George slays modern dragons; he seeks to quiet the undead, protect the weak and help to fix the broken. He and 'Hazel' reach a sort of truce and have dinner, bed down for the night, but then George gets back up to take care of business. Hazel comes after him but it’s not what she thinks. He needs her to reconsider; she was grief-stricken and made a choice which she doesn’t have to stick to.

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 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 just me.”

“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?”

Hazel

 2K words in a post apocalyptic setting involving a heart shaped locket; I'll bite…

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.

An actual Grid 2 Sphere...

I have made a 3D grid of points and tell the page to show all points inside a sphere inside the box of grid points. Now that I have restricted this to points which are inside but adjacent to outside points, I will start building edges and triangles.
(The red dots are farther away and should be smaller, but I made them bigger to make them visible. Also, please click in the box! 8-)

Zombies and Astrobeans! (Nah...)

I’m watching Sebastian Lague blather on about rigging in Unity, not because I want to understand Unity but because I want to adapt principles of rigging, bones and skins to my walk cycle. I was considering zombies staggering around last night, a simple stick figure so not very gross, for a monkey (skeletal, even 8-) copy of a side-scroller which Nook was playing. Which is something I’ll never get anywhere with but it would be useful for stick figure astrobeans for my asteroid miner sim/DF clone (again, skeletal…). The astrobeans are a one pixel arc for their head, so 2 pixels across and some lines for the body, arms and legs. I’m sorely tempted to do this all with triangles, but I can easily turn the lines into triangles later. Also, make the head a short line? Anyway, I get (back) to that from zombies, because that’s the way I roll!

There’s my drabble, now I owe myself some actual coding butt-in-chair time, and a sketch because I haven’t drawn a purely artistic sketch for a while. I drew a lot of procedural triangle-based stick-figure zombies last night (base was two points in/on the body quad, then a the third point was somewhere away, then a point in the center of that triangle and and the 3rd point for the base of the next limb segment, lower arm or leg, to a point away, and again for the hand or foot, but the foot is a triangle pair or quad touching ground at two points).

I coded the bit which displays the points of a 3D grid inside of a sphere representing the world whose surface I want to mesh, a procedural spherical polyhedron whose triangle faces represent the surface of that world. I need to find only the just-subsurface points which are adjacent to outside points and display only them, and then animate meshing the world in triangles…

This highlights that I had and should be working from a To Do List, so here’s the list of neglected coding projects-

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

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

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

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

The peeps thing involves rethinking my peep-space, changing to their new outside enclosure and the ‘chicken condo’, as well as finally returning to my 3D peep object, the head, wings, legs and tail from that subdivided octahedron I made before. Whew!

Grid 2 Sphere!

I make a 3D grid of points and show all points inside a sphere inside the box of grid points. (This is another place-holder; I'll get there! 8-)

How About Grid 2 Sphere?

I should work on the peeps animation, or serpentine landmass, and procedural subdivision of a tetra or octahedron would be pretty kewl… but, I want to find the points of a 3D grid which are inside of a sphere and then find those points which are adjacent to points outside of the sphere. These are subsurface points and I can use them to draw the surface with marching cubes, but I want to find this procedurally rather than looking something up. If one or more vertices of a cube lie inside the sphere and other points lie outside then the surface passes through some of the twelve edges of my cube. For each inside corner we interpolate where the surface point lies along the three edges connecting that corner to one of the three adjacent corners. If the surface doesn’t pass through a point along that edge, we need to keep looking. Make or find the twelve edges, look for edges containing a surface point then start connecting surface points in each quad face which have edges contain surface points.

Too complicated! Let’s just consider the subsurface grid points and worry about the interpolated surface later. I want to link a subsurface point to the nearest subsurface point and then connect the endpoints of resulting edge to the subsurface point which is closest the midpoint of the edge. Now that I have a triangle, I build a surface/subsurface by connecting to neighboring subsurface points in a mesh of triangles. I build new triangles off of the edges of existing triangles, then remove the doubly used edges as the edge of a triangle in a surface mesh only belongs to at most two triangles; if an edge belongs to only one triangle that edge is an open edge and is the border of a surface.

We start with something modeled on the Earth, about 6378 km in radius, as a 3D grid thirteen thousand km across… which is waaaay too much to ask of my poor chromebook! Thirteen hundred cells about 10 km across is slightly more reasonable, but still amounts to a couple of billion cubes, so that’ll take nearly forever as well. A hundred thirty gets it down to about two million cells, about half inside and half outside with a subsurface of a few thousand.

The simplest option is to go with thirteen cubed, some twenty-two hundred cells each about a thousand km on a side with hundreds of subsurface points, edges and triangles approximating the surface/subsurface of the world. Once we find the subsurface and create the mesh of triangles we can adjust the position of each subsurface point to be at the surface and make the triangles represent the area. So, make a 3D grid from 0 to 13, times 20 pixels, across wide, high and deep, from 0 to 260, which will fill up the left side of my 520 by 260 canvas. The proper coordinates would be minus 65 pixels XYZ to plus 65 pixels XYZ, so we can add perspective with the depth or Z coordinate. Each point would be P5D: x, y, z and px, py, for perspective or perceived x and y. Each edge would be EJ5: e1, e2, md, t1 and t2 for the first endpoint (actually lowest index endpoint), second endpoint, midpoint, first and second triangle. Each triangle would be TR7: e1, e2, e3, p1, p2, p3 and cn for three edges, three corners and a triangle center.

Now would be a good time to get on with it...

Snowballing...

I want to place a few seeds to grow into planets. This makes for some super Earths and super Jupiters, so far, so good!