The terms Left and Right wing don’t always make sense and people seem to be using them to mean different things

At the time of writing, the UK is gearing up to an election,, which means many people have talked to me about politics. The terms “left wing” and “right wing” are used, and I easily get confused about these sliding scales, because everyone seems to use them to mean different things. Continue reading The terms Left and Right wing don’t always make sense and people seem to be using them to mean different things

Making money from BotSumo without being evil

I’m still trying to understand the audience of my BotSumo game, as analytics for apps don’t seem to have the detail about the type of audience as we’re permitted with web analytics. From what I’ve gathered, most of the players are young, and I’m gathering that from user reviews saying they enjoy to play at school, or play with siblings. Continue reading Making money from BotSumo without being evil

That time I made a boring but useful green arrow

A while ago I needed an arrow in one of my 3D hobby projects, I think it was for Starbug Thruster but can’t remember. Anyway I was surprised that I couldn’t easily find such a basic 3D shape, so made one myself and put it on Turbosquid (see it here). Other arrows do exist of course, but have a high poly-count (not good for games) or are expensive, like this one which seems a bit steep at $8.

Anyway over a year later my arrow has been downloaded over 19 thousand times, and I received this really nice email from someone who used it: Continue reading That time I made a boring but useful green arrow

Say what you want about the USS Discovery, at least it adheres to the 1975 Starfleet technical manual

Today I saw the trailer for the new Star Trek TV series which has recently been revealed will be called “Star Trek Discovery” (with lack of colon, just like the recent movies). The trailer is the first look at the ship, which you can see here:

There’s been chatter about the look of the starship already, and if I know Star Trek fans, there’ll be a lot of hate (nobody does hate like a Star Trek fan!). In fact it’s so different to what we’ve seen before that I bet fans are going to freak! Continue reading Say what you want about the USS Discovery, at least it adheres to the 1975 Starfleet technical manual

Putting some 3D assets onto Turbosquid before the Windows 10 upgrade makes my PC useless

Windows 10 upgrade bear memeYesterday I caught my PC trying to upgrade to Windows 10, and I quickly put a stop to it. Windows has been threatening this for a while, and I saw Helen’s laptop take several hours to upgrade, on a day she needed to do work.

The biggest reason I stopped it though was because it’ll make my 3Ds Max useless. I have a trusty version from 2010 that is essential for optimising and rendering assets for my games. Continue reading Putting some 3D assets onto Turbosquid before the Windows 10 upgrade makes my PC useless

Most popular articles from 2015

I know March seems like an unusual time to do a roundup of last year, as we’re already 2 months into 2016, but I was recently encouraged to do a roundup of all articles on my OngoingWorlds blog, so thought it wasn’t too late to do it for this blog too. So here’s the most viewed articles I wrote in 2015:

  1. I’ve finished a game but too embarrassed to show it anyone because it’s about a giant turd
  2. Exporting a sprite sheet from Flash into Unity animation
  3. So I’m uploading something to the Google Play store
  4. My CSS layout – group by component, not by screen-size
  5. I use BEM – A good clear naming convention
  6. Chrome pulls Unity plugin
  7. My opinions on using or not using Bootstrap
  8. My favourite CSS comment style
  9. How long before we get cool curved desktop screens like this one from Black Mirror?
  10. A vertical-align mixin that changed my life

Also, I wrote this article about what I did in 2015.

New 3D city asset project

So I’ve started creating 3D assets of buildings sat on asteroids.

Why?

Dunno really. Seems like they might be useful at some point. But for some reason these shapes have been in my head for a while, and I need to get them out. I’ve been creating them in MagicaVoxel, a great simple voxel 3D editor, and then collecting them together in 3Ds Max.

I’ve been keeping a blog of progress on IndieDb which you can see here.

I’ve also been adding some of these to Sketchfab as I’ve been going along, so you can see them in 3D. See below:

Isometric low-poly shop building
by daviddickball
on Sketchfab

Avoiding location-based inheritance in CSS

I had a thought today on a personal HTML/CSS project about how to style a light button in a dark container, and how to style a dark button in a light container.

Should I use CSS inheritance to make the button the appropriate colour in each area? That makes sense right? It means I can write HTML not really caring about the styles, and let the CSS do the rest.

But then I worried about what happens if I use the button elsewhere, out of the container. If the coloured container provides the styles, I’ll need at least some base styles on the button. And which one should be the default? Light on dark, or dark on light?

Let’s say light container is the default, so the button by default is dark.

What about then when we want the button on a different coloured background, maybe a red container inside the dark container. We’d have to override the button’s default styles to make it dark on light, then override these again to show as [I dunno, yellow?] on the red background.

I know the “C” in CSS stands for cascade, but this can get out of hand!

There’s a good article about this I found today, which has this great line that I need to repeat over and over.

…your styles will be more flexible and less prone to breaking if you avoid relying on location inheritance.

Read the rest of the article here. It takes you through a good use case of how inheritance can cause problems. It also talks about how “multiple inheritance” can also get out of hand, and solves it with SASS extends, although I prefer more of a BEM approach, but the idea of being very specific about your styles is the same.