I slowly eased back into it and tackled features again, but not before editing a bunch of stuff to take advantage of cool modern C# features. Certain values are now C# properties, which makes them look and work slightly nicer than they did before. I then fixed the issue I mentioned last month, where feature zones would be cut off by towns. Features don't yet spawn properly yet, as the reference center tile will either appear late or disappear after it's been generated. I think I know how I'm going to fix that, but first I'll have to make some super sweet art assets for all of these features, of which I currently have 22 in mind.

I was looking for some relevant dates and numbers in history and stumbled upon an old addon idea that had been lost to time. STMarket allows you to create 16 generic products from 4 different departments, box them up, and sell them for cash. Raw materials are bought in randomized packs of eight, and each product takes a different number of materials and amount of time to make. STWholesale might be a better name for this one, but I didn't think of that back then. You can play with this one right now as a Supplier on The Big Apple!

I was insanely busy last week, this week, and perhaps even next week so all I did was port STAssistant's --viz/--vis command to STA On-the-Go as /viz. This command takes a hexadecimal color code and sends a block of that color in response.

I broke my rule yet again and wrote a quick program that counts the number of distinct headings I've written for progress reports. In a super quick, unrefined sample, I've reported on 213 different projects.

ScamBusta

Crypto casino scams continue to get out-of-hand so I edited ScamBusta to handle a tried and true honeypot channel. Implemented in another server, it has banned 11 people.

Turf War RP

Turf War RP, previously named Gang War RP, received an updated minimap using 3D \"models\" from Microsoft Word. It looks silly and tacky but I kinda like the charm it has. I also modified the loadout menu of Turf War RP to allow you to unset a slot in your loadout by right-clicking the dropdown box.

STCuffs

Someone asked about how STCuffs worked which made me remember that I was never really truly satisfied with how they worked, so I rewrote the dragging movement to be more in-line with how I envisioned. The power of trigonometry!

I figured out the \"center\" of feature zones, so now I can actually put stuff there. For some odd reason, this doesn't work with exceedingly small zones, so that's something I'll have to look into. There are also really jarring cut-offs if a feature zone is too close to a town, but because of the trickery I wrote three weeks ago, it was unavoidable. I'm not happy with it, so I might have to do some trickery on top of my trickery to get it to work. I'm trying to be too clever for my own good. In this midst of figuring this all out, I accidentally made houses stop spawning again, so I had to take a detour and fix that. And finally once more, I did some more minor and boring reorganizing and revising of some stuff I'd written.

I started the week by breaking my rule and adding a confirmation form for deleting WPRs in the Code Circular's dashboard. Even though I don't think I'll be deleting reports all that often, it was neat and only slightly infuriating to learn how HTML dialog forms work.

Addon Tag Updater

For a long time, it's bothered me that most of my non-tool addons were labeled as tools on the Workshop. I wrote a program to read through all of my addon folders, find the ones that are marked as tools, edit them to be labeled as server content, then update them. Altogether, 84 addons were affected and caused suspicious-looking updates on the Workshop.

Tale of Flocksworth

I was lazy so all I did was edit tiles to only populate some data depending on a bitfield given to it. As it stood, every time a tile's data is requested—which, for features, will need to be several times in a very short period—the game would generate different noise values and populate the data with them. I don't think this caused a major performance hit, but I didn't like the idea of filling the data with values that would normally never be used. This change required just a little bit of review and rewriting, so I did that too.

I spent almost the whole week bug-hunting on The Big Apple and found a ton of things to fix. Most of them weren't noteworthy enough to make into a report, but what is enough to make it into a report is the addition of STPottery to the economy. Suppliers can now purchase kilns and clay to make precious pottery and sell it to The Contact. I made a lot of edits to STPottery that should probably be pushed to the Workshop, but we'll get to that later.

Tale of Flocksworth

I fixed the single issue from last week and made some more proactive optimizations. After that, I continued working on getting features to spawn. As I was doing an informal survey of the land using the new spawning method, I realized there were way too few features to be interesting. Most of the world would end up being empty and boring, so I started to revert to the old way of spawning features, which will result in a lot more features spawning. I'll have to figure out how to not cause an infinite loop, but I think I have an idea that will work.

I game-sniped my friend in DarkRP the other day and the server he was playing on had these cool neon signs, so I ripped them off for myself. You can use them on The Big Apple right now!

Tale of Flocksworth

I saw an angry post about problems with Godot C# and even though this game wouldn't suffer too hard, I decided to make the optimizations to prevent these problems. Now, just about every commonly-used string is cached. After that, I was going to continue making features spawn using the new method from three weeks ago, but I realized I'd be taking way more memory than necessary, so I did some trickery to try to reduce it. This ended up causing a single, minor issue that I didn't get around to fixing yet but other than that, it went surprisingly well. These things might seem unnecessary and overly proactive, but I want to do things the \"right\" way now so I don't run into mystery problems later.

I was lazy and played too much Overwatch this week, so this is all I got done. I recently learned about binary-coded decimals through Atari games so I wrote two different functions to translate from BCD to a decimal number, one using strings and one using logarithms. I might also be extra busy next week, but we'll see.

I asked my friends how many words they think they've typed and written throughout their lives and the numbers were in the tens of millions. I spent like ten minutes writing a script to collect a word count of all of these reports and came up with an estimated 24,000 words in 300 reports.

Code Circular

My major project this week was a dashboard for the Code Circular. Since the inception of these weekly progress reports, I've issued a command to my Discord bot to post each report to the Progress channel and eventually, to whatever online mirror I had at the time, from the WordPress site to the Code Circular. Once I created the Code Circular, I lost any easy to edit or delete reports, having to resort to modifying the database entries raw. This week, I created a full dashboard—complete with a login flow—to allow me to post, edit, and delete reports directly from the website. Unfortunately, this isn't something I can exactly show off so you'll just have to take my word for how awesome it is.

Tale of Flocksworth

Turns out, I had math problems all over the place. I have no idea how the consequences of these mistakes only showed up recently, but I went around and fixed all of them and verified they work properly. Since the dashboard took up most of my time, the only other work I did here this week was cleaning up massive, useless comment blocks and re-adding functions that mysteriously went missing.

I added STAssistant's --time command to STA On-the-Go as /time. This command takes a Discord ID and translates it to a human-readable time. I think you should be able to try it out in this server...

Tale of Flocksworth

I discovered the infinite loop I had was unavoidable with how I was intending to spawn features, so I started rewriting it to avoid this. I spent a lot of time being stumped with very strange issues before realizing I don't know how to do math and I'd been using some very wrong calculations. How fun.

GetSoundscapeFn

The recent Garry's Mod update broke my binary module again, so I had to take some time to fix it up. I also needed to fix it up for Infiltrator's re-release, but that came after the update.

The Big Apple

There were a few minor things I wanted to fix before re-releasing The Big Apple so I did that. There was an infinite loop in STGunrunning because of how I tried to make the gun pallets' data persist across servers, and I edited STChopShop to drop car parts with different values so you don't get $100 of parts from a $1'000 car.

Server Tracker

I tried writing a website to query all of my servers and present their info and players, but I don't think my web host allows me to send out requests. I could run it elsewhere, but I wouldn't be satisfied with its URL so I turned it into a local console app instead.

I was incredibly lazy this week so I didn't do a whole lot. I tried to get features to spawn but ended up creating an infinite loop as soon as the game starts. This one's easy to track down but the SweptThrone offices have closed, so it's a problem to tackle next week.

I cleaned up some old stuff I wasn't using anymore, organized some that I'm still using, and got started on spawning interesting features in interesting ways. I realized I'm not quite done with towns yet since right now, random houses spawn with no regard for how the town should look, but I'm doing features anyway. I also might try something new, different, and exciting next week, but we'll see what I end up feeling like doing.

Being a scumbag is a minor hobby of mine, so I worked on a crosshair overlay to help with sniping. I learned and made it with Windows Forms before researching and realizing I'd have to use a more advanced graphics API to make it actually draw over the game. I decided this was too much work to soft-cheat in a game I like, so I just dropped it.

ScamBusta

I added a scam counter to ScamBusta, saving a file and counting how many messages it has caught. It's at a whopping 42 right now, which is 0.777... crypto casino scams per day. Awesome!

Tale of Flocksworth

I finally fixed the issue with house spawning—as far as I know—so I think I can finally move on to making interesting features spawn, moving ever close to completing world generation. I also "fixed" another minor error that came up relating to culling entities but I feel it was too simple to be correct...

I spent, like, an afternoon setting up a feed for the SweptThrone Code Circular. If you have an RSS reader, you can now subscribe to the SweptThrone Code Circular using the URL sweptthr.one/progress/feed. I did this because the old WordPress site had this functionality but this new version did not yet. Other than that, I was busy and had Easter to do, so I didn't do anything else.

I wrote a quick invite tracker in STAssistant for my server only. I know Discord has had this as a feature for a while, but it hasn't yet made its way to mobile so I brought it to mobile, in a way.

RtCW Meals

A friend and I were supposed to tour a couple of maps one night but he took too long so while I was waiting for him, I got bored and ported the hot meal and the cold meal from Return to Castle Wolfenstein to Garry's Mod. I learned how to make models with bodygroups and use the particle viewer, so it was an educational experience! You can see how they work here. I'm not unretired, I just got impatient!

I slowly eased back into it and tackled features again, but not before editing a bunch of stuff to take advantage of cool modern C# features. Certain values are now C# properties, which makes them look and work slightly nicer than they did before. I then fixed the issue I mentioned last month, where feature zones would be cut off by towns. Features don't yet spawn properly yet, as the reference center tile will either appear late or disappear after it's been generated. I think I know how I'm going to fix that, but first I'll have to make some super sweet art assets for all of these features, of which I currently have 22 in mind.

I was looking for some relevant dates and numbers in history and stumbled upon an old addon idea that had been lost to time. STMarket allows you to create 16 generic products from 4 different departments, box them up, and sell them for cash. Raw materials are bought in randomized packs of eight, and each product takes a different number of materials and amount of time to make. STWholesale might be a better name for this one, but I didn't think of that back then. You can play with this one right now as a Supplier on The Big Apple!

I was insanely busy last week, this week, and perhaps even next week so all I did was port STAssistant's --viz/--vis command to STA On-the-Go as /viz. This command takes a hexadecimal color code and sends a block of that color in response.

I broke my rule yet again and wrote a quick program that counts the number of distinct headings I've written for progress reports. In a super quick, unrefined sample, I've reported on 213 different projects.

ScamBusta

Crypto casino scams continue to get out-of-hand so I edited ScamBusta to handle a tried and true honeypot channel. Implemented in another server, it has banned 11 people.

Turf War RP

Turf War RP, previously named Gang War RP, received an updated minimap using 3D \"models\" from Microsoft Word. It looks silly and tacky but I kinda like the charm it has. I also modified the loadout menu of Turf War RP to allow you to unset a slot in your loadout by right-clicking the dropdown box.

STCuffs

Someone asked about how STCuffs worked which made me remember that I was never really truly satisfied with how they worked, so I rewrote the dragging movement to be more in-line with how I envisioned. The power of trigonometry!

I figured out the \"center\" of feature zones, so now I can actually put stuff there. For some odd reason, this doesn't work with exceedingly small zones, so that's something I'll have to look into. There are also really jarring cut-offs if a feature zone is too close to a town, but because of the trickery I wrote three weeks ago, it was unavoidable. I'm not happy with it, so I might have to do some trickery on top of my trickery to get it to work. I'm trying to be too clever for my own good. In this midst of figuring this all out, I accidentally made houses stop spawning again, so I had to take a detour and fix that. And finally once more, I did some more minor and boring reorganizing and revising of some stuff I'd written.

I started the week by breaking my rule and adding a confirmation form for deleting WPRs in the Code Circular's dashboard. Even though I don't think I'll be deleting reports all that often, it was neat and only slightly infuriating to learn how HTML dialog forms work.

Addon Tag Updater

For a long time, it's bothered me that most of my non-tool addons were labeled as tools on the Workshop. I wrote a program to read through all of my addon folders, find the ones that are marked as tools, edit them to be labeled as server content, then update them. Altogether, 84 addons were affected and caused suspicious-looking updates on the Workshop.

Tale of Flocksworth

I was lazy so all I did was edit tiles to only populate some data depending on a bitfield given to it. As it stood, every time a tile's data is requested—which, for features, will need to be several times in a very short period—the game would generate different noise values and populate the data with them. I don't think this caused a major performance hit, but I didn't like the idea of filling the data with values that would normally never be used. This change required just a little bit of review and rewriting, so I did that too.

I spent almost the whole week bug-hunting on The Big Apple and found a ton of things to fix. Most of them weren't noteworthy enough to make into a report, but what is enough to make it into a report is the addition of STPottery to the economy. Suppliers can now purchase kilns and clay to make precious pottery and sell it to The Contact. I made a lot of edits to STPottery that should probably be pushed to the Workshop, but we'll get to that later.

Tale of Flocksworth

I fixed the single issue from last week and made some more proactive optimizations. After that, I continued working on getting features to spawn. As I was doing an informal survey of the land using the new spawning method, I realized there were way too few features to be interesting. Most of the world would end up being empty and boring, so I started to revert to the old way of spawning features, which will result in a lot more features spawning. I'll have to figure out how to not cause an infinite loop, but I think I have an idea that will work.

I game-sniped my friend in DarkRP the other day and the server he was playing on had these cool neon signs, so I ripped them off for myself. You can use them on The Big Apple right now!

Tale of Flocksworth

I saw an angry post about problems with Godot C# and even though this game wouldn't suffer too hard, I decided to make the optimizations to prevent these problems. Now, just about every commonly-used string is cached. After that, I was going to continue making features spawn using the new method from three weeks ago, but I realized I'd be taking way more memory than necessary, so I did some trickery to try to reduce it. This ended up causing a single, minor issue that I didn't get around to fixing yet but other than that, it went surprisingly well. These things might seem unnecessary and overly proactive, but I want to do things the \"right\" way now so I don't run into mystery problems later.

I was lazy and played too much Overwatch this week, so this is all I got done. I recently learned about binary-coded decimals through Atari games so I wrote two different functions to translate from BCD to a decimal number, one using strings and one using logarithms. I might also be extra busy next week, but we'll see.

I asked my friends how many words they think they've typed and written throughout their lives and the numbers were in the tens of millions. I spent like ten minutes writing a script to collect a word count of all of these reports and came up with an estimated 24,000 words in 300 reports.

Code Circular

My major project this week was a dashboard for the Code Circular. Since the inception of these weekly progress reports, I've issued a command to my Discord bot to post each report to the Progress channel and eventually, to whatever online mirror I had at the time, from the WordPress site to the Code Circular. Once I created the Code Circular, I lost any easy to edit or delete reports, having to resort to modifying the database entries raw. This week, I created a full dashboard—complete with a login flow—to allow me to post, edit, and delete reports directly from the website. Unfortunately, this isn't something I can exactly show off so you'll just have to take my word for how awesome it is.

Tale of Flocksworth

Turns out, I had math problems all over the place. I have no idea how the consequences of these mistakes only showed up recently, but I went around and fixed all of them and verified they work properly. Since the dashboard took up most of my time, the only other work I did here this week was cleaning up massive, useless comment blocks and re-adding functions that mysteriously went missing.

I added STAssistant's --time command to STA On-the-Go as /time. This command takes a Discord ID and translates it to a human-readable time. I think you should be able to try it out in this server...

Tale of Flocksworth

I discovered the infinite loop I had was unavoidable with how I was intending to spawn features, so I started rewriting it to avoid this. I spent a lot of time being stumped with very strange issues before realizing I don't know how to do math and I'd been using some very wrong calculations. How fun.

GetSoundscapeFn

The recent Garry's Mod update broke my binary module again, so I had to take some time to fix it up. I also needed to fix it up for Infiltrator's re-release, but that came after the update.

The Big Apple

There were a few minor things I wanted to fix before re-releasing The Big Apple so I did that. There was an infinite loop in STGunrunning because of how I tried to make the gun pallets' data persist across servers, and I edited STChopShop to drop car parts with different values so you don't get $100 of parts from a $1'000 car.

Server Tracker

I tried writing a website to query all of my servers and present their info and players, but I don't think my web host allows me to send out requests. I could run it elsewhere, but I wouldn't be satisfied with its URL so I turned it into a local console app instead.

I was incredibly lazy this week so I didn't do a whole lot. I tried to get features to spawn but ended up creating an infinite loop as soon as the game starts. This one's easy to track down but the SweptThrone offices have closed, so it's a problem to tackle next week.

I cleaned up some old stuff I wasn't using anymore, organized some that I'm still using, and got started on spawning interesting features in interesting ways. I realized I'm not quite done with towns yet since right now, random houses spawn with no regard for how the town should look, but I'm doing features anyway. I also might try something new, different, and exciting next week, but we'll see what I end up feeling like doing.

Being a scumbag is a minor hobby of mine, so I worked on a crosshair overlay to help with sniping. I learned and made it with Windows Forms before researching and realizing I'd have to use a more advanced graphics API to make it actually draw over the game. I decided this was too much work to soft-cheat in a game I like, so I just dropped it.

ScamBusta

I added a scam counter to ScamBusta, saving a file and counting how many messages it has caught. It's at a whopping 42 right now, which is 0.777... crypto casino scams per day. Awesome!

Tale of Flocksworth

I finally fixed the issue with house spawning—as far as I know—so I think I can finally move on to making interesting features spawn, moving ever close to completing world generation. I also "fixed" another minor error that came up relating to culling entities but I feel it was too simple to be correct...

I spent, like, an afternoon setting up a feed for the SweptThrone Code Circular. If you have an RSS reader, you can now subscribe to the SweptThrone Code Circular using the URL sweptthr.one/progress/feed. I did this because the old WordPress site had this functionality but this new version did not yet. Other than that, I was busy and had Easter to do, so I didn't do anything else.

I wrote a quick invite tracker in STAssistant for my server only. I know Discord has had this as a feature for a while, but it hasn't yet made its way to mobile so I brought it to mobile, in a way.

RtCW Meals

A friend and I were supposed to tour a couple of maps one night but he took too long so while I was waiting for him, I got bored and ported the hot meal and the cold meal from Return to Castle Wolfenstein to Garry's Mod. I learned how to make models with bodygroups and use the particle viewer, so it was an educational experience! You can see how they work here. I'm not unretired, I just got impatient!