Greetings all! I'm a touch late writing here, but I've been preoccupied elsewhere doing other things. I'm here now though, so let me do a recap of my February!<br> First and foremost I have had a very productive month working on Project Exclusion. I initially started this project in GoDot 3.0 knowing I would immediately throw away all progress I have made on it once GoDot 4.0 rolls out. Well, GoDot 4.0 is now here and I'm really happy seeing how far I have come since I first started my work. Here is a few screenshots/videos of what I managed to get done on Project Exclusion.
⮺ Project Exclusion
I managed to get a kinda-of functional gun imported for testing purposes. The gun as shown here is firing a raycast from the gun barrel to where the person is aiming. I implemented it this way because it feels better to have it done like that than to have it just come out of the player's eyes. Unfortunately for me, building the gun this way was deceptively hard. The raycast system alone took a day out of my life, despite how easy it was to create. I had to find out though trial and error how to have this raycast parented to the player, set the parent to the world root, then draw from where the gun's raycast starts to where it impacted. Though out my entire efforts, my progress was mainly stopped by one culprit. FLOATING POINT ERROR! For the longest time I could not figure out why my gun wasn't firing and it was due to player angles that caused floating point errors. These errors just simply prevented the gun from firing at all. I didn't even know GoDot could have some serious and easily triggerable errors.
I also got player vaulting implemented.
You can also see I have the most bare-bones player AI you can make in a video game. The AI just goes to where the player is at this moment, but eventually I would have to make different AIs for the different enemy types. All of this is definitely a problem for future Armored.
⮺ NeosVR
I've been playing a lot more NeosVR recently. I have recently started creating content for this game too! I started to create for this game as a fantastic excuse to improve my Blender skills. So far I have been designing military weapons or utility tools. Currently I have created a shitty rocket, a better rocket, a SAM emplacement for the better rockets, and a Tac-Insert.
Some of you might feel like this SAM turret looks familiar, well you'd be right for feeling that! I was inspired by the design of the CoD MW3 (the good one) SAM turret kill-streak reward. Currently only the Tac-Insert is any amount of functional, and the furthest I've gone into the SAM turret is making it track object automatically. One thing I have on lock though is slapping my name on my items. :P<br> I mostly do that because I always found the idea of someone slapping who they are on their weapons they create. So in the event it fails, the person who was targeted knows who they themselves need to dedicate their life to tracking down.<br> Just before I created the SAM emplacement I was developing anti-air missile systems to make sure I could do it before I dedicated as much time as I plan to in the creation of this weapon. If I can remember I will document my progress a little better than what I have been doing lately. I absolutely would love to share my developments with everyone! <br>
⮺ Server Upgrades
I have been slowly upgrading my local server so that I can keep better track of my things and hopefully limit duplicates or scattered data. I have been probably going about this using the slowest possible method but it's really the only way I know how to. Currently I'm moving my data to some hard drives in my primary computer while I run upgrades and adjustments to my system. Once my upgrades are complete, I will be running TrueNAS for my everything server. I was (well, "was" soon) using ProxMox and just allocating these drives to my TrueNas installation in ProxMox, the problem is I really don't need to run dozens of virtual machines these days, and the virtual machines I would need to run I could easily run though TrueNAS with little problems. <br> The end goal of all of this is organization for myself. With this organization will come about other opportunities such as me being better able to distribute some things I work on. I currently plan on allowing people to download and edit my NeosVR models as they wish. I would probably do this though Nextcloud. Until my backup process is complete, I am in a limited state with a very messy computer. However during this downtime I have been planning my file-structure and I feel very confident and happy with what I have devised. During this whole process I have realized how much garbage I have saved and, quite frankly, I am not surprised. I am very much a data hog and I really don't want to delete things I really don't have to. There comes this point though where I realize I really don't need some of this stuff I've downloaded. I think I've cleared about 600 GBs of almost useless data that I have not seen or thought about since it's download. <br> I am really trying hard to not have to ever do this again as moving ~5TB of data across a ~100MB/s connection is PAINFUL.
⮺ Nextcloud
I am probably going to move towards hosting my own storage server if for no other reason than privacy. As a Mega user I have felt satisfied with their prices and proclaimed security, but something still seems off to me about their business. All of my personal files have always been encrypted once they left my computer, it's not like I'm just handing them my long-term data, but still I just don't fully trust them. It would be nice to have my data hosted on servers that are a little bit nicer. Thanks to the Sergal who talked me into trying it again!
⮺ Hard to let go
I have a shitty 500GB Hard Drive in my server (I'm sure it's older than me or something) that I really want to get rid of but it's still fully functional. I have been using it as my torrenting HDD for a while because that data is very low-priority, but even still. It makes all kinds of noises that sound painful and it makes me cringe every time it squeaks. Even with all of the signs to get rid of it I just can not bring myself to do it until it fails. When it does fail I am certain to lose data, but still, 500 GBs is no small amount. It is coming to the point where I do have to consider replacing it. I'm thinking about replacing it with a new 2TB Seagate drive, but those are like $50.00. I just can not bring myself to drop $50.00 to fix something that technically isn't broken yet. I'm just in a loop where I want to do the right thing and replace it, but I just know I can still get some use out of it.