Confessions of a Linux User

I've never understood this one, but I've felt bad for it for a while now, so I'm going to come clean.... At my last employer they had a very strict network/internet traffic policy, like everything was locked down.  I had a few issues with this because using Windows and Chrome it didn't just block the at the DNS or URL returned level, but it actively broke open HTTPS packets and inspected their contents.

YEAH I KNOW RIGHT?

This was meant to be secure, but it clearly wasn't and I asked about what was opening these packets and inspecting the contents and bless 'em the IT department said it's not... It clearly was.

Because, slip over to a none-Microsoft operating system, even one running in a VM on the self same windows host and it could get out to the internet and retrieve whatever it liked.  So it wasn't just blocking the URL it was inspecting the actual traffic, the actual supposedly secure traffic wasn't secure.

I'm pretty sure this would have proven illegal; just like Scunthorpe Council was found reading its employee's email.

Either way it wasn't that they were doing this that actually bothered me, it was that when asked they said they weren't.  Which meant one of two things, either a) they were and were lying or b) something else was and they didn't know.  I believe it was a case of option A.

For you see besides watching copious amounts of YouTube and listening to even more music, which no-one else could I saw the darker side of this power I had through Linux.

You see the packets were being broken over to inspect their contents because IT wanted to filter certain search terms or words, you know like porn or weapons, nasties.  HTTPS connections can't be inspected (at least between your browser and the receiving/signed server they shouldn't be) so the software on the Microsoft pipe, or Windows itself, was compromised in my point of view.

That's not to say I was looking for tits, but I could have if I wanted to.... Tux!

I love Wales, and I like Scotland..... So IndyRefs?

I'm British.... If we want to delve further into that I was born in England and can trace an 8th of myself to very strong Irish Ancestry, the rest is a bit of Norfolk and a lot of Nottinghamshire.

As a kid I spent time holidaying in North Wales; and of late I've spent a bit of time holidaying on Anglesey.  I like Wales a lot.

I also like Scotland, I had a lovely friend who is Scottish, I've many acquaintances who are Scottish, and I toured Scotland once with notable stops in Dundee and Edinburgh.

Lately the wife and I have even contemplated moving to either country.

However, the thoughts of moving to Scotland were tempered with all this me-gudgeon about IndyRef2.  Now, I thought the matter was settled in the first, it was a close vote, I think every Scottish National voted; and they were out voted by everyone else; there were even a bunch of apathetic people who didn't even bother to vote and still the nationalists were out numbered.

And to be perfectly honest, I think recent times have taught us you're stronger together.  Doubly (or is that quadrupley?) so in terms of the UK.

So hearing all this hoo-haa about the possibility of another referendum and wanting to put things into perspective I took a look at the Scottish Governments own publications; they make for interesting reading.

And I of course focussed on the economy and how Scotland may fair as an independent unit, my question came down to one of Revenue versus expenditure, and to be perfectly honest if I were a Scot asking for independence I'd be scared stiff.

As an Englishman this is perhaps easy for me to say, and feel free to dismiss me; but I'm talking about the FOI-202200277763 publication of the Scottish Government; where it clearly states that "Around 40 per cent of the Scottish Budget 2020-2021 was funded from revenue raising powers devolved to the Scottish Parliament."

40%? Where does the rest of the 60% to keep the country afloat arrive in the coffers from?  "a block grant from the UK Government".

Right, so a lot of money goes into Scotland which it itself can't afford to provide, and I've taken a look, no-one; not one single party calling for IndyRef2 has an answer to this problem.  Indeed they don't ask it, and I find that so very worrying.

I'd even proffer my own opinion that is I, or anyone in Whitehall, asked the question they would have a decorative Shortbread tin stuffed down their gullet faster than you can say "Nicola Sturgeon".

So how do these politicians pulling on the strings of Nationalist Sympathy think the money will come from?  Honestly, I can only believe they think the UK would continue to stump up the cash; forgetting there would be no more UK.

The United Kingdom would cease to exist.

There would be Scotland and then the rest of the Kingdom; England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Assuming the latter did not continue to fund Scotland, which I believe they would in some way, but assuming that "we" didn't what would the Scottish Expenditure Portfolio become?

Well, I believe Health and Sport would take a hit, particularly Sport.   Quite what the split is between the two is not made clear in 202200277763.  But I think sport would go.

Communities and Local Government is the next big ticket item; well there would not be any "Local" in Government, there would just be the Scottish Government; but does that necessarily spell a saving?  I don't think so, for there would suddenly be a requirement for institutions to facilitate the functions of state.  For example, the Bank of Scotland would have to issue actual currency, Passports, Drivers licensing and control; so many things assumed to cost zero to Scotland today as they're provided services of the state would have to migrate and be picked up by Scotland.

Indeed in the current portfolio "Government Business and Constitutional Relations" shows as zero; because there is none, that cost would sky rocket; more so in a hostile departure from the Acts of Union.

Similarly the "Audit Scotland" would rise, Scottish Parliament too... So many things.

And I can only see the people of Scotland suffering, or the people remaining in the Union being forced to bail out the situation; so I don't get it.

Personally I do not get it, I do not see any need for England, or Wales, to depart the Union, and neither can I see this for Scotland.  It's almost an emotional reaction from some Scots, that they want to be independent, but asking them quite what that means, it means they want the status quo AND freedom; but looking at the books that can't happen.

Whatever your thoughts mine are quite sad, I'm personally strongly against moving to Scotland with this question poised as it is.  I would only move to Scotland if it were part of the Union anyway.

My References:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202200277763/

https://www.gov.scot/policies/government-finance/setting-the-scottish-budget/

https://yourviews.parliament.scot/finance/scotland-public-finances-23-24/

https://fraserofallander.org/scottish-budget-guide/

https://ifs.org.uk/articles/scotlands-underlying-public-finances-are-improving-oil-and-gas-revenues-rise-long-term

Viva la Treeland!

I would like to call upon the international community to welcome and ratify my call for a vote of independence in the Russian Far East; you know, just randomly, I'm going to call for a vote for some part of someone else's backyard to become a country in it's own right...

Because seemingly one can do such absurdly strange things and the UN not bat an eye lid....

I also wish the local people to know I will be naming their new country, which I shall become a non-executive head of state for... erm.... Treeland.

Yes, TREELAND!!!

Take that Putin, you knobber.

Home Engine - Texture Mapping & Camera Update

I wish I had found more time this week to work on my home game engine, but I've been stuck doing DIY like things; including sorting out the installation of a new gas boiler after going through every possible green energy alternative and finding none for less than £15,000.....

So, what did I get done in code land?  Well, I added texture mapping to my home engine, this was a major step, I also sacked off the blender exporter which I wrote in Python to expose the blender meshes and loops into my own format.  I've simply reworked that hand written format to be less verbose and simply be simple.

I've improved the camera controls added previously, but still have things I want to try there, but for the feel of the game I have in mind for my first pass "project" in the engine this will suffice.

Ray Casting is next on my list, and to that end I started to write my own little Physics solution providers, the first thing added was simply to collide the camera point with the ground plane and bounce it back up and point it slightly skywards again; this both stopped the camera going out of bounds, but also hides the near clipping plane cutting off the ground as the camera gets too close to the ground geometry.

Ground geometry is perhaps one of the higher priority things I want, a bit of diversity in what I'm seeing, but also a heightmap and collision solution against that for the camera.

I also plan to put the Tank & Turret problem solution I have back in, it just needs a clean pair of new models.

And that's the big word for the next couple of hours I find spare... CLEAN UP... I have a lot of cruft in the code, from hard coded models in arrays, to unused vertex descriptors to simply some areas where I've not followed my own coding standards (I found two of these very frustrating in my Vulkan API to transfer images from staging buffers to actual images & views on the device earlier).

I'm not talking about a full pass through the whole vulkan demo, more just the demo I have.

Ultimately I will need to stop writing this demo and start to back port all the code into a Vulkan Renderer Implementation proper (like the DirectX11 one I have), but that's going to take a little more head scratching.

My Physics solver is very rudimentary too, points within boxes, checking which side of a plane they're on or being parallel to.  I plan to add rays and spheres soon, then boxes of course, and I'll have a very basic rigid body and intersection test system; I'm sure the depth buffer will come into this, but for now I'm keeping it all on the CPU.

In Memorium HM Queen Elizabeth II

Rest in Peace Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

God Save The King

Home Engine - Bank Holiday Camera Controls & More Models

After the silence earlier in the year I'm so happy to be blogging more often, and I hope you are all enjoying it too; I can see some regulars popping by and a few new faces in the stats list; but still far too many of you are totally anonymous, drop me a comment!

Anyway, what I have I been up to?

Well, under the hood I've totally revamped how the uniform buffer objects are passed to the rendering operation in the vertex shader.  I've also moved the view and projection matrix calculations into a nice camera system class, so they're contained and sensible to use.

As a result I've then added some key bindings to move forward, strafe and rise/drop the camera on the plane of x-z.  Likewise I've added a free mouse mode to let me move the mouse and fly over the terrain.

Speaking of terrain I've added a checker board to show me the X-Z plane at about -0.5 Y.

I also noticed a winding order in my Blender exporter tool, I've not fixed that in the python, just patched it in my loader and created a few more models to start building out a play space.

Technology wise I need to make the camera more usable - a full third person camera basically.  Then I would like an orbit cam, which moving in the strafe would move it around the locked object.

Then I'm going to think about texturing and lighting.

The solid coloured aesthetic is intentional though, so anything more fancy is a low priority for me.

I am feeling much more comfortable in Vulkan though; and of course enjoyed moving all the glm implementation from the first (and second passes) over this project.

That's perhaps something I've not mentioned to you before, this project as a home engine... Well I've started and restarted it a few times.  The original was in DirectX9 way back; I wrote a page about it in 2004.

Then I re-wrote that in fixed function pipeline OpenGL; that didn't go very far, indeed I received a letter to cease and desist from an IP owner for that particular project's name was known in the wider world.  That IP has moved onto yet another owner now, so best of luck to them.

I however was knocked for six and it wasn't until 2018 that I started to look at a game engine at home again, spurred on by my change of job; and I really enjoyed that first pass, but it didn't focus on the graphics side of things, it was far more about the technology such as threading, memory management, and something you may have heard of, an Entity Component System.

All those pieces remain.

But this new project is very much just about my putting features together into a renderer, indeed the application level item is called "renderDemoApplication" and that is all this is.

What might the game be?  I'm still thinking about that, but I have three strong contenders and when I've picked one, you folks will be the first to hear about it.

Home Engine - Blender Export & Model Loading

Some progress in my home engine has been had, first of all multiple geometry rendering through my fixing up and better understanding both render passes and descriptor sets.

All of this is nuts and bolts, what I want to get to; just like the DirectX 11 rendered version; is to play with 3D geometry and placing objects into a scene.

To this end my hand written geometry is no longer hacking it, and you will have seen from my raw game engine posts I did use Milkshape 3D.

Milkshape, lovely as it is to my eye, is not a modern well featured 3D suite and sadly does not let me easily plug into the geometry live within it (one can only export and perform post-processing).

To that end I delved into how one might write a Blender add-on to export your own format...

Long Story short, here's my text intermediate output from just such a plug-in written in python.

The plug-in is far from robust, I followed the lines of another open source plug in and applied my own, copying it into blender with a batch file and clearing the pycache each time I perform an edit.

But it is doing the job I initially want, and I get my own format of file output.

And indeed I can load these into my engine...

I can work on the axis for the data output and start to ensure my camera system from the main client works as expected in vulkan; since the maths here is exactly the same code I don't anticipate any issues.

This should free my mind up to think about a lighting system and to finally get back to where I was with the coloured cubes in the DirectX 11 version and ultimately onto a full scene.

I have four constant things in the world, a ground plane, a skybox and a center marker flag (showing X, Y and Z axis respectively) with a quartet of boxes in the center of the scene.  This is the test scene for the "world" loaded into the scene graph.  And it's where I want this to be this time next week perhaps.

Since progress has been much quicker now I'm past the deep dive into learning the initial set up of vulkan.

I can also appreciate much more why folks just pick up an off the shelf engine, I myself make little prototypes in Unreal Engine 4.  But this kind of denudes me of the walk through these technologies.

For the most part creating an engine like mine, which is planned to have solid shaded low poly vehicular combat, well it's a solved problem, so I'm enjoying following in a lot of well trod foot steps to better my understanding of the processing, memory, mathematics and challenges in writing a game engine.