I've ported the blog off of Wordpress onto a static site generator (Specifically, 11ty/Eleventy). I have a bit more control over the format here, and it's easier for me to write pages (Wordpress was fighting me on all sorts of formatting which I can just do now).
What this means is I can finally start copying over the rest of my posts that were on (the now-defunct, sadly) cohost.org (rest easy, little eggbug).
Likely there are things on the new site that aren't set up correctly yet, so if you happen to notice anything, find me on Bluesky or Mastodon and let me know!
I was writing about how to parse C++17-style hex floating point literals, and in doing so I ended up writing a bunch about how floats work in general (and specifically how floating point rounding happens), so I opted to split it off from that post into its own, since it’s already probably way too many words as it is?
Here we go!
How Floats Work
If you don’t know, a floating point number (At least, an IEEE 754 float, which effectively all modern hardware supports), consists of three parts:
Sign bit – the upper bit of the float is the sign bit: 1 if the float is negative, 0 if it’s positive.
Exponent – the next few bits (8 bits for a 32-bit float, 11 bits for a 64-bit float) contain the exponent data, which is the power of two to multiply the given hex value with. (Note that the exponent is stored in a biased way – more on that in a moment)
Mantissa – the remaining bits (23 for 32-bit float, 52 for a 64-bit float) represent the fractional part of the float’s value.
A while back (over a year ago) this blog got hacked and so it’s been down for a hot minute. I’ve brought it back online and now I can finally post things on it again – I have a few things that I’ll post here and there but honestly it’s unlikely to ever be really FREQUENT around here.
Valve recently announced that Procyon is in the most-recent batch of titles to be given the green light for release on Steam! This is super-exciting news!
There are a few things that I want to add to Procyon before it’s ready for general Steam release: achievements, proper leaderboards, steam overlay support, etc. Basically, all of the steam features that make sense.
It’ll be a bit before it gets done, as we’re working on putting the finishing touches on Infamous: Second Son at work, so I’m a little dead by the time I get home at the moment. But once we’ve shipped, I’ll likely have the time and energy to get Procyon rolling out onto Steam.
It’s been a ridiculously long time coming, but I’m finally breaking my radio silence on this poor, poor blog to let you know that Procyon has, in fact, finally been released!
It’s available on Desura and IndieCity:
(Way-late 2022 edit: no it’s not, anymore – both of those storefronts are gone. But it’s on Steam!)
So apparently I forgot how to update my blog for over a year, making the previous post’s title even more accurate than it should have been.
What’s been going on, you ask? I’ll tell you.
I’ve switched jobs! Now I’m working at Sucker Punch Productions as a coder (working mostly on missions and the like). It’s a totally fantastic place to work. If you look ever-so-slightly close, you can find my name in the Infamous 2 credits 🙂
I’ve entered Procyon into DreamBuildPlay and this year’s PAX 10 (no love from the judges, though)
I’ve been lazy about updating my blog!
And I’ve updated the holy craps out of Procyon!
Entirely new enemies (and enemy art)
New levels
Updated special effects
A new level
All sorts of new craziness
Okay, the list isn’t as long as last post’s, but I have been busy. Some new videos:
Hopefully I’ll update a bit more often than once per year. Sorry for the radio silence. I have a lot of things that I could write about, if only I’d take the time to do so.
I’ll go into more detail later, but here’s a SUPER quick synopsis of the last (yikes!) six months:
Completed the demo build of Procyon
Level 3!
New title screen!
Finished game flow!
Working local multiplayer!
New control scheme!
New font rendering mechanism!
New tutorial!
Another bullet point with an accompanying exclamation point!
Sent it through several (sometimes-painful) rounds of playtest on the creator’s club forums, and got some great feedback (especially the feedback from one Jason Doucette of Xona Games, who gave some painful-to-hear but necessary criticism)
Submitted to the PAX 10 competition
Learned that I was not accepted into the PAX 10 competition 🙁
Started work fixing the networked multiplayer that I broke while working towards the demo (I’d disabled it for the demo so that I could keep my focus elsewhere!
Anyway, that’s my short update. But fear not, for here, too, is a pair of videos!
Just another quick update to show off a pair of videos of the in-progress level 2 boss.
First, note that the textures that I have on there currently are horrible, and I know this. It’s okay.
The first video was simply to test the independent motion of the various moving parts of the boss:
[video gone, sadly]
aaaaand the second shows off the missile-launching capabilities of the rear hatches (complete with brand-new missile effects and embarassing flights into the direct path of the missiles!):
What have I been up to since early June? Quite a bit. On the non-game-development side of things: work’s been rather busy (still). Also, I now own (and have made numerous improvements on) a house! So that’s been eating up time. But, that’s not (really) what this site is about.
(Procyon and texture generator devlog below the fold)
