What Are You Making? (August 2023)

[Glorgu]

Enjoy capturing your current scenic view with some watercolors? Like putting the final touches on your self-made cosplay outfit of one of your favorite characters? Are you into 3D printing your own tabletop minis and painting them? Are you really happy with how your garden is coming in this year? Everywhere around us there are things that inspires our creative energy into overdrive. It’s that energy that gets channeled into taking a conceptualization of a project to the feeling of satisfaction over its final form that keeps people coming back for more. So with that said…

Hey folks, what’re you making?

This is a thread for sharing your projects. From drawings to music, writing, crochet, reorganizing your bookshelf — if you’ve worked on something and you’re proud of it, we want to see it!

While posting, please keep in mind the following:

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• We ask that you don’t make posts about the things you create as being your first and/or only posts. Please make an effort to be a member of the community and not as someone only interested in self promotion.
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[okonomichiyaki]

This is a programming project I have been working on for a little while, but with the release of new Netrunner cards, I was inspired to clean it up in order to release it publicly.

pantograph

It’s basically “Spelltable but for Netrunner”. in other words: a web application that supports playing Netrunner with physical cards via webcam by allowing you to click on a video feed to see higher resolution card images. You can try a demo here (no webcam or Netrunner cards required) and click around to run the search engine

I don’t play Magic personally, but at some point over the pandemic I taught an MTG-playing friend how a play Netrunner, and he mentioned Spelltable. Because he lives several states away, most of the time we were playing online, not using physical cards. Eventually he bought cards to teach his colleagues, which lead us to play a few games via webcam, and I got inspired to try building something.

My initial attempt was a lot more ambitious than where I ended: I started out using traditional computer vision techniques to automatically separate cards from the background play area:

spelltable demo 1

This proved to be fairly fragile because the technique I was using (background subtraction) was very sensitive to rearranging the cards or play area. Since the whole point was a more natural feeling experience using physical components, I ended up abandoning this. it didn’t help that I really don’t have any background in computer vision, furthermore this technique required sending a video feed to my backend for processing which led to frankly a lot more operational challenges than I wanted to deal with for a side project (WebRTC is very cool but somewhat terrifying to roll by hand)

Eventually I gave up on the idea of automatic recognition, and the end result is that you have to click on the cards in order to trigger the search engine. from there my code crops a portion of the video and uses Google’s OCR API to extract text and search for the card title (using Google due to the higher quality of bounding box data). the search process ends up being fairly Netrunner specific: because the cards have a lot of text beyond the title the search is specific to the card templating (both Null Signal Games’ templates and FFG’s templates), as well as things like ICE being placed horizontally.

Since I’ve taught basically every friend of mine who will listen how to play Netrunner, but several of them live far away, I’ve played a few games with the software and although it’s not perfect, it does smooth out the process compared with playing without it. Asking “what strength is that ICE breaker you just installed?” as you surreptitiously look at a piece of un-rezzed ICE is a bit too much of a giveaway sometimes.

I’m not really a front end developer, although obviously I know enough Javascript to be dangerous, and this was a fun project to dust off some of those skills. The code itself is some really rustic stuff (vanilla JS) but to be honest that has its own charm. React is great and all but sometimes it really is overkill.

[Spinningmind]

That’s very cool!

I hadn’t heard of Spelltable before. I’ve never been a serious Magic player but spent a few years selling and trading cards for a store so it’s nice to find out all those people with physical collections can get some of the flexibility digital players enjoy.

I wonder if anyone does hybrid in person and remote play nights and tournaments. The store I worked at was up a long flight of stairs in an old building with no elevator and we had a couple of regular customers who collected cards and would pick up their orders outside because they couldn’t come up to the shop. I wish this had existed back then so we could have invited them to play with the rest of our customers at Friday Night Magic and such.

[glaivemaster]

I’m trying to learn how to spin wool into yarn, with the eventual goal of turning the patch of stinging nettles that I let grow in my back garden into useable thread and cloth.

Currently I’m mostly making a mess.

Trying to spin using a drop spindle because it’s pretty cheap (and small and protable) compared to a full spinning wheel, and it’s supposed to be something just small I can do while having the telly on in the background. Once I’m proficient at it, anyway. Practicing with wool for now because that’s what most people use, and especially for learning, but in the meantime I’m also processing the first batch of nettles into something ready to be spun. That’ll take quite a while in itself, so hopefully I’m decent enough at spinning by the time it’s ready.

And then I need to learn to weave it into cloth…

[anarchobama]

I took half a year off my mental health podcast but got back to it this month with an episode about maintaining connections to people after die.

Funeral Merch Table (Connection after loss) w/ Brooke

[BlueHighwind]

Planet Blue: 'Final Fantasy XVI' Did Not Need to be HBO, it Needed to be Final Fantasy - finally put words to paper about FFXVI.

[blzzzrrttt]

This feels very weird for me to type but…

I’d like to imagine most video game enjoyers here can relate to thinking at some point “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a game like [your very cool game idea]?”. I’d been following this train of thought about a particular idea for several months now but I wasn’t really doing anything about it. Until a few weeks ago. I randomly thought “I probably own some version of RPG Maker on Steam, what if I just started making this game?” and before I knew it I started seriously making a video game.

At first, I was just fiddling with the engine just to get a general sense of what seemed plausible for me to do as someone who was wholly unfamiliar with the tools in front of me. After a several days of that I sat down for a few hours, staring at an empty notepad document, and just started writing down every idea I could remember to try and come up with some things to work on/implement whenever I was working on the game.

From there it’s been a little stunning how deceptively easy/incredibly frustrating/wonderfully satisfying it is to take my formless ideas and molding them into an increasingly sound structure that resembles a functioning video game. I’m only posting this right now because earlier today I finished a small slice of what I would like to eventually turn into a demo of what I’ve been working on so far.

Still very far from what I’d consider presentable, but every day that gap gets just a little bit smaller…