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Author: Michael Horvath
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Moving materials off-site 
I have spent the last few weeks moving most of my geometry activities from this site to the online collection at the GeoGebra website. I plan to do the same for my LDraw models, either at Brickshelf, MOCpages or Rebrickable. I’ve also written a new tutorial for the POV-Ray wiki, and created a new solar system scene for the POV-Ray Object Collection and Wikipedia.
More Wikipedia illustrations
I have been busy creating illustrations for Wikipedia. They can be seen on my user page at Wikimedia Commons. Most of them involve the spherical or elliptical coordinate systems somehow.
I also created a series of sectional drawings comparing the internal geometries of the various “Color Spheres” of (from left to right) Johannes Itten, Albert H. Munsell, and Philipp Otto Runge; as well as a fourth sphere created for comparison based on the spherical coordinate system. It is amazing how many ways there are to draw a sphere!
And I updated a couple of existing images that show how the color-making attribute saturation can be determined from the chroma and value parameters of the Munsell Color System. (Though this definition of saturation is a bit different than the one used in the HSL color space I am accustomed to.)
Lastly, I finished an old scene featuring my interpretation of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. It is a giant ring encircling a far away sun, with oceans, continents and Earth-like weather embedded into it. Here’s the latest render:
The source code for these images can be found in my new GitHub repository which I just created for this purpose.
VGKD submission form
I have completed developing a new submission form for the Video Game Keyboard Diagram project. It should now be much easier to fix and submit new keyboard bindings data.
I have also uploaded the project to GitHub.
Updated keyboard diagrams project
I’ve updated my Video Game Keyboard Diagrams project over the last few weeks. Here are the most recent items from the change log:
- 2018/05/29: Renamed the project from “Video Game Hotkey Maps” back to “Video Game Keyboard Diagrams”.
- 2018/05/29: Updated the printing tips with new info on problems and workarounds.
- 2018/05/25: Tweaks to style sheets and meta tags in order to (somewhat) better support mobile browsers.
- 2018/05/25: Fixed a bug that was causing some browsers to not be able to switch between the HTML and SVG versions of the diagrams.
- 2018/05/25: Old URLs are now being properly converted to the new URL syntax.
- 2018/05/23: Added bindings for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Fortnite, Overwatch, Far Cry 5 and Everspace. I’ve only played the last one, but hopefully people will appreciate the others.
- 2018/05/18: Made changes to the accordion menu in the front page. Made changes to the alphabetical list (now renamed to “master list”).
- 2018/05/14: Added a button to the bottom of each chart to quickly switch between SVG and HTML rendering.
- 2018/05/14: Added bindings for Battletech and Stellar Tactics.
- 2018/05/14: Fixed a bug preventing charts from being loaded if the gam, sty, lay and svg parameters were missing from the URL.
Goals heading into the future include creating PDF versions of the diagrams, and possibly starting a github repository for the project.
In other news, I re-enabled comments on this blog.
Updating Datsville
I’ve spent the last few months updating Datsville in various ways.
- I have reverted the town layout back to how it was at around revision 501, including putting the corn fields and airport back in their original locations, and removing the surrounding hills.
- I have reorganized and cleaned up a lot of the POV-Ray scripts, which should now be a lot easier to use now.
- I helped translate Tore Eriksson’s LDBoxer program into Python, and optimized it slightly.
- Lastly, I made the sidewalks narrower, and expanded the space devoted to the town’s houses and other buildings.
Right now I am working on porting Datsville RPG from RPG Maker VX Ace to RPG Maker MV. I have already updated many of the project’s graphics. Now I just need to implement the LeTBS combat plugins and get them working properly. Below are some screenshots. There are still several graphical bugs in the LeTBS plugin, as can be seen in the image on the right. Hopefully they will get addressed at some point so that I can continue working on this.
Test Mission Grid
Over the past few weeks I have been porting my Test Mission Grid mod from Homeworld 2 to Homeworld Remastered. You can find it on my Homeworld page as well as on Steam Workshop. I have also moved a lot of old content from my Homeworld page to my new Old Stuff page.
Graphical projection construction
I created four new illustrations showing how several forms of graphical projection are produced. You can view them all here. I started out by modeling them in POV-Ray. The next step was to export the important coordinates to a text file using a modified version of “screen.inc”. I then imported these coordinates into GeoGebra, and connected them all using line segments to produce the final images. I discuss this process here.
Microsoft Azure and colony ship panoramic render
I decided to open an Microsoft Azure account, and use the $200 in free points for new members to render a better version of my colony ship panoramic scene [edit: click here for an external view]. I was still unable to add atmospheric media and radiosity inside the station habitat. They simply take too long to render, even with dual 8-core CPUs and 32GiB of RAM. If I could afford several virtual machines linked together to form a render farm, maybe it would be feasible to enable them. But that would cost a lot more than the points I have available, I think.
[edit]
Google Cloud has a similar offer for new customers, but limit you to a single CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads until you “upgrade” your subscription. So I did not find it very useful.
Color space plots
With lots of help from Christoph Lipka at the POV-Ray newsgroup, I created four more images for Wikipedia having to do with color spaces. They show the sRGB color gamut projected within the bounds of the CIELAB and CIELUV color spaces. Both the rectangular and cylindrical models are depicted. You can see all the renders, as well as some animations, on my Wikimedia Commons page.
