The quest for Zireael
Over the past six weeks I've completed my second full run through of the The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and I want to record my thoughts about it.
I set out with three main goals: to follow the 'Triss' path rather than the 'Yennefer' path; to rescue the Bloody Baron's wife, and generally explore that story more fully; and to win as many allies as possible for the battle at Kaer Morhen.
No one here gets out alive
My mental health, which had already been poor before my lover Avis died of cancer in July last year, has collapsed utterly since the suicide of my niece Zoe in November. Somehow I have to find my way back (or die, which would be easier). This essay is an attempt to plot a plan for the first option.
Partly as a consequence of my mental health collapse, my last remaining work contract is looking very shaky, and may not continue. I don't even really want it to continue, even though without it I have no income at all. And I don't believe I am now well enough to seek new paying work; I don't believe it's reasonable to expect that I will be well enough in the even moderately near future. But when I do seek new paying work, I need to have some story about what I was doing this year.
Baking the world
In previous posts, I've described algorithms for dynamically populating and dynamically settling a game world. But at kilometre scale (and I think we need a higher resolution than that — something closer to hectare scale), settling the British Isles using my existing algorithms takes about 24 hours of continuous compute on an eight core, 3GHz machine. You cannot do that every time you launch a new game.
So the game development has to run in four phases: the first three phases happen during development, to create a satisfactory, already populated and settled, initial world for the game to start from. This is particularly necessary if hand-crafted buildings and environments are going to be added to the world; the designers of those buildings and environments have to be able to see the context into which their models must fit.
The Changeling
I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about the 1962 Foot And Mouth outbreak, and its effect on my father; wondering to what extent his psychiatric crisis affected mine, and mine, his.
(My father wes then the Ministry of Agriculture's Regional Controller for the North of England; among his responsibilities was deciding which herds were condemned. He insisted on visiting every affected farm, talking to every vet and every farmer. He didn't have to do that. It's because of him that we now know that the disease can be carried on the tyres of cars — specifically our car. He carried the disease from farm to farm with him, infecting farms which had not previously been infected).
About taxing the car
This is an account of my descent into yet another psyciatric crisis this weekend. It's a bit confusing, mainly because my memory is so scrambled I can't be clear about the order of events; and, of course, it isn't really of interest to anyone else. But writing it down at least lets me get it out. Like talking to a psychiatrist who isn't there, and doesn't answer. Because that's how it is.