Dory

Welp, I finally got uniform buffers working! So now we have 3D basically already figured out :D
Now, I have to clean up the code at least a little bit, and, afterwards, I wanna see if I can get textures sorted out and working. Let’s hope we can keep this ball rolling! I’m excited to see how it turns out! :D

So, after two more hours of work, I’ve managed to do two different things. First of all was getting the window to resize and minimize without crashing the program or my entire operating system on the way! :D
Second thing, was making the geometry not be hard-coded to the vertex shader! :D
For now, it uses a really inefficient approach to vertex buffers, so the next step will be making it be much more efficient, and afterwards, getting some more interesting geometry inside of it. Keeping all of this clean and somewhat readable is becoming harder by the minute, I must admit. Hopefully I can keep it that way for a long way though…
For now, have a little triangular art from me, hope you like teehee :3c

Well, and another nice while of work, and now we have… Exactly the same… Well, that’s unfair to see. Internally, the main.cpp file went from over 900 lines to just 56. I’ve also taken the time to slightly improve both the performance and the memory safety of this engine, which is good, because, even though probably no one will ever play this but me and my friend, I might use the underlying engine in future projects, and having all of this base already assembled for me is awesome, because that would mean I can skip all of these small tasks that are so numerous that they end up adding to hours…

Anyways, now it’s time to keep going forward, and try to get some more interesting geometry on the screen… Wish me luck! :D

Welp, I have put a lot of work on this devlog, but, I kinda wanted to show some output on the screen instead of just text. And then I remembered I put myself through the hell of using Vulkan… Anyways, I GOT A TRIANGLE WORKIN!!! :D

This is huge, because it sets the precedent for me starting to properly work on this. For now, it’s just a monolithic file, so the first order of business is abstracting all of this.

If I get a good multiplier I’m becoming rich just because of how much work Vulkan takes… Welp, I guess that’s a positive, sure… XD

Well, continuing with the tutorial I’m following, and improving quite a bit upon it, is h I have joyfully spent this time. I have also started light work on a logger class for a bit of abstraction and slightly improved performance.

One of the interesting ways in which I managed to heavily optimize this is by using more identifiers that let compiler know what to do with my code. Which is GREAT. Anyways, let’s hope I can get a triangle showing soon-ish :3

Welp, it’s been quite a treacherous time implementing validation layers, mainly due to a few bugs that were difficult to trace back. Most notably, CLion, my IDE of preference, does NOT work with them for some reason, so I am bestowed with the curse of having to forcefully run this program either from a terminal, or, like I have decided to do, from vkconfig-gui, which is actually pretty neat because it lets me emulate various other devices. Anyways, with that done, it is time to continue forwards, towards progress!!! :D

Well, well, I face against Vulkan again. I had a lot of fun last time with my Vulkan Game Engine project, so, now, we’re back at it again, for a project a friend asked some help with. Time to make a 3D engine with Vulkan!!!

So far I’ve gotten the basics working, aminly instance creation, a black window, all that. So, pretty fun stuff, and surpriisngly far for an hour and three quarters I think, having in acount how complex Vulkan can get hehehe…

Anyways I’m pretty happy and hope to make more progress soon, let’s see where we go with this!!! >:3

Well, I’ve done various changes in this last hour. First and foremost, we now have proper saving and loading of calibration files, as well as a constant output of the measurements, which are checked are correct!!! :D

I have also taken the liberty of experimenting a bit with Smith Charts, and they were indeed pretty fun and correct. So apart from this, I guess I can now start designing the mount for the antenna and the ESP32 circuitry that will control it… Let’s hope it goes alright!!! >:3

Originally I had planned for the second devlog to already include a bit of me rambling about a manual prototype where I spin the antenna and the nanoVNA goes about taking measurements, but, calibration is a thing, and a painful thing too. I also wanted to make it so that it caught whenever the VNA was not connected to the computer, and that was surprisingly hard lol. I also found out the hard way the library has a lot of other restrictions, that hopefully I can kink out with my implementation… Anyways, now the calibration is going, next step is being able to save and load this calibration, mainly for testing (I don’t even know if I’ll do this lol) and afterwards (or just directly) I’ve gotta make it so that we can have a “manual spin” of the antenna. Let’s hope my idea goes well… :3

Well this was mostly trying to experiment with how to communicate with the LiteVNA I’ve got. I experimented a bit with serial communication but the protocol isn’t the easiest so for now I’ve decided I’m gonna do the initial testing with the pynanovna library, which should make the job a bit easier at the start, even though I plan on eventually porting all this to most likely pure C code to be honest. Let’s see where this goes, I guess…

Welp, and with that, my little self-updating portfolio is done! It now automatically does stuff like updating my profile picture, my bio, and even the display name. This is all really cool, since it also means ANYONE can use it by just changing a single line of code. I am pretty proud of this! :D I even added a little “Extra Info” section for some stats about my GitHub! With that all done, I think I’m ready to have this shipped. Happy time! :D

Welp, the page has not changed much in terms of looks, but I have redone some stuff behind the scenes, as well as added a (self-updating, so it’s always correct) link to my GitHub profile when clicking “My Projects”. This is a cool little detail, and now I should just need to do the finishing details and be done with this little pet project of mine :3

Well, I finally managed to add auto-fetching to my carrousel. It now fetches all my public repos using the GitHub API, then checks which of them have at least one star or watcher, then gets a hyperlink, name, description, the good stuff. Puts it in a nice little package, and ta-dah! :D I’m pretty proud of how this came out, and I can feel the end really close. I’m surprisingly excited! :D

So, this was a bit more difficult than I was expecting, I am not going to lie. But, I got it! I got the carrousel working on a set timer, with cool animations, and looking pretty much ideal to how I wanted it! :D

Now the next steps are adding the projects, and a few extras I have, but the end is near, I can feel it!!! >:D

Welp, it finally works! :D We now have a carrousel! Right now, it moves when I click the right arrow, but I think I will most likely make it into a timed movement, since that looks more slick. Though I wanna be able to pause it. I will watch how I do it, and I hope it turns out cool. Let us hope for the best! >:D

I’ve been iterating a lot on design ideas and how to do all the stuff I wanna do. This is going a bit slow, mostly because of classes and other projects of mine, buuuuut, it’s shaping up. Let’s hope tomorrow I can solve up the JavaScript to make this move left and right as a proper carrousel.

Well, I started coding the site. I want it to have a sleek, “OLED” aesthetic (mainly so my retinas don’t get absolutely obliterated every time I want to test this page, but also because it looks cool as hell). Everything I have done up to now is just setting the basics and playing a bit with the looks. I have now to make the project list autoscroll so it looks like a carrousel of projects. Maybe I’ll even randomize the projects it shows. We will see…