The past week has been hasn’t been very productive, and I’ve needed to take a few days off.

I’ve been working on PoD now for 13 weeks, 12 of which have been non-stop. I’m not saying I’m getting burnout. However, I know it’s important to take a break every now and then for your sanity. So I started learning Python during my time off, not taking a break, right?

Wrong, lol; the break was from sitting at my computer or laptop. So instead, I bought some old-fashioned books. I have read “Python Programming” by Lewis Taylor & Eric Matthews, “Python Machine learning for Beginners” by Gary Gold” and “Python for Beginners:” by Santos Ozoemena. I learned a lot from these books, even if I already knew most of the basics because of Ren’Py. Reading beginner books might seem pointless if you’ve been coding for three months already, right? Well, it’s about understanding ‘Why’ more than anything.

On Monday, I reviewed some of my code against code in The Fosters by 13 Games, and I had my trusty friend Thor’s Hamster on VC. We were talking about my Character Bio screen, variables, values and how they’re called to the screen. During our call, we noticed that one of the character portraits was clipped in the viewport. As a good dev, I wanted this fixed, so we started debugging the issue, and both took different solutions to resolve it. I added the null height = 60, and hey presto, no clipping. But Thor wanted to know why it was clipping in the first place and said that using the null height is more of a cheat than an actual fix, po-tay-to, to-mah-to, right? 

That’s what I thought, a fix is a fix, but I must admit when we fixed it without the null height, it made a lot of sense to fix it at the source rather than implementing a quick fix as I had. It turned out to be simple too:

vpgrid:

                ypos 20 # used to stop the images overlapping the text in the vbox above
                 cols 4
                 rows 5
                 spacing 50…

Became this:

vpgrid:

# ypos 50 wasn’t needed, ‘null height 20’ was used to stop the images overlapping the text in the vbox above in the code above
 cols 4
 rows 5
 spacing 50…

It was a pretty simple fix in the end, but we spent a lot of time discussing how the code worked and why it did the things it does. Unfortunately, halfway through, I got lost; I’m not a programmer but can follow logic very well due to being an Engineer. This was when I realised I needed to gain a better understanding of Python; to be able to fully grasp what the code is doing and why it behaves the way it does.

I am now 75% through scene 4 and have acquired and set up the environment for scene 5, but that’s about it, so minimal movement from last week. However, I had to re-render ALL of the 4th scenes renders due to clipping or missing shaders. Note to self: don’t move your Daz Libraries.

I’ve had some good discussions on what to do with the added scenes 6 to 8, so I have to write the script for them. This will be after I have completed 4,5,9 & 10 as these were all the planned scenes initially, and I’ve got the script all coded. I’m also toying with the idea of adding a short scene for the Extra version only over just adding an extension to a scene.

That’s it for this week, folks, slightly shorter than usual, and it’s not because today’s Sunday and 1:00 pm, and there’s a nice roast beef dinner with loads of Yorkshire puddings and horseradish sauce waiting for me.

Snowy

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