Archive:
It dawned on me, over the weekend, that I can “script” the entire level using a Level Sequence. So I knocked up some enemy spawners that I can trigger from the timeline. They can throw out enemies of a given type, over a period, that either follow a path, or mooch their way toward the player independently. Works quite nicely, and gives me something visual that I can mess about with to adjust timings.
Added splines for the enemies to follow, a cassette, a 5 1/4 Inch floppy disc, and some floating Asteroids. I think this is enough to script out the bulk of the level. Then I need to work out how I’m gonna do the floating head of Kevin Toms
I work from home, and as you can tell, mostly on my own. That means there are certain services – Off-site backups, Source Control (Perforce), Web Hosting, etc. – that I need to buy, or host and maintain. I normally try to do this with my own servers, which, for the life of Triple Eh?, have been Virtual Private Servers in data centres run by Digital Ocean and Hetzner. But I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with the whole Data Centre thing. They’re big, they aren’t the most environmentally friendly, and my needs are small enough that there’s probably a better way. And there is. I have symmetrical Gigabit internet (since moving to Wales)), which is more than enough for one man to sync a Perforce server, and serve a couple of websites.
After a lot of digging around, looking at small, low-power machines like the Raspberry Pi, I found a sub £100 Intel N100 box called the Firebat T8. 4 low-power cores, 16 gig of Ram, and half a Terabyte of disc space. Absolute bargain. It arrived on Thursday, and I’ve spent the last two days setting it up with Debian, Perforce, Nextcloud, (blah blah LAMP things) and automated backups. It’s up, it’s running, and I think I’m fully migrated.
I’ve just checked; one of my Hetzner servers is 14 years old, so today marks the end of an era.
Friends:
If you like any of my work, please consider checking out some of the fantastic games made by the following super talented people:
