Jenna's Virtual Life 1.1 is now public

 With the release of Jenna's Virtual Life 1.2 on Patreon, the previous version 1.1 is now publicly available. As I decided to use Itch.IO for public releases, it can be downloaded from there: https://fairyhataka.itch.io/jennas-virtual-life

Change log for version 1.1:

• There is a new character available: Mr Williams, Jenna's manager
• The manager gets upset if Jenna misses work for more than 6 hours in a month

You can also read the log on Itch: https://fairyhataka.itch.io/jennas-virtual-life/devlog/414735/jennas-virtual-life-version-11

Jenna's Virtual Life on Itch

The public version of Jenna's Virtual Life is available on Itch.IO: https://fairyhataka.itch.io/jennas-virtual-life

I am planning to make all future public releases through this platform.

Private releases will remain available on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FairyHataka

Enjoy!

Ray Tracing

 I am doing lots of renders for my 3D adult game Jenna's Virtual Life. I always wondered how these are actually being done and why it takes so much time to render. I found a very nice explanation of the ray tracing process here: https://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-rendering/introduction-to-ray-tracing/how-does-it-work

There is also a basic implementation of the algorithm. Seems like a fun thing to try at some point :)

Jenna's Virtual Life 1.0

Version 1.0 of the game Jenna's Virtual Life is now available, first on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FairyHataka?filters[tag]=release

Change log:

• The game script is now fully functional
• You can die if: do not pee for 12 hours, do not eat for 24 hours, remain without money
• You can play the game for as long as you want if you manage to avoid dying

Linux text editors

 Today I had a discussion with a colleague about text editors in Linux and which one is the best editor. I realized people don't know lots of text editors (I guess I also don't know about all of them). But here are a few (the ones installed on the machine I was working on):

1. VI

2. NANO

3. MCEDIT

Personally I prefer mcedit . It's part of the Midnight Commander package. It's very intuitive and you see on the bottom bar all the shortcuts in case you forgot one of them. 

Jenna's Virtual Life 0.3

 A new version of the game Jenna's Virtual Life is now available on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FairyHataka?filters[tag]=release

Change log:

• Most of the images are now in High-Res (1920x1080, HD resolution)
• Added a new location: the office toilet
• Romantic encounter with Robert at home
• The game scenario allows for more interactions

Turning a JFrame into a JDialog

 I recently had to turn a JFrame into a JDialog. This means transforming a regular window into a dialog. In turn, this means blocking the main application window until the user does something in the newly created dialog (also known as "modal dialog"). It's actually quite easy to do. Even though at first I was tempted to start creating a new dialog from scratch, it turns out it's just a simple change in a few lines of code.

Here is an extract from my JFrame code:

JFrame mainFrame = new JFrame("Settings");

buildContent();

mainFrame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

mainFrame.pack();

mainFrame.setSize(1200, 900);

mainFrame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);

mainFrame.setVisible(true);

And how it looks like after conversion to JDialog (I only changed 2 lines of code, those in red):

JDialog mainFrame = new JDialog(this.appFrame,"Settings",true);

buildContent();

//mainFrame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

mainFrame.pack();

mainFrame.setSize(1200, 900);

mainFrame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);

mainFrame.setVisible(true);

You probably want to avoid JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE but this is how it was implemented. You may also want to do some other checks, like making sure appFrame is indeed set to the main application frame. And maybe you don't want the dialog to be that large on the screen. But for a quick JFrame to JDialog conversion, this should work ok.