Category Archives: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

Data loss

tl;dr – If you take anything away from this post, back up your data to an external drive.
Please learn from my mistakes

Another post, another ‘I haven’t posted properly in a while introduction’.
I just wanted to do an update, since I actually have something to talk about – data loss.

The past couple of weeks, I’ve lost a lot of data – some through my own fault and clumsiness – and some of them weren’t, and I want to talk about those first and segue into the events that as far as I’m concerned weren’t so much.

It has been a few weeks where I’ve actually had such a string of bad luck, that it has to be a cosmic message to tell me to change my ways, or a divine digital reset to force me onto a new path with my life.

YouTube account terminated

The first was that I received an email out of the blue that my YouTube channel that I had been working on for a few years had been terminated, for spam or scamming.
I don’t know exactly what it was that I had purportedly done for them to make this decision, and reaching out to Team YouTube on Twitter was as helpful as one would expect.
I have a suspicion that a policy change was implemented, and the content I had been uploading had retroactively flagged with that policy, and found to breach it.
I uploaded a lot of colourisations of TV shows and movies, and maybe they thought because I uploaded them without context, I was claiming to be the person that had made them.

When trying to find out what had happened, I was met with the same stock, automatic replies that most small creators are met with when they are faced with the same situation, and never received an answer.
My appeal was met with the same level of automation, and I had received a response within 15 minutes – it is quite clear that no human had even looked at my appeal.

My experience with both the appeals process, and their social media team is one that many people will also have endured: when it comes to terminating channels, they are the judge, jury and executioner before I had even entered the courtroom. It’s their website, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

The long and short of it is that I’m done with YouTube; since if I create another channel, this faces closure for ban evasion.
Suffice to say I have cancelled my YouTube Premium subscription, so that will save me £13 per month at least.

Migration to Rumble

Thankfully, I set up synchronisation of my channel with another video sharing platform, Rumble – which does seem to have retained the majority of videos that I had uploaded over the years, so I am thankful for that.

Given that most of my existing content is already here, I will most likely continue my uploading predominantly here – I’ve already begun replacing my YouTube links on this site to Rumble videos so that the site works as expected.

I appreciate that the audience on Rumble is very different to YouTube, and I’m unsure how well I’ll do as a content creator on there, but as long as I can link the videos here, I’m happy for now.

PC Crash

This happened just the other day, out of the blue – whilst watching a video, my Windows 11 PC started misbehaving – and Blue Screened with the error code CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED.
I’ve no idea what happened, but when I had loaded it the next day and managed to boot into Automatic Repair, found that the partition it was on had errors – which chkdsk reported that there were errors on the drive, and it had apparently repaired them – but I was just unable to boot into Windows after that.

Honestly, I had been having BSOD errors with Windows for a few weeks before and could not understand what was causing it.
I should let it be known that I do not use CrowdStrike – which caused an outage of Windows machines worldwide just a month ago.

I opted to install Linux, because at this point – booting from Live USB was my only option, and intended to run Linux as my sole OS.
I have a separate nVME drive that houses all my documents and data, so no biggie if I have to reinstall the OS.

Wrong. Not anymore.

nVME Drive

So everything I had that was vaguely important was on a separate nVME hard drive, and as long as that was OK – I didn’t care too much about reinstalling the operating system because at least most of the sentimental stuff was on another drive. This drive.

When I went to install Linux off the Live USB stick, it hadn’t recognised my Windows partition at all, only the nVME drive – so when I went to install it, it asked me if I wanted to install it to the drive it opted to, I (absently mindedly) clicked Yes.

This is the part that’s my fault, because I hadn’t read the message properly, and it wanted to install to nvme0n1p1 instead of one of the /dev/sda devices and clicked Yes – which instantly nuked my NTFS partition with everything on it, and said ‘EXT4 file system creation failed’ – but it was too late, the drive had been wiped.

I have a lot of the content backed up onto an external drive, relating to past YouTube videos I’ve made for my now defunct channel, but the things I had kept on that drive were sentimental things that I wanted immediate access to.
At this point in time, I am not sure what I have lost – probably things I can get access to via the cloud, emails or instant messages and the websites I had purchased assets from, but it was all so well organised on this drive!

The Windows partition

I still have this partition on my 1TB drive, and just opted to install Linux on this drive, and if I’ve lost anything, I’ve lost it – but being able to boot into Windows Recovery Mode, I could access the C drive from the command prompt, and by some miracle of grace, my Unreal Engine was installed to this drive – which still had my Projects folder.
The main thing I was concerned about is the Sheffield game that I had been working on for years – there it was, still there.
I breathed as much of a sigh of relief as my asthma would allow.

The Blender file I used for the map however was gone, but I was able to download a copy of it from 2020 from this website.
Thankfully, past me had had the foresight to upload a copy here, that I could continue to use.

Installing Linux

Since the nVME drive was now empty, I decided to install Linux onto it, so I at least had a working computer – and could always use PhotoRec on the drive to try to restore files, which did work – kind of.
It found a load of files, but not in their original file structure, so I now have a folder full of randomly named files that it had restored on my 1TB drive.

I’m writing this from my PC as we speak, so it is working again – every now and again something pops into my mind to say ‘you’ve lost that’ but it is what it is, it’s only digital data – a lot of it is in the cloud, and I could get it back if I need to – but right now, I’ve had to start from scratch with everything except my passion project – which was the game I’m working on.
Opening the project in Linux is going to be a challenge, but at least I still have that data available safely.

Password Managers

I feel like it’s also important to write a section on Password Managers, if your entire drive gets wiped and you lose access to that browser, the one that remembers all your passwords for you – you’re stuck.
I use (and I’m not affiliated by) Bitwarden – I encourage you to do your own research on something as important as a service that is going to remember your passwords for all of your online identities, but this is the one I use. I have it on my phone, and my second computer – and as long as you remember your email address and master password, installing it is easy.
On the first install, it’s so handy to have it available to remember your Google password, because this opens up everything: Your mail, your video site (that you are now banned from), and your Drive.

What next?

I will come back to the game I am working on, I just don’t know when.
I’ve recently invested in a 3D Printer, so I’m looking to explore what I can do with physical art that can’t be deleted, either by a massive conglomerate on a whim, or myself – accidentally.

If anything, this has taught me how fragile digital data is, and how easily something you have worked on for years can just disappear.

The past couple of weeks have felt like a cosmic intervention, something to make me change my ways and not rely on a computer for your legacy – so I’ve decided to paint more – be it 3D prints, or canvases – because these are the things that the world can’t take away from you at the slip of a button or our tech overlords deciding that they don’t want you on their platform anymore for reasons only known to them.

I’ll read more books, draw things on paper – at least they are physical and permanent.

Also, again. Back up your data to a device that isn’t plugged into your computer all the time.
Same for you, don’t be plugged into your computer all the time.

Uncategorized

Terrain retopology

Tonight I’ve been working on the ground for an area of the level: I want to start shaping the level so that it has some flow.

The ground, currently is an object called Terrain, and is the geographically accurate height map data of the level that I imported with blender-osm.
On its own, it looks like this:

It’s all bumpy


I need to leave this object alone – if I start messing with it, it willl break things. I’m going to use it as a guide, the new object I create on top of it will ‘stick’ to this mesh, and build upon its height map data, so I still keep its shape – this is retopology, it will be the ground that the players play on – as well as align in-game, and level entities – powerups, streetlights, advertising signs, steps and bus stops…

For the new object, I’ve used a checkerboard pattern so that I can see the contours of the terrain through the shape of the squares – and I can see at a glance which areas need fixing.

I couldn’t work with this
Better…but those squares need to be smaller
Adjust the Shrinkwrap settings on the checkered mesh to the Terrain
(the white ground object on the other side of the road)
It now fits a lot smoother, we can see better in black and white.
Overhead view of The Queens Head and Bus Interchange

To retopologise sculpted mesh

While editing, I have my Terrain set to invisible, because I know my Ground object will automatically align to it – and I don’t have to worry about accidentally clicking it.
  • Select the mesh that you want to retopologise
  • Enter Edit mode (Tab)
  • Select a single vertex
  • Press D to Duplicate it
  • P to Separate the vertex Selection
  • Exit Edit mode (Tab)
  • Select the single vertex, your new object
  • Rename the object
  • Edit mode (Tab)
  • Select Shrinkwrap from the Modifiers panel
  • Use the Extrude tool to start forming edges, make a face with 4 verticies selected with the Face tool, this’ll now be locked to your mesh or sculpts shape.

… I’ll do a video.

Sheffield, Uncategorized, Video Games

Charles Street ‘The Cheesegrater’ / Genting Casino

4 Comments

No video tonight, I’m still not finished with this one – and since it’s technically two buildings, I’m allowing myself two days.

I’ll share some picture updates here:

Charles Street car park, with the windows to Genting to the right: to the left, the UV material is broken, so I’ve reset it and turned the material to a neutral grey while I model it.

Adjusted the colours in GIMP for a bit of a different feel

Foyer area and signpost is still incomplete, it’ll be a reasonably complex scene.
I’m not sure where the glow is coming from – it looks inviting enough though, doesn’t it? Once the windowframes are blocked out, I’ll be able to turn the windows into coloured glass (which didn’t quite turn out the green I was expecting) it should spill out into the street: adding some ambience.
For this, I’ll use an Armory glass material, Cycles glass material will not work.

Filmic colour management really handles the light more realistically than sRGB
Banaman, Sheffield, Solarus, Uncategorized, Video Games

Terrain elevation, osm2world, basic WASD, Solarus, Bananaman reboot.

Horizontally split screen view showing a red box object and a camera. The bottom window is where on the map it is positioned.
The Player entity is the red object in the top panel, and the bottom shows their relative position on the map.

Sheffielders will recognise the area, but it doesn’t look right – does it?
In reality, the region in the middle isn’t flat – they’re connected by Park Square Bridge, and has a busy road below it (and there aren’t any roads)

I’ve purposely selected this area to show how they are interpreted (at least on my machine) – I strongly suspected that this feature does work in the addon, but it is too intensive for my netbook to run.
In the real world, there is a complex road system, and a tramline and a trainline that run alongside it – even a bridge to connect the tramline into the city center and beyond.

What also isn’t shown, is that there is Park Square Bridge connecting the two areas.

ParkSquareBridge
OpenStreetMap view of Park Square – the circular-type buildings (Park Hill flats) would be off to the right of this image.

This does bring me on to another method I have been using to work around this, at the moment unsuccessfully: though I have been busy with work.
There’s not really much I am allowed to say about my job , so I won’t say anything.

These are hobbyist projects I’m working on in my own free time and volition, the two are completely separate and I intend to keep it that way.

I digress, the other method I’ve been using is a free package called OSM2World. This is a small Java tool that scrapes OSM data from OpenStreetMap, much the same as the Blender addon from my last post

I had hoped that using this tool would be much more lightweight than having a full Blender session open, and less demanding on system resources. I’ve tried running in an ultra-minimal window manager (my firm favourite, i3.) – but still, it crashes once half way through terrain generation.

In this article, I’m going to be using a free piece of software called OSM2World; currently in my development process, I plan to use a hybrid of exporting OSM files from this application and blender-osm to import into Blender: the reason for this, is that I want a copy of the geographic data I’ve downloaded, and not for it to be embedded in my Blender savefile.

I’m assuming you have downloaded and installed the packages from the Requirements area of the post; if you are wanting to play along, if not – that’s cool, too. I don’t want to go too deep in the installation here, and entrust the relevant applications’ documentation will get you where you need to be if you get lost.

Open OSM2World, and you’ll have a black screen with a menu bar along the top. If you have already selected your region, and downloaded a file from the OpenStreetMap website, you can open this with File -> Open and selecting the file.

I already have one, but for the purposes of the exercise, I’m going to redownload it through the application.

Select File -> Download OM data:
On the test I did with blender-osm, I used these latitude and longitude parameters:

Min-Lat: 53.3766, Min-Lon: -1.4726 / Max-Lat: 53.3837, Max-Lon: -1.449
A 3d model of a city, with several lines coming from it, where it has incorrectly interpreted multi-level areas as flat.
The terrain mesh here is trying to tell us something is wrong.

As it stands, this is as far as I have gotten with the level editing portion of the game, knowing that until I can generate the correct terrain height-maps, it’d be pointless modelling the buildings. Again, I revist the idea of having a set number of maps and levels but can’t let go of the free-roaming idea, and don’t want to have to break it down.

I have set my sights towards having a control system. At the moment, I have a rudimentary WASD and MouseLook enabled, and can (sluggishly) walk through the city. I perhaps need to look at optimisation and culling of objects that aren’t in view.

Basic setup of WASD keymappings in Blender’s logic editor; Game mode.

This kind of works, but I really need to slow everything down as far as the movement, you run through entire streets in seconds!

Top: Logic editor / Bottom: Overhead view of the city

Solarus

This has been so much fun to play with! It’s a Zelda-alike RPG maker; which doesn’t come bundled with any Zelda assets, but they are downloadable from their website – and there is a big community fanbase that are doing fantastic work with reinventing Zelda games with this software.

I’ve been using it for something a little bit different, I’ve downloaded a tileset from vgmaps.com of Beavis and Butthead on the Gameboy, brought it into GIMP, and have gone around selecting any portions of the map which are tileable, and creating a tileset from it, and importing it back into the game.

Bananaman reboot

I’ve been waiting ages for a Bananaman reboot, and nobody has made one – so I want to make my own: to draw comparison for where I’d like to take it, would be a cross between The Tick and Love, Death and Robots.

Short videos utilising existing storylines from Beano and Funday Times comics, each episode has two stories and no two animation styles are the same.


Title in ‘Comica’ font
Title in ‘HVD Serif Comic Pro’ font
Title in ‘Comic Queens’ font
Title in ‘Comic Kings’ font
Title in ‘Comic Cover’ font

Which do you prefer? Should episode titles vary in the fonts? Leave a meaningful comment to share your views so I don’t overlook it as Spam.

For inspiration, I selected a lot of images and pasted them all into one big reference sheet, so that with it imported into Blender as an image – I can quickly look around and use the colour picker to ensure I use accurate, canonical data from the original source.

The original is much higher resolution than this: I’ve pixelated and blurred the image so I’m not sharing other peoples content, and it keeps the web crawlers happy