I usually talk shit about Valve nowadays, but it’s hard to deny their games are (usually) very good and highly influential. And today (16th November) is the 20th anniversary of one of their greatest: Half-Life 2.

For the past three years I’ve been using Google Pixel Buds A-series, and they’ve actually served me really well. They aren’t exactly high-end earbuds - for me, they just play music and I can slap them to play and pause; though they had Google Assistant and mics, I never used those. But now they are getting old, and they’re now partially broken, and I thought it time for an upgrade.

A long long time ago, Minecraft had an isometric level previewer. This feature was added in Infdev update 20100616-2, during the early phase in mid-2010 where infinite level support was developed. It lived at minecraft.net/infdev/preview.jsp, and according to the Wayback Machine, that page disappeared between the 14th and 26th of September 2010, the same time as Infdev itself. However, it remained hidden in the game’s code for a while after - and I got it running in the later versions it remained in.

Catacombs Plus, the game I’ve been slowly hacking away at for the past year or so, is finally released. You can grab it from itch.io for Windows, macOS, and Linux:

A year and a bit ago, I wrote about adding a test suite to Omniscient. In that post, I mentioned:

There used to be an incredibly minor and hard-to-notice bug in Minecraft: its “first-person” view was a third-person perspective. Instead of rotating around in-place, the camera was actually orbiting the point it was supposed to be in, therefore making it third-person (although up really close on an invisible point – technically an arcball camera). It was eventually fixed, but it took ten years, and it annoys me every time I play an older version of the game – and with projects like my Thirty server for Minecraft Classic, that’s reasonably often.

And they called it DOOM + DOOM II. Together at last.

It’s been slow-going, but Catacombs Plus development is approaching a state that might be releasable. My last proper progress update was in February (oh jesus), and since then I’ve made about 200 commits. A lot of that is internal changes, bug fixes, optimisations, etc – but there’s also a bunch of content. So, here’s some of the stuff I’ve done since then…

This is a followup to my previous Linux post. It has been a little over two months since I last properly used Windows, and things are going reasonably well.

So, it’s been about two weeks ago since I switched to Linux full-time. What brought this on is that I finally got a different GPU - I swapped my RTX 3060 Ti for my friend’s RX 6700 XT. The NVIDIA card was basically unusable on Linux for me: I am required to use Wayland due to my display setup (mismatching refresh rates), but Wayland on NVIDIA is full of issues (namely broken graphics APIs under XWayland.) NVIDIA is slowly fixing their stuff, but now I have an AMD GPU where none of these issues exist, that means I can use Linux now instead of waiting for all that to drip down to me.