I have started to play around with learning some game development using the Rust based Bevy game engine. One of the first things I wanted to make sure I understand is the coordinate system used by the engine. However, it was a little different than what I am used to (web and Flash), and took me a bit to figure out. This post gives a quick overview and summary of the 2D coordinate system used in Bevy.

I am working on a new Rust based Destiny 2 project (dcli) and needed to be able to calculate the last date / time that Destiny 2 had its weekly reset (every Tuesday at 1700 UTC). Finding the previous Tuesday wasn’t too difficult, but adding the specific time on Tuesday added some complexities and I wanted to share my solution in Rust using the Chrono library. First, lets look at a quick solution to get the last previous day of week (in this case Tuesday):

I have been spending some time the past week playing around with Arch Linux. I really like the approach of a bare bones install and understanding every single thing on your system. However, this can lead to some frustration when you are first starting out (my first install I ended up without a network, any fonts or a kernel!). Anyways, I think the most workable barebones install of Arch Linux is basically the base Linux install with a window manager.

I have been wanting to learn a bit more about Linux, and see if it could maybe work for me as a day to day machine for general development and usage. I have some old laptops laying around that I’m not currently using, so I figured I would spend the weekend and install Linux one of them. I decided on ArchLinux as it seems to be well regarded and is bare bones, built for people who want to learn how things actually work, and want to freedom and flexibility to build and configure the exact system they want.

I have been playing around with the Alpha version of Flutter Desktop lately, and needed to use a SQLite database which I may need to update at runtime. This was causing an an issue, as once I loaded the database file into SQLite it was holding a lock on the file (and thus preventing me from overwriting it). Since I was only reading from the database, and never writing, I wanted to just completely load the database into memory and disconnect it from the file.

Grant Skinner and I have released a new iOS and Android app for Destiny 2. Redrix is a Destiny 2 PVP companion app which gives you information and stats when playing Crucible mode in Destiny 2. The response from the community has been overwhelming. The app made the front page of Reddit (2), and has had a couple of articles and reviews posted online. We are using Bungie’s Destiny 2 API, which really gives a ton of information about what is going on in game.

I have ported my Twitch Live browser extension for Google Chrome to Firefox. Twitch Live is a toolbar extension that makes it easy to see when your favorite streamers on Twitch are live. There are options to open streams in a new window or tab, to enable notifications, as well as filter out vod casts / reruns. You can install the extension from the Firefox Add-Ons site. If you have any issues, just ping me at @mesh on twitter.

I have been playing around with openFrameworks and some Perlin noise this weekend, and put together a quick project which autogenerates high resolution desktop wallpaper graphics. I grabbed a couple of my favorites and wanted to share them here to make them easy to download. You can grab the code on my github page. Here are the graphics. Just click through for the high resolution version.

Paper.js is currently the primary creative framework that I use for my creative coding. I really like its API, which is easy to use and extend, the ease in exporting vectors graphics from it (making it easy to create high resolution prints), and the general ease of development due to the use of JavaScript and running within the browser. While I do sometimes miss the higher performance that lower level frameworks like processing or openFrameworks provide, for the most part the advantages of Paper.

I have put together a Google Chrome extension named Adobe Live on Behance which makes it easy to keep track of when Adobe is live streaming from Behance. Install Adobe Live on Behance Chrome Extension. To use, install the extension which will place a small Behance icon on the Chrome tool bar. When Adobe is live, the icon will turn blue, and show “LIVE”. Just click the icon, and the live stream will load.