![]() ![]() It took from around 2006 to 2011 to go from "I shall make a new terminal!" to "eeh. The OCD about UI design started around 2003. Over the past few years this has slowly (and initially painfully) morphed and rounded out into a general interest in psychology, human focus, the understated/unintuitive amounts of friction produced by network effects, and how hard it truly is to solve for holistic, cohesive design that allows us to reason about complex ideas in ways that are intuitively instinctive. ![]() I somehow got the idea that " I shall solve the UI problem!" (.woops). And so the reverse-engineering process has to come up both with the content and the language. It's so weird not only is every brain's user manual uniquely different, every single one is also written in a different long-lost language. I'm trying to figure out my brain as well. xDĪt the end of the day, you stuck in there and finished it, and cold wet ashes are arguably better than fire drenched in burnout. Perhaps someone could file "port to Android" on GitHub and tag it "good first issue for newcomers". Heh, "cold wet ashes" is more interesting than "old chewing gum", I might borrow that :) I can understand being done with something as complex to reason about yet fundamentally self-consistent (ie, lacking novel/unexpected details to discover). It's very cool to see the results of sticking to/studying/exploring the depths of the implications of a specific rule system for as long as you have. I'm more trying to say, " if you have the motivation, porting to Android may have positive results". Hmm I made a wall of text to say "port this to Android". (I'd actually forgotten it was written in Java when I went "ooh, I want to play with this on my phone.") but if you ever wanted to showcase the project further, given that the architecture is already written in Java, an Android port almost seems like a shoo-in answer. I cannot deny that I'm describing several months/subprojects-worth of work to port the renderer to run within Android, replace the AWT/Swing UI with something that would be intuitive on touchscreens of various sizes, figure out what crowd(s) to make the app appeal to (eg, solely technical focus, or general passive/"arty" demographic). The only consideration is the learning curve. This system doesn't directly fit exactly into any of the boxes defined above, but the apparent widespread popularity(?) for the above kinds of apps may suggest the existence of a target demographic that might like being available to play with this kind of thing on a phone or tablet. There are likely other general categories I'm not thinking of. "geometric drawing" apps that generally use some kind of rule system as the basis of control active wallpapers that display graphical effects of different kinds pattern generators that let you create your own wallpapers, quite a few based on tesselated designs ("geometric pattern" and "tangram generator" are good keyphrases "wallpaper pattern" also seems to weed out lock-screen pattern generators) "paint by number" thingies that let you passively "color" pictures by matching up numbered colors with a pixellated numbered grid based on a supplied image This makes me think of a bunch of a different categories of Android apps: This is admittedly very over my head :) (I may or may not have tried deleting most of the metagons to see if I could start with with simpler layouts, but then I just got handed lots of single-metagon renders instead.) Reading through the readmes was admittedly less interesting :) than firing up the editor, getting confused for about 2 minutes, then going "oh" once I got the relationship between metagons and jigs, and that the kernel was basically a placement system based on a rule engine combined with a solver. In all seriousness, Wow, this is really cool. There's a drawer in my closet that's labeled "unfinished business". One of drama, hope, despair, struggle and eventually, "escape". Starting from the effect based presentation in your early works, it's wholesome to see you take all of the stuff you learned about physics engines, still top it off with more you've learned along the way - but then let it all take a backseat to telling a story instead. Most impressive though I think is the development you did as an artist. I feel like pulling out one of my early works and doing the same. ![]() The time was magical and feels nostalgic in retrospect. Playing with GTA3 config settings, cheating physics engines in Stunts, watching the releases of the demoscene with awe. I had immediate flashbacks to my old modder days for Jedi Knight and DN3D, I was reminded of the endless fun we had creating worlds out of the puzzle pieces we were handed on our underpowered machines. Hats off for this masterpiece, David - and my congratulations for not letting this dream escape but working your way through to see it bloom to fruitition. ![]()
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