A slice of Alternate History (just a nugget)

Going To The Queens’ Garden is about the outbreak of war between kingdoms of an alternate balkanized North America. The Queens’ Garden is a gas and go convenience store like Royal Farms or Wawa; Queens’ Garden is a franchise in the United Kingdoms of Virginia and The Carolinas, the V&C, and the Minmax is a similar franchise common just north of the (Delmarva) Peninsula. Not sure what they would call it, but Delaware is ostensibly part of Maryland, which is a protectorate of the Kingdoms. The three counties of Delaware are claimed by Pennsylvania, being originally part of the Commonwealth. Anyway, really a throw away idea, a slice of an alternate history.

I need to finish up peeps and get my flag animating and waving for the fourth. This morning, for peeps, I was looking at how to make it possible to only pick a point in the floor of the virtual box containing the peeps, although now of course I need them to be out in their run with the chicken condo on one end. I can place the chicken condo on the right and have the grass (procedural blades of grass?) for the floor, wire grates on the left, at the bak and the top. I can handle that by making quads as surfaces of my box. For now I just want to draw a grid of X’s which will link up to make the crisscrossing wire of the grates. I need to plot out the five faces we can see and ignore the sixth one we are looking in through, then subdivide the grates into a grid of cells to make wires (or instead figure out and display the wires? I can make the segments different sizes, so no...) and the interior of the chicken condo.

Back to extrusion? The peep as a box, shaped and subdivided? I’ve looked at pulling on points and stretching and subdividing triangles, but I could also pull a quad face out, cloning and moving new points and displacing the original face outwards and joining this face to the original edges, which is what I usually see people doing as extrusion in how to use blender tutorials, for example. We can keep doing that and making limb segments that way, or what I should do is grab the point I want to pull out in a limb and make a limb object with a list of vertices and triangles. Body thing as the base for limbs? That can be a tetrahedron, an octahedron, a cone, cylinder, UV sphere or cube/box. For the limb, I start with the point and make a list of triangles which belong to that point and therefore the limb, or the triangles which share that point, really.

(Why am I revisiting this yet again? I can’t escape the nagging suspicion that there must be an easier way! 8-)

Hazel (finished?)

The shambling un-dead American was eating chunks of bloody flesh with stray hairs. A very messy eater. He, it, had gotten a hold of a squirrel somehow; that and a flash of gold around its neck was a minor mystery and I am a sucker for that. As I considered it I heard a twig snap behind me. I’m light on my feet these days, moving and turning silently and quickly, but the girl was quicker and I found myself facing a fairly decent handcrafted arrow. I looked down the shaft at the young girl with a slightly under-powered bow, it couldn’t have been more than a twenty-five pound pull. She was maybe eleven, a scrappy little survivor of the apocalypse, greasy ponytail, dirty face with a nasty infected scratch, hazel eyes, and a snaggle-toothed not-grin, lips skinned back from yellowed teeth. She needed a bath, some neosporin and a toothbrush, stat.

She hadn’t decided to kill me, yet, so we were on better terms than the last survivor I’d tangled with, about five days ago... and six feet, give or take. Maybe more like three.

“My friends call me George; you can call me George, okay? Uhm, Hazel?”

“Who?! Oh.. uh, Amanda.” She looked behind me and I risked a look. Squirrel breath was looking around, bits of squirrel all but forgotten in its hands. It turned to us, and the bright yellow metal flashed again in the sunlight. A locket.

“Do you mi-”

“No! Don’t you hurt him!”

Puzzle pieces fell into place and I crabbed around, no sudden moves, but I preferred an arrow to  teeth.

“Okay,” I said slowly. I watched her consider once again putting an arrow in me and regretfully (on her part), passing on that option. God help me, I had questions and little sense. “Who was he?

“My Dad.”

Ouch.

“That sucks and nothing I say will make it not suck.”

“But?” She said it quietly, but make no mistake, there was an edge there, underneath.

“It’s a blessing to quiet the undead.”

I watched the point of her arrow describe a tiny circle. It was a pretty good ground spoon and I imagined trying to extract it from between my ribs. God help me…

“You think I couldn’t figure that out?”

“Sure you can. And yet… he’s… he was your Dad. The right thing is never easy.”

“You have a death wish.”

“I won’t patronize you, except, well, you’re obviously a pretty sharp kid.” I risked another look at, well, undead Dad. “Can I please get a little distance, or are you planning…”

Her eyes bugged out a little. “What?! I’m not planning to feed you to him!”

“Well thanks for that. About, well, him, what’s he got around his neck?”

“Is that what you were asking me a minute ago?”

“Yes. I'm gonna get myself noshed on one fine day, but I have a natural curiosity, and I have to know, or try to figure these things out…”

She nodded and then indicated her dad with a tilt of her head his way. “We talked about that. A few hundred million death stories.”

“You, he talked about heavy shit like that with you?”

“Now you are being patronizing.”

“Sorry. That’s just not how that used to work.”

“It’s how we worked!” She closed her eyes, and lowered the bow and put the arrow away. “Sorry. That’s a locket he gave me. I put it on him, after, and then…”

“He got back up again, as they do-”

“If you don’t make it permanent.”

“Yes.’

I concentrated on the zombie now, trusting her more than it. He was not terribly interested in me, fortunately. Well fed…

“What was his name?”

“Jake. Jacob Herriot Bixby.”

“Three good names for the price of one. How long ago did he pass and how?”

“Not long, less than a week. I’m not sure what it was, a fever. He was burning up, talking nonsense and getting things out of order. I, he tried to get me to leave him, and…”

“You wouldn’t, of course. And there was a thing which he couldn’t ask his daughter to do?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I guessed, but it happens a lot. I have walked a long way since the dead started getting back up, with a lot of people, and now I’m alone again. By choice and by chance, both ways.”

“One of them told you that thing about it being a blessing to quiet the dead.”

“She did.” I smiled sadly. “I think you would have liked her, if you could stand each other, which I bet you could. You’re a lot like Ruth.”

We were quiet for a bit. You could hear the breeze blowing. Even the zombie was quiet.

“What-”

“No. Sorry, but no.” I was shaking a little bit, turned to ‘Jake’ and his shiny bit of pretty.

“What’s with the locket, or is that-”

“I can tell you about that. It’s a gold heart-shaped locket my uncle Jamie gave me for my tenth birthday last year. It has my name and the meaning of it and a picture of our family. I wanted him to have it.”

“Your family?”

“My uncle, his little brother, my dad, Mom and the baby.” She chewed her bottom lip. “We were all that was left, and then there was one.”

“I think we’ve had enough questions, save for one or three. Are you hungry, Amanda? What do you do with your shadow when you need to eat and sleep? And can I interest you in a nice bar of soap?”

***

I made good on my offer, after we got Jake to follow us back to the house they were squatting; well, she was living there, and keeping him in a room with two doors.

Minding a zombie is exhausting. You’d think it would be easy to keep its attention somehow but no. Whatever is going on in that decaying brain it can’t stay focused, unless it does and then there’s no distracting it. Like turtles; god knows, I’ve come across zombies who have spent hours worrying at a box turtle, torn fingers and such. Or rabbits, too.  I’ve found zombies stuck in collapsed tunnels which they were apparently digging after a rabbit, or badger, enlarging a burrow and getting stuck.

Stupid zombie tricks.

Anyway, we got him locked away and I made ‘stone soup’, or stew, whatever I had and whatever she offered, starch, protein and veggies. I had a rabbit, a few potatoes, carrots, a battered can of peas, and she had a little old cornmeal someone had wrapped in aluminum foil. Whatever works.

We both had a bit of a wash up and I gave her my neosporin; it’s pushing things, date-wise, but nobody is making any more and I haven’t sourced any handcrafted ointments and such. That’s one of the other things I’ve been up to…

It was a bigger meal than either of us had been used to; the rabbit had been joined by a couple of squirrels. Good hunting, on both our parts! And food these days doesn’t last. What was left in the pot would simmer overnight, perhaps even as the start of some forever stew, perhaps not. There wasn’t much more talking, what with the washing and cooking and eating. The lockup included all the doors and the rest. Although I didn’t ask, the former occupants must have had some pressing reason for leaving a decent fort. Maybe she didn’t know.

I got back up and attended to business a few hours later. I’m a lot better in the near dark, surprisingly so. I think we were spoiled for electricity and good lighting, in the before times. The human eyes and other senses are pretty good and fear maximizes what we have.

I waited by the door to her dad’s room for ‘Hazel’, instead of attending to that other business I’d gotten up for, and she came looking for me as I expected, a little frantically, which saddened me but didn’t surprise me much.

“You had no ri-”

“I didn’t.”

 

She checked the door anyway and it, I mean ‘he’, groaned, hit the door a few times and settled back down again.

“What’s this all about, then?”

“Your dad, of course. This is your decision, but I need you-”

“No.”

“When you decided, a few days ago, not to quiet him, that was grief. I’ve been taking your measure and you are competent-”

“Thanks!”

“-to make this decision, but you need to revisit it now. Now that you have had a little time-”

“And now that you can brow-beat me into making the ‘right' decision?!”

“Well, I suppose I could try, but you are obviously going to do whatever you want to do, and I don’t need another enemy. I need all the friends I can make and keep alive and healthy.”

“Which this isn’t, I suppose?”

I shrugged in the darkness and then sheepishly added, “No?”

***

A few months and a few dozen zombies later (I keep count, but that’s for me to know), I found myself in familiar territory. An empty squat this time, not a home, occupied by a pair of zombies which I quieted with a heavy heart. I buried them side by side in a single grave because I don’t see the point of digging two holes when one will do, but I had a look at the locket, which I took from around his neck and put back around hers.

As she said, two brothers, her mother, a baby in her arms and Amanda, ‘worthy of love’, proudly holding up a store-bought bow. I suppose, but I hadn’t asked, that she learned to make her own after she picked up archery.

A useful skill in this world, one of a few thousand more I’m trying, and mostly failing, to keep.

In.

This.

World.

Back to talking about things and not getting them done 8-(

1. Peeps! Definitely plural, walking around, now outside in their ‘chicken condo’

I haven’t worked on this

2. Procedural Flag, waving in the virtual wind. I can do waves, just modify the z coordinate!

I need this for the 4th of July

3. Extrusion of 2D and 3D shapes by picking points in the canvas, such as serpentine landmass and body plans.

4. Procedural world-building, from stars and their worlds to meshing spherical polyhedrons

I sort of have been working on this

5. Critters! Procedural body plans and walk cycles, ecologies? 8-P (This list is getting pretty, so that’s it for now)

6. Adding WFC, I didn’t get it done yesterday

Although I did get some random history going, vague, comments in parenthesis-

9 random events (in the world over just about half a century, two generations)

Year: 10, a minor war (with a minor power, between minor powers or resolved quickly?)

Year: 12, a major epidemic (major in that it’s widespread and/or kills a lot of folks?)

Year: 14, a(nother) minor war (between two minor powers)

Year: 22, a major reformation (effecting lots of folks or does it make a major change?)

Year: 29, a minor marriage (not to them, of course)

Year: 33, a minor reformation (involving a small portion of the population or a minor change?)

Year: 39, a minor discovery (well, keep it to yourself then, if you don’t think it’s so special…)

Year: 44, a minor epidemic (few people die or it spreads to only a few)

Year: 51, a minor celebrity dies (again, I’m sure they were a big deal in their own story)

I need to work on specifics and it occurs to me that things like wars and epidemics, recessions and recoveries are persistent, multi-year things and affect very different fractions of the population to very different degrees. This is always going to be a first pass, modified by copying and pasting it into your word processor and going to town, like I just did to a lesser degree. It occurs to me that we could flip this for a turning points system to key in an ass-backwards character generation, maybe even group character generation? In the year you were born… yeah, I like it!

Tonight I need to-

1. Finish ‘Hazel’

2. Make a map with random heights, a grid of quads sub’d along the three highest corners

3. Get back to (and finish?) Peeps

Finishing off ‘Hazel’ as a priority, because I have a deadline

Random History

Random History and Waveform Collapse

Happy 21st Work Anniversary/52 years plus two months birthday to me...

Two more items for my to do list- 1. Make random histories and 2. Illustrate and demonstrate my understanding of waveform collapse with a simple tile set of land/sea broken up into coast, interior and mountains and deep vs. coastal shelf. Coast bordered by coast, coastal shelf or interior, interior by interior, coast or mountains, mountains by mountains or interior, coastal shelf by coast, coastal shelf or deep sea, and deep sea by deep sea or coastal shelf. I can do a list of lists, a list of tiles which contain a list of allowable tiles. So we can look up a type and have a list of which we can count the length and then randomly choose a type from. So we look at a grid point, find out what kind of tile it is, then look at its four neighbors and randomly assign a type based on that first tile.

How do I make a random history? It is made up of events which need to answer the reporters’ questions, starting with when and what, but who, where, how and why as well. When is a date and we can generate random dates one after the other or subdivide a timeline. What is a list, for example war, disaster, prominent births or deaths, famine and pandemics, first contact, prominent marriages and treaties, legislation, revolution and civil war (internal vs. external war?), religions, depressions, etc. Events break down into good or bad, major or minor.

Took last night off, back to messing around with triangles

I played hookie last night… I need to finish the zombie story and submit it by Tuesday night. I owe myself words from yesterday and I need to get it done now that I have some idea where it’s going, but do I have an ending after all? What does Amanda decide?

In other news, I was looking at what I hate about marching cubes and squares. I have been coming sideways at the problem for a long while with the sea levels and sea shores for my world building; when subdividing triangles between above and below sea level and finding the sea level or a boring midpoint between two high points or two low points. I color triangles which have vertices at sea level and above green or tan for land and triangles with vertices which are at or below sea level blue for ocean. If I subdivide all the quads of a 2D grid of world surface into a triangle pair and then subdivide them along sea level or midpoints, depending on the endpoints of a given side or edge, now we’re getting landmass vs. sea, and we can make a list of edges which have two sea level endpoints. We can even chain them up into coastline and find individual islands and continents.

This is apparently something called dual contouring, if I understand this, and I can potentially and procedurally do this for tetrahedrons, which I can get from cubes, either five or six of them. The six way subdivision of a cube is between upper and a lower opposite corners. Each tetra shares these two, p0 and p7, if you will, first and last. The remaining six vertices pair up, each belonging to two adjacent tetrahedrons, (if the upper cube face is (p0,p1,p3,p2) and the lower cube face is (p4,p5,p7,p6), then the six are (p0,p7,p1,p3), (p0,p7,p1,p5), (p0,p7,p4,p5), (p0,p7,p2,p3), (p0,p7,p2,p6), (p0,p7,p4,p6). Or we can slice off four of the eight corners to expose a hidden inner tetrahedron, (p0,p1,p2,p4), (p3,p2,p2,p7), (p5,p7,p4,p1), (p6,p4,p7,p2) and (p0,p3,p4,p6). If the surface crosses within a tetrahedron we can make and display either a single triangle or triangle pair.

You may notice that even in 2D we are making surfaces; we can think of each quad of a 2D grid as a surface suspended in a cube or rectangle. Each quad is really a very tall upside down pyramid or prism. The bottom vertices are all the way down at the center of a nice round world. We are concerned with the rock and water on top of a presumably molten core and the bottom corners we are considering aren’t noticeably closer together than the top corners, which are some height above the highest mountains or the atmosphere. So getting a surface (or surfaces, decidedly plural!) from a 3D grid of points is just thinking about the problem a little harder, I suppose… 8-P

About half done, in one piece

The shambling un-dead American was eating chunks of bloody flesh with stray hairs. A very messy eater. He, it, had gotten a hold of a squirrel somehow; that and a flash of gold around its neck was a minor mystery and I am a sucker for that. As I considered it I heard a twig snap behind me. I’m light on my feet these days, moving and turning silently and quickly, but the girl was quicker and I found myself facing a fairly decent handcrafted arrow. I looked down the shaft at the young girl with a slightly under-powered bow, it couldn’t have been more than a twenty-five pound pull. She was maybe eleven, a scrappy little survivor of the apocalypse, greasy ponytail, dirty face with a nasty infected scratch, hazel eyes, and a snaggle-toothed not-grin, lips skinned back from yellowed teeth. She needed a bath, some neosporin and a toothbrush, stat.

She hadn’t decided to kill me, yet, so we were on better terms than the last survivor I’d tangled with, about five  days ago...and six feet, give or take. Maybe more like three.

“My friends call me George; you can call me George, okay? Uhm, Hazel?”

“Who?! Oh.. uh, Amanda.” She looked behind me and I risked a look. Squirrel breath was looking around, bits of squirrel all but forgotten in its hands. It turned to us, and the bright yellow metal flashed again in the sunlight. A locket.

“Do you mi-”

“No! Don’t you hurt him!”

Puzzle pieces fell into place and I crabbed around, no sudden moves, but I preferred an arrow to  teeth.

“Okay,” I said slowly. I watched her consider once again putting an arrow in me and regretfully (on her part), passing on that option. God help me, I had questions and little sense. “Who was he?

“My Dad.”

Ouch.

“That sucks and nothing I say will make it not suck.”

“But?” She said it quietly, but make no mistake, there was an edge there, underneath.

“It’s a blessing to quiet the undead.”

I watched the point of her arrow describe a tiny circle. It was a pretty good ground spoon and I imagined trying to extract it from between my ribs. God help me…

“You think I couldn’t figure that out?”

“Sure you can. And yet… he’s… he was your Dad. The right thing is never easy.”

“You have a death wish.”

“I won’t patronize you, except, well, you’re obviously a pretty sharp kid.” I risked another look at, well, undead Dad. “Can I please get a little distance, or are you planning…”

Her eyes bugged out a little. “What?! I’m not planning to feed you to him!”

“Well thanks for that. About, well, him, what’s he got around his neck?”

“Is that what you were asking me a minute ago?”

“Yes. I'm gonna get myself noshed on one fine day, but I have a natural curiosity, and I have to know, or try to figure these things out…”

She nodded and then indicated her dad with a tilt of her head his way. “We talked about that. A few hundred million death stories.”

“You, he talked about heavy shit like that with you?”

“Now you are being patronizing.”

“Sorry. That’s just not how that used to work.”

“It’s how we worked!” She closed her eyes, and lowered the bow and put the arrow away. “Sorry. That’s a locket he gave me. I put it on him, after, and then…”

“He got back up again, as they do-”

“If you don’t make it permanent.”

“Yes.’

I concentrated on the zombie now, trusting her more than it. He was not terribly interested in me, fortunately. Well fed…

“What was his name?”

“Jake. Jacob Herriot Bixby.”

“Three good names for the price of one. How long ago did he pass and how?”

“Not long, less than a week. I’m not sure what it was, a fever. He was burning up, talking nonsense and getting things out of order. I, he tried to get me to leave him, and…”

“You wouldn’t, of course. And there was a thing which he couldn’t ask his daughter to do?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I guessed, but it happens a lot. I have walked a long way since the dead started getting back up, with a lot of people, and now I’m alone again. By choice and by chance, both ways.”

“One of them told you that thing about it being a blessing to quiet the dead.”

“She did.” I smiled sadly. “I think you would have liked her, if you could stand each other, which I bet you could. You’re a lot like Ruth.”

We were quiet for a bit. You could hear the breeze blowing. Even the zombie was quiet.

“What-”

“No. Sorry, but no.” I was shaking a little bit, turned to ‘Jake’ and his shiny bit of pretty.

“What’s with the locket, or is that-”

“I can tell you about that. It’s a gold heart-shaped locket my uncle Jamie gave me for my tenth birthday last year. It has my name and the meaning of it and a picture of our family. I wanted him to have it.”

“Your family?”

“My uncle, his little brother, my dad, Mom and the baby.” She chewed her bottom lip. “We were all that was left, and then there was one.”

“I think we’ve had enough questions, save for one or three. Are you hungry, Amanda? What do you do with your shadow when you need to eat and sleep? And can I interest you in a nice bar of soap?”

***

I made good on my offer, after we got Jake to follow us back to the house they were squatting; well, she was living there, and keeping him in a room with two doors.

Minding a zombie is exhausting. You’d think it would be easy to keep its attention somehow, but no. Whatever is going on in that decaying brain it can’t stay focused, unless it does and then there’s no distracting it. Like turtles; god knows, I’ve come across zombies who have spent hours worrying at a box turtle, torn fingers and such. Or rabbits, too.  I’ve found zombies stuck in collapsed tunnels which they were apparently digging after a rabbit, or badger, enlarging a burrow and getting stuck.

Stupid zombie tricks.

Anyway, we got him locked away and I made ‘stone soup’, or stew, whatever I had and whatever she offered, starch, protein and veggies. I had a rabbit, a few potatoes, carrots, a battered can of peas, and she had a little old cornmeal someone had wrapped in aluminum foil. Whatever works.

Yet another placeholder, this one for Astrobeans...

I copy and pasted this meaning to work on my ateroid miner thing again, but I have to go in waaay too early tomorrow/this morning! I'm going to repurpose the grid from my grid to sphere to find the bits of asteroid...
Also, please click in the box! 8-)