of Israel, the Zionist settler colony launched by the British.
The website links an MP3 file, but you can also find it on Spotify etc.
The BDS Campaign
It is important to support the BDS Campaign.
BDS stands for 'Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions'. It is led by the Palestinian BDS National Committee. It is a campaign of targetted boycotts of goods and services.
The BDS movement uses the historically successful method of targeted boycotts inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the US Civil Rights movement, the Indian anti-colonial struggle, among others worldwide.
We must strategically focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected companies and products for maximum impact. We need to target companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes and where there is real potential for winning, as was the case with, among others, G4S, Veolia, Orange, Ben & Jerry’s and Pillsbury. Compelling large, complicit companies, through strategic and context-sensitive boycott and divestment campaigns, to end their complicity in Israeli apartheid and war crimes against Palestinians sends a very powerful message to hundreds of other complicit companies that “your time will come, so get out before it’s too late!”
The point is not simply to avoid feeling as an individual that one is complicit. As a UK citizen, a certain degree of complicity in the genocide is unavoidable -- our government is supporting, arming and participating in it, and aside from a few independent candidates it has not been possible to vote against it. It is therefore not a problem that the list of companies and products to boycott is 'arbitrary' or 'incomplete' -- it has to be, in order to stand the chance of having an effect.
Similarly, a common objection to calls for solidarity with Palestine is: why oppose regime X and not regime Y? What about Xinjiang, the Congo, Sudan, ...? There are a few fairly obvious answers to this:
- Our government is not directly backing those atrocities. Nobody in our press is argueing that the treatment of the Uyghurs is Good Actually. Our government isn't selling F-35 parts to Congolese militias or providing them with access to airbases. (There are other forms of complicity in various atrocities, but the point is that it isn't nearly so direct!)
- Any campaign is by definition not another campaign. If you're doing one thing you are not doing another thing. If we never did anything because 'why not do the other thing' then nothing would ever happen at all. And quite often this is precisely the aim when this point gets made by the ghouls that write in newspapers.
Medical Aid for Palestinians
Projects in 2024
In terms of personal project work, 2024 was a period of dabbling in various different things.
Contingency
To the great surprise of nobody I'm sure, progress on my magnum opus economic simulation has stalled. This is because I went down a few ultimately unproductive rabbit holes, and because I spent a lot of time dabbling in other areas.
Quantities Optimization
The first tarpit was optimization of my Quantities type. I found that
calculating land use for the entire world every frame was taking a lot of time,
due to lots of arithmetic operations involving Quantities. I'll probably do a
post about this because the problem itself and the solutions I tried are fairly
interesting (to me). I didn't find a completely satisfactory solution but the
one I did find was much faster than what I started with.
IMGUI Experiments
Second, I experimented with making a simple UI system as an alternative to Dear ImGUI for game UI. The motivation for this is that Dear ImGUI is designed to be used for tools, and you only have limited control over how it looks.
This might be worth taking further at some point, but really it took up a fair bit of work for not a lot of reward. For now, I think the best approach is to just use Dear ImGUI for everything and accept things looking like Dear ImGUI as the price of its ease of use.
Stalled Progress
This project is now on hold whilst I aim to fully complete a less ambitious project first. I'm actually quite happy with how the project is looking at the moment, but it's too big to be able to declare it finished in any reasonable length of time -- and the aforementioned distractions sapped my enthusiasm somewhat.
Workbench
The Workbench is probably the most useful thing I made this year.
Often, I want to implemented a technique or debug an algorithm. In the context of a running game this can be too clumsy -- you really just want to be executing the code you are interested in and nothing more, and you don't want to have to do a bunch of work to set up your test case.
It's possible to make a separate MonoGame project for each case like this, but there is a lot of boilerplate involved and switching between cases is slow.
The Workbench gives me a way of quickly adding new self-contained graphical applications without as much work as creating a new project, and allowing me to re-use all assets, and in a way that allows me to quickly switch between test cases.
All I now have to do is derive a class from the following, and it is automatically picked up via reflection as a bench that I can select:
public abstract class Bench
{
public WorkbenchGame Game;
public void Initialise(WorkbenchGame game)
{
Game = game;
Initialised();
}
public virtual void Initialised()
{
}
public virtual void BeginFrame(GameTime gameTime)
{
}
public virtual void GUI(GameTime gameTime)
{
}
public virtual void Update(GameTime time)
{
}
public virtual void Input(GameTime time)
{
}
public virtual void Draw(GameTime time)
{
}
public virtual void EndFrame(GameTime gameTime)
{
}
/// <summary>
/// Should return 'true' unless the bench wants to host the workbench UI
/// itself via Game.DoMainGUI().
/// </summary>
public virtual bool WantDefaultMainUI => true;
}
A Bench can easily do custom drawing, input and make Dear ImGUI calls.
Here's a Bench for debugging the Delaunator library:
And here's a more complex Bench for prototyping 4x game rules on a sphere:
The other win here is my decision to keep all of my game projects within a single solution in a single repository. They all share a lot of code with one another, and they don't 'rot' over time. Despite me having not touched Contingency in a while, I can still easily fire it up and work on it.
OMMERUM
Two things are fascinating to me:
So I experimented with making an isometric ARPG in a precedurally-generated tunnel system.
Skeletal Animation
This project stalled when I got side-tracked into writing a tool for skeletal animation. I was dismayed by the complexity involved in making animations in tools like Blender, and in importing them into MonoGame. I looked at the GLTF format and was quite intimidated by it! Surely I could come up with something simpler myself?
As you might expect, making even a simple tool for this is going to take more work than learning to do it the normal way and import the result. So I need to do that (learn blender) before I continue with this! Otherwise it will be a game about a cube with a floating sword, and I'm not too inspired by that!
It did help me flesh out my Workbench tool though!
Get Annihilated
I've been working on a 'hex and counter' style wargame on the surface of a sphere, which I am provisionally calling 'Get Annihilated' as a reference to Total Annihilation and The World's End.
I love hex grid maps and I've been wanting to make a game around one for ages. One thing I always wanted from Civilization 5 was for the map to be on a true sphere, not a 2D grid projected onto a cylinder. Now, it's mathematically impossible to tesselate a hex grid onto a sphere, but there are compromises that allow you to do it: include a few pentagons, or have arbitrary polgons instead of true hexes. That's what I've gone for here: lay out points on the surface of a sphere using the fibonacci spiral, perturb them a bit, then compute the convex hull. On a sphere, the convex hull is the same as the delauney triangulation, which is itself the same as the voronoi diagram. So instead of hexes, we have voronoi cells on the sphere surface. If you don't perturb the points, you get 'mostly hexes' in a very recognizable pattern. If you perturb the points a bit, you get more irregular shapes in a less obvious pattern.
The inspirations here are a cocktail of miniature wargames like Epic Armageddon and Legions Imperialis, and videogames such as Shadow Empire, Supreme Commander and Dominions.
I took a deliberately slapdash approach to the initial implementation, which I think has paid off. I even made the very first prototype wholly within the Workbench. The current version is fully playable with hot-seat and play-by-email (PBEM) multiplayer.
Subsequently, I have been experimenting with different combat systems for it in the Workbench -- the current version is highly abstracted, whereas what I want is something like Dominions where hundreds of little blokes duke it out:
Art assets here are from various assets packs I bought.
I'm currently working on a more sophisticated economic model with unit design, where units are composed from devices that have to be built in factories. It's a big step-up in complexity which I'm trying to manage by working on small parts at a time in the Workbench. I'd like soon to be able to make another full game prototype integrating my economic model and combat system.
I have all sorts of ideas for this including different factions, events and weapons of mass destruction. I'm hoping that because the scope of this game is deliberately limited -- it's a pure wargame which you win or lose, not an open-ended simulation -- I can get a lot of this stuff implemented and actually sell copies of it...
Miniatures
I got back into miniature wargaming with friends. I'd been wanting to get into epic-scale warhammer since finding the Epic Armageddon rulebook in a charity shop a few years ago. With the release of Legions Imperialis a few of us got into it and now I have lots of tiny plastic men. My aim has been to collect miniatures I can use in either system, so I actually don't have all that many official LI miniatures -- mostly old Epic stuff or third party miniatures. But now I have the bug I'll probably be getting some more...
The LI rules are a bit of a mixed bag. It's a fun game that looks great, but the rules themselves are somewhat inelegant, and released in a dribble of overpriced rulebooks. I'll probably write a post about them at some point.
Driving
I got my driving license in late 2023, so much of 2024 was spent driving to the countryside.
