News - nuwen.net

I updated the Links page, adding a few new links and fixing a broken one.
I replaced all of my old jumptables, even on pages that I'm no longer updating. (Jumptables are the things immediately below the site directory on some pages.) This doesn't really modernize my old pages, but at least it makes them look slightly less hideous.
I removed some insanely stale sections from the Archived News page; all that remains are the news posts themselves.
I removed my 6 ancient essays. These were relics of a time when I was still trying to imitate my pre-2000 site by writing about whatever came to mind.
I removed the Parrises Squares page. I released that game over 5 years ago, and its source code had become actively harmful to the uninformed. (I was, however, able to salvage its OpenGL initialization code for Spacetimewar.)

I have a few more things to mention about the games that consumed my life recently:

For me, one of the most "emergent" things about GTA4 was finding cars. The Turismo sports car is one of the best cars in the game (I compared it to the other sports cars, but not extensively, since I kept coming back to the Turismo). "Best" means "accelerates well", "handles well", and "doesn't explode". As the Turismo has its engine in the back, the game's damage model makes it almost invulnerable, which is nice. They're rare, and they're consumable (if driven into the water). So, this led to a minigame for me: find and collect every Turismo in sight. By the time I was done, I had parked two Turismos in front of each of my safe houses.

Playing D&D 4e is a remarkable turn of events for me. When I was at Caltech, I used to laugh at the people who played D&D in a common room. Of course, I had been exposed to the game system through Neverwinter Nights and Knights Of The Old Republic, but playing the tabletop game seemed strange to me. Later, I flirted with playing 3.5e with a few friends, but that petered out quickly. 3.5e's rules were stupidly complex (I can keep track of complicated rules - that's my day job, after all - but not stupid rules, like "full attacks"), and I hated the Vancian magic system ("fire and forget"; the less you know about it, the better). Recently, I heard about how 4e had simplified the rules and eliminated Vancian magic, which immediately hooked me. Indeed, 4e's rules make a lot more sense, and low-level wizards are actually fun to play now. In fact, I've gone so far as to DM a campaign for my best friend, who is controlling 6 PCs simultaneously. It's great fun, but also time-consuming; fortunately, it's not all-devouring like a video game would be.

Geometry Wars 2 fixes all of the things that I disliked about the first one (insanely rapid difficulty progression and insanely nasty penalties for death), and looks way better. Now I've got to make Spacetimewar look as good.

Go play Braid, if you haven't heard about it already. I like to call it, A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Reversible.

8/14/2008 - I return!

Where did I go? To places called GTA4, D&D 4^th Edition, Geometry Wars 2, and Braid. And work, although I have far fewer magical powers there. Now that I'm back, thanks to the finiteness of my addictions, I'm working on nuwen.net again, and will soon resume working on Spacetimewar.

Version 3.10 of my MinGW Distro contains Boost 1.36.0.

I've read and scanned several more SF novels, and I bought a new copy of Walden Two to scan. I've gotten several mails about my lack of reviews; I plan to start reviewing books this weekend.

I've renamed the Index page to the News page, which accurately describes it, although I haven't changed its URL. That reminds me: nuwen.net is now 8 years old, ignoring name changes. And I am now 25.

When I paused working on Spacetimewar, I had successfully replaced my font rendering code with FreeType. Now I just have to reimplement gradient coloring.

More tomorrow.

5/19/2008 - Version 3.9 of my MinGW Distro is now available.

5/5/2008 - Version 3.8 of my MinGW Distro contains a functionality fix for GNU make and a security fix for libpng.

Recently, I've been working on Spacetimewar:

Spacetimewar Renderer (With Background)

Spacetimewar Renderer (Without Background)

Aside from making the renderer use vertex buffer objects for increased speed, and removing a special (and slow) codepath for non-power-of-two textures (which OpenGL 2.0, now my minimum requirement, supports natively), I've added machinery for OpenGL shaders. I implemented photosphere and corona shaders to make my awesome sun.

The only thing left to do before I write the game engine itself is to replace my font rendering code with FreeType, for kerning and borders.

Older News

News: 2008 - in which STL writes Spacetimewar.
News: 2007 - in which STL plays Supreme Commander.
News: 2006 - in which STL rewrites libnuwen.
News: 2005 - in which STL plays World Of Warcraft.
News: 2004 - in which STL graduates, but doesn't go to graduate school.
News: 2003 - in which STL applies to graduate school.
Archived News - where news posts go to die.

About This Site

What is nuwen.net?

A collection of things which are intended to be useful to readers.

This type of site, with its focus on useful things, is now rather unusual. It is different from a blog, which (being chronologically organized) is about events. It is also different from a journal, which is a blog about people. While my chronologically organized news posts often talk about events (sometimes sounding suspiciously blog-like) and myself (sometimes sounding suspiciously journal-like), neither the news posts nor myself are the focus of this site. The news posts are fundamentally a ChangeLog for the real stars of this show: the pages about stuff.

John Walker's fourmilab.ch is a larger example of this sort of thing. It was, and continues to be, the inspiration for nuwen.net.

Who writes nuwen.net?

As the footer on each of my pages mentions, my name is Stephan T. Lavavej. To learn more about me, including my elusive middle name, see my personal page.

You can help me improve my writing by sending me feedback. Do you like what I've written? Do you dislike it? Is something broken? How did you get here? (Through a search engine? From another site? Etc.) Please E-mail me at stl@nuwen.net with your thoughts.

How long has nuwen.net existed?

Since June 5, 2000, although it experienced a few name changes before receiving its current and permanent name.

How is "nuwen" pronounced, and what does it mean?

It's pronounced "noo-when", and it's a reference to my favorite character, Pham Nuwen, in my favorite science fiction novel, A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge ("vin-jee"). The novel implies that this far-future last name is derived from today's Nguyen. And Pham rhymes with "ROM", although I usually mispronounce it to rhyme with "RAM".

In actuality, the name of this site is a subtle hint that you should read A Deepness In The Sky and its sequel A Fire Upon The Deep. Both novels are extremely rich in concepts and terminology, which I delight in referring to.

http://nuwen.net/index.html
Stephan T. Lavavej
stl@nuwen.net
Updated 8/22/2008.