ROllerozxa
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I'm currently revisiting some old #Principia adventure levels I originally made as part of a bigger level package that I never ended up completing. Going to upload the good ones as separate levels once I have finished up them.
The times I get to spend fully immersed in the sandbox is few and far between, so I'm always a bit rusty in the beginning, but get the hang of things again eventually...
I really enjoy treating the LuaScript objects as small programmable circuits like an Arduino that I can just wire up with stuff in the world to do something small, when I'm too lazy to think of how to do it using signaling components.
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Finally I have managed to flash #postmarketOS onto my old Nexus 7 tablet, the only device I have that supports pmOS.
It took some attempts (...a lot of attempts) to get into APX mode and do the whole backup the bootloader and flash u-boot thing, and accidentally bricking the bootloader once during the process, before I could actually flash the pmOS image onto it.
So cool! ...Well, it doesn't have hardware acceleration, XFCE is not really intended for touchscreen devices, and in general it seems slow even when I'm connected via SSH.
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Last night someone told me that I was mentioned in a YouTube video going over the source code of #Balatro.
At first I was like "huh, that can't be right...", but once I went to the given timestamp I saw myself! Specifically, a screenshot of a comment I left on the #Luanti issue tracker about performance issues with the JIT compiler in LuaJIT on Apple Silicon Macs, using it to explain the one-liner at the start of Balatro that disables JIT for such systems.
Crazy!
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So far the Principia #Fluxer community has 80 members now!
...It's pretty silent, the member count is a bit inflated by temporary accounts from people checking it out, and I haven't gotten around to setting up bridging yet. But getting Principia onto the discovery page seems to have been a really good idea.
I haven't kept up with Fluxer's developments during the past weeks but it does seem to have gotten a lot more stable by now. Hopefully the mobile apps will be releasing soon.
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Arranged an event this evening for a local language Discord server I'm in, playing #Webfishing together while talking in voice chat and all the silly stuff that ends up happening from that.
It was really fun...
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The blog post is now live. Trying out Claude's C Compiler, a vibe coded #AI slop #C compiler consisting of 180k lines of #Rust code. I compiled a simple Hello World program, my puzzle game Tensy, #ClassiCube and finally the #Linux kernel using it, getting a bare minimum RISC-V Linux environment running in QEMU. Also a brief mention of #slimcc at the end, another small C compiler.
It ended up being yet another really long blog post, so I hope I didn't forget anything.
https://voxelmanip.se/2026/02/06/trying-out-claudes-c-compiler/
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Last night I continued working on the Apparatus decompilation, specifically I was looking at why most of the in-game menu buttons did not get rendered. After doing some cleanups to make the SpriteCache initialisation clearer I remained stumped at why it would not work, considering drawing all buttons at once with the simpler method prototype did work.
Works: SpriteCache::draw(spriteId)
Does not work: SpriteCache::draw(spriteId, offset, length)It started to seem like a bug in libGDX itself (SpriteCache being a part of libGDX's graphics code). And that's when I started to delve into libGDX internals, looking at the implementation in the 0.9.9 source code and comparing it against a Git blame from the latest version of libGDX to see if there was a bug that maybe had been patched in some revision shortly after 0.9.9 that Apparatus used.
After seeing an oddly recent change to the relevant code, and inspecting the decompilation of the vendored libGDX inside Apparatus 1.2.1 only to find an almost identical change there that predates the upstream change by 7 years, I made a startling revelation.
Apparatus had been hoarding a patch to a bug in libGDX for almost a decade that was only brought to their attention and fixed independently in 2020!!!
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Either way, the decompilation is available on GitHub to build for either platform. Apparatus fans rejoice, things are finally looking up again.
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So today I got the Apparatus decomp to run on desktop after splitting up the codebase into an Android-specific project and a common project, and then brought in some code from my previous desktop port attempt putting that into a new desktop project.
It works much better than my previous attempt! Sandbox works, you can play through challenge levels and such. Absolutely spectacular seeing it running natively on desktop like this.
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Today I gave another go at doing a decompilation of Apparatus. My previous attempt was almost five years ago now and didn't go particularly well, but now I feel like I am much more experienced.
After some quick fixing of decompilation quirks I managed to get it to rebuild, and after some more work I managed to get dialogs to work, levels to load and objects to render! There are still some issues remaining however, most glaring issue being some GUI elements not being drawn, but this is already way further than the last attempt.
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Earlier in December I brought out my #3DS for the first time in a while in order to set up #Azahar and dump my savegames to import into the emulator.
The 3DS has a great game collection but I have never really been able to enjoy the hardware itself - I sent in mine two times to Bergsala to fix the touchscreen, and after that the shoulder buttons are starting to fail. Thankfully the 3DS emulation scene has gotten to the point where just about every game I'd wanna play is fully playable, and my computer can emulate them at full speed too now.
I have a big back catalog of games I want to start or continue playing, but with a comfy full-size controller and in 720p resolution. So far I have been picking up Animal Crossing New Leaf again which has been pretty enjoyable.
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The #Principia Wiki has a page about #Apparatus which has since become one of the most visited pages coming from Google search results.
Even now with Principia being revived as open source and such, it still seems to be overshadowed by the popularity Apparatus had back in the day. Which is unfortunate, but hey, I have lots of nostalgia for it too.
So I decided to set up a new website for collecting information about the game, intended to look very similar to the old community site for the game:
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I suppose I should give asking Fedi about this a try...
Are there any games out there like #webfishing? Cosy multiplayer chatroom game for just hanging out in. In particular one with a lobby system based on geographical proximity, just like Webfishing used to have before the update around the end of the last year removed that.
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#deltarune this and #deltarune that... I just want a new #webfishing update that brings back the geographical lobby system that was removed in the last update half a year ago
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Now that I have moved from @[email protected] to here I should maybe do a new #introduction post.
My username is ROllerozxa, I'm from Gothenburg, Sweden. I'm a programmer and currently studying software engineering at university.
I'm the maintainer of the now open source physics-based sandbox game #Principia, but you may also know me from #BoxSmasher, my work on #Luanti (formerly #Minetest) or various other open source projects I have worked on.
Other than that I do other interesting things (blogging, archival, talking about the weather, eating soused herring, cuddling my Blåhaj, etc.)
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Still hoping #Webfishing can finally get another update that brings back the lobby browser that sorts by geographical proximity... Been four months, still not giving up hope yet.
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Now #OpenAI's rabid scraper bot #GPTBot is getting stuck in an endless URL concatenation loop again, this time it's on the principia-web forums. It's been going ever since last night.
I have no idea how you can mess up a crawler bot this badly, but I guess nobody cares if it goes havoc. Into the shitlist it goes.