Back in the Office, Progress continues

This post will be most likely written over the course of a few days. This leaves a pretty large gap in my posts but I don't really think anyone will notice anyway.

I've been ill, I am still recovering but I am good enough to work on my projects again so that's all I really care about right now. I've been trying to work out a way to allow myself more time to be visually and musically creative and I've also been really wanting to work on a more system-level project. I also have been looking for an excuse to use Rust, I did a short course on it a while ago and I have been looking for a reason to go and cement the things I learned and expand on them... so...

I'm going to be starting on the Rust book in my spare time and also probably using a good chunk of the early part of my day on creative endeavors rather than logic since I tend to do better with the logic in afternoons/evenings after I have been awake a while and had some food and caffeine. I will be working on my drawing skills for one and picking up digital painting. (This will be useful when I get to 3D, probably in a year or two depending on how all this goes.)

The majority of the work I need to do on Yarrdachi is the front end so I will be building myself a dev environment for it on my local server as well as building a dev environment for the rust book in much the same way... this allows me to work on these things from wherever I want to, fandabbydooby.

So as it stands my idea is to get up in the morning, afternoon, whatever turns out to be the best time for me to wake up in order to get shit done and start out with some music and art, then move on to the things I need to do for the day on the Yarrdachi project and once that's done I can take some time to do some rust stuff. This should in theory allow me to continue at a steady pace with my primary project while also picking up the skills I need for building this little game engine.

There's this very loud part of me that wants to build a whole world and set all kinds of things in it, from games to books to art and music. The other part of me, the logical, responsible part of me knows it will be a very long project and if I were to approach it correctly and not risk other people's money with it I wont see any potential profit to live off of until I have created a large chunk of it. This is why I need web development to be a heavy focus in order to keep that part of my brain happy. But to keep the creator in me happy I NEED creative projects that allow me to very specifically build a world.

When I say build a world I mean it very much in the Tolkein sense. With cultures and languages and economies and all the detail required. I want it to feel alive and real, as if reading a book based in the world were reading a non-fiction novel about a historical event even. Eventually I want to go into 3D and build my MMO in this world but the important thing, the very most important thing... is the world. It's always been the primary dream behind all my game dev and art and everything.

I need to cook now, so I should just save this draft and be off. After dinner I will set up some dev environments on my local server for the two things I need them for and maybe get the first chapter or 2 of the rust book done or something. I'm no longer limiting my work environment to the office. I am also going to set up a very specific wiki for this world development and another for my Rust notes.

Cheers for today. Go go gadget <HR/>!

Well, it's the next day now. Last night I set up some structure around the projects that I will need to work on from various rooms and spaces. My server now hosts the rust docs and book (in case of internet outage, possibly an old habit from the satellite internet days) as well as some code-server instances. One instance is for the Yarrdachi client, this allows me to develop it from anywhere, if I hated myself more than I already do I could do it on my phone even. Another instance for working my way through the Rust book.

Now I have to figure out how I will go about balancing all this. I gotta draw, play several instruments, maintain 2 large web projects and maintain 14 servers.

The plan for this month is to do several things;

• Finish the front-end components for all the back-end endpoints I already have for Yarrdachi.
• Add Snakes, Crabs and Toads to Mantilogs (Might only have time for one)
• Finish the "Rust Book" and have a compiled and organized set of notes via my local bookstack instance.
• Begin crafting my world in a more tangible, digital form.
• Work through either a drawing course or digital painting course. At least sketch something every day.
• Daily Instrument practice with a focus on guitar, but time with Ocarina and Erhu as well.

Seems like a lot but I don't really spend much time playing video games anymore... There is more time between games that grab me now, most games that are coming out nowadays just aren't for me. A lot of them feel soulless and derivative. Maybe that's just me though... I can go back and play games like Everquest and Morrowind and enjoy them more than modern games because there's so much detail and weirdness that doesn't even need to be there but gives soul and life to the games even with their old graphics and clunky interfaces. You can feel the devs caring about the games, now it just feels like the suits design the games to have the features that make the most money and that's it. Like they sucked all the art from games somehow. I miss when it was a niche hobby. More-so because the indie devs of today are influenced by this corporate design by comity bullshit.

Anyway, that's enough being sad about the direction of the game industry, I got shit to do. Besides, it's not like these things matter. In the end they are just toys to distract us from the horrors of life for a while. Though I do feel like they are an art form, like books or movies. Capable of inspiring people to do great things. Video games inspired me to learn to code, draw, play instruments... I met my wife in a video game. I would actually probably be dead or in prison statistically based on where I grew up if not for video games. So it's easy for me to be personally invested in them as a whole. But yeah, shit needs doing.

I forgot to change my DNS on my server to go through my local DNS server. That explains a few things. Fixed it now, should be better from here on. Real dumb move on my part there. Easy to overlook things when you have to configure a network like this I guess... but that's why I do it. Gotta learn somehow.

I can now override domain names if I need to or assign domain names to things that will be resolved for everything in the network. This is useful to not have to remember IPs to connect to SSH, also for setting up reverse proxies on the local server to not have to remember ports. I've spent enough time messing around with this for today, I will set up the reverse proxies maybe later on tonight...

I'm tired, as usual. Kinda dragging today. I've made black tea with cinnamon and poured in some apple juice... hope it doesn't suck. Also changed to blue lighting in here to maybe snap out of this.

If you have a DNS server and to get it running you need to set /etc/resolv.conf to use 8.8.8.8 or something, remember once the DNS server is running you need to set it to the IP of the DNS server. Often 127.0.0.1.

The tea is nice, at least.

Right, on to the front end stuff for Yarrdachi. I was last working on the pet information display from the dashboard. I got a little hung up on the idea of it being a Modal and that's probably a bad idea. Instead I will have it be a component accessed via the router and pass the data in props if I can.

To start I need to add the component to the router I think... thing is... how do I go about this? Time to grab a pencil and work it out.

So I think it might make sense to have the pet ID be part of the route, maybe? It does simplify things though I may find a reason this is a bad idea later. For now I guess it works. I'm still figuring out react router.

I really am having a hell of a time trying to pass the pet ID to the component here. Might just be because I am tired, really. I've decided to try and pass it as a param so the player could bookmark the care page for a specific pet if they have some reason to... but getting the params from the router is proving to be less than intuitive.

Or I had it but my hot-reload broke because there's too much for it to track already. Let's fix this...  

So, when you want to increase your max_user_watches for developing React stuff and you are running React in a docker container you do not increase it inside the container, you do so on the HOST. See here.

Progress.

Which eventually became

Did what I set out to do today. Well, last week really... but then I got sick. Now I have the basic pet care design in there, I think next I have to do the inventory design but I think that should wait until I have the player inventory endpoints on the back-end. Next up is wiring up logic and breaking some of the more complicated bits of the UI so far into their own components.

First I will get the party members displaying data from a player's actual party, then I will get the pet care displaying the correct data for the pet selected. Then I will write the pet care endpoints and wire that all up. For now though I am done for today. I am just so exhausted I feel like I will pass out on my desk soon. Time for a little lie down. Maybe later I will do some Rust stuff and get the server setup with a reverse proxy system so I can use domains instead of IP addresses and ports.

Cheers.