An #UX problem that has been bothering me for the some months now: The MyVodafone app has not been adjusted for inflation (at least in Portugal).
Comparing the "Yorn" phone plans from 2015/2018/2021/2023:
- 2015: €1.80/wk (~€7/month), €2.35/wk (~€9/month), €3.90/wk (~16€/month)
- 2018: €2.25/wk (~€9/month), €3.99/wk (~16€/month)
- 2021: €2.75/wk (~€11/month), €3.99/wk (~16€/month), €4.99/wk (~20€/month)
- 2023: €2.95/wk (~€12/month), €4.10/wk (~16€/month), €5.30/wk (~21€/month), €6.35/wk (~25€/month)
Meanwhile, the payment options are still €5/€10/€15 - which were OK for ~2015 prices, but now pretty much all plans require you to charge a custom amount.
I wonder if this is an oversight or if there's some fear that changing the values will make more users aware of the price changes.
João Costa shared 6 days ago
LETSSS GOOOO; Kenney Game Assets All-in-1 is FREE today, instead of the usual $19.95. Get all my game assets in a single bundle, great for learning new engines 👀
Download/claim here:
https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-game-assets
Just moved this server from Contabo to Hetzner.
I've been having quite some technical problems lately (which might have been my fault), but this time it felt particularly bad:
- Rebooting the instance from the UI didn't fix the problem
- I couldn't connect to the machine via SSH or VNC
- The "rescue" option didn't work (I still couldn't connect to the machine with the rescue image running)
I contacted support which, to their credit, responded in a timely manner, and apparently they just rebooted the machine and things just stated working. 
So, overall I think their offer might be pretty good if you don't need uptime guarantees (e.g. if you just want to host a minecraft server or something), but I'm not sure if I can keep trusting it to host this blog.
Either way, I'm now on a smaller instance (since Hetzner is a bit more expensive), so maybe things will blow up... Hopefully not
Took a quick break from InterIm development to work on Minart.
Finally got transparencies to work, and the performance doesn't seem that bad. I can get multiple moving particles on the screen with no problems.
To be honest, I picked this up now because I spent way too much time searching for bitmap fonts without transparency for my InterIm demos. That's a thing of the past now.
This weekend I was playing around with InterIm to try out some new features (asRefs macro) and some old ones that were not really tested (custom render ops), so I decided to build a drum machine! 
The API could still use some improvements, but this is getting to an almost usable state.
Font: Spleen by Frederic Cambus (https://github.com/fcambus/spleen) Drum Samples: Free Pipe Pack by Goldbaby (https://www.goldbaby.co.nz/freestuff.html)
João Costa shared a month ago
Junta-te ao esforço de arquivamento do #sapovideos!
Depois de mais de uma década como a principal plataforma de vídeos em Portugal, o Sapo Vídeos vai eliminar o seu arquivo a 17 de setembro. Trata-se da perda irremediável de um espólio cultural, mas é possível evitarmos esse destino.
O @hugopeixoto tomou a dianteira e criou um kit para se poder participar no esforço de download do que ainda está up. Se tiveres um par de terabytes disponível por aí, precisamos da tua ajuda!
Entretanto estamos a procurar soluções para alojar o arquivo de forma mais permanente. Se tiveres alguma pista, somos todos ouvidos.
João Costa shared a month ago
A Scala port of @karpathy's llama2.c: https://github.com/jrudolph/llama2.scala Even without optimizations performance is surprisingly acceptable (-6%, single-threaded on GraalVM)
João Costa shared a month ago
I was really inspired by an article Tyler Hobbs wrote about flow fields, so I translated it into Scala and wrote https://chris-kipp.io/blog/an-intro-to-flow-fields-in-scala. l learned a ton in the process, and am really enjoying playing around with these concepts. This will also be the topic of my talk this week at Scala in the City in London.
Just released InterIm, an immediate mode GUI library in pure Scala: https://github.com/JD557/interim
Published to JVM/JS/Native and backend agnostic: You give it the current input state and it returns a set of basic operations for you to render.
You can play around with an online example in https://joaocosta.eu/Demos/InterIm/
Today I was playing a bit with immediate mode GUIs, trying to port the code from https://solhsa.com/imgui/.
This actually worked pretty well and, while still pretty imperative, I was able to hide some of the ugly mutable code with Scala 3 context functions.
For fun, I also made sure that the code received a structure with inputs and returned a sequence of operations that need to be interpreted. That way it is completely backend agnostic (like microui).
Maybe I'll clean it up a bit (at least to add text support) and open source it.
OK, I finally took the time to version control all custom changes that I have in this instance: https://github.com/JD557/microblog.pub
I needed to do this anyway to comply with AGPL. I'm posting this note just in case someone comes looking for the link - I should probably add the link to the footer, but that's something for the future.
João Costa shared 4 months ago
Our new video! We take you on a journey through a small game world and showcase the non-Euclidean transformations of its third dimension.
Full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Rhjv_PazzZE #noneuclidean #mathart #mathviz #NoneuclideanGeometry #rogueviz
João Costa shared 4 months ago
Out Scala Space is on mastodon! Follow to get all the newest info about the initiatives we are involved in. Only technical toots! @scala_space
João Costa shared 4 months ago
Thanks to Scala Native, #scala is in the same pool as Go, Zig and other very fast languages in this little benchmark for cold-start performance.
I contributed adding Scala to this nice benchmark 🙂
https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison
João Costa shared 4 months ago
The incredible folks at Game Dev Lisbon have put together a magazine compiling #gamedev studios, events, universities and the various organisations/communities from the portuguese games industry! It's an amazing effort showing how diverse the industry in #portugal is becoming! 🇵🇹
Catalogue with just the studios: https://bit.ly/GDL01Catalog
Version with everything on it: https://bit.ly/GDL01Full
And of course, if you want to know more about the Game Dev Lisbon folks, check https://gamedevlisbon.com! ✨
It's been a while since I entered a gamejam and I won't be able to make it to the next #LudumDare, so I decided to enter MiniJam 130 with another game in #Scala.
The themes are "Lunar" and "10 Seconds", so I went for the least original idea: A lunar lander clone with a 10 second time limit.
As usual, you can play it on itch.io and check the source code on GitHub.
There are quite a few performance issues (don't try it on Firefox) and I found quite some bugs in Minart during the development. However, it's going to take me a while to fix them, so that will have to wait for a post-jam version.
One of the reasons I like to enter jams once in a while is to find bugs/problems in Minart. On that regard, this was clearly a success.
Debugging some audio problems recently.
How it started:
Fucking Firefox always giving me performance problems, I bet they messed up the WebAudio implementation.
How it's going:
How the hell were Chrome, JVM and SDL still playing audio with my stack-exploding accidentally-quadratic code?
#TIL about the QOA audio format, which seems to be pretty recent - 2 months old, based on the announcement blog post.
It's a simple audio format for lossy audio compression (in the same way that QOI is a simple lossless image format).
This couldn't come in a better time, as I was looking for simple compressed audio formats (and if it's just like QOI, it's going to be great for sure 
).
Can't wait to take it for a spin.
Just took some time to setup Airflow and convert some old cronjob into a DAG.
This is way overkill for my needs (it was mostly to play a bit with Airflow), but I find it pretty interesting on how the whole tool/paradigm kind of guides you into having a easily debuggable job:
- Since everything is a DAG, it feels a bit off to have just a single task, so you break your work in small tasks.
- But now you need to pass data between tasks, and the simplest way to do that is by having intermediate snapshots.
- And since you need to pick a name for the snapshots, it's quite intuitive to just add a timestamp, so you go for the nicely provided
dsvariable, which is the logical run date of the job (reproducible when you rerun the jobs, this is no "datetime.now()").
So now my old hacky shell script to notify me of free Steam games is now a fully reproducible pipeline with monitoring, logging and data snapshots. 
Maybe now I'll find out why the script stopped working a while ago 
Today I was playing around with sprite stacks, which is something I wanted to do for a while.
It's so cool how easy it is to get something that looks "kind of 3D". Just make a quick model in MagicaVoxel, export to a sprite sheet and draw the sprites in order with some displacement depending on the camera position.
Even putting shadows on the ground is not that hard. It's kind of the same thing, but with a displacement based on height (instead of camera position).
Not sure if I'll do anything else with it, but it was fun.