Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Bring Me My Wireless Cable

2024-Jan-24

Quite a gap in the update pacing. Almost a whole month without any new development fruit to harvest into pithy blog posts framing these efforts as anecdotes that tell a more interesting story than the bare recounting of what is different about the codebase since the last blog post date. Nor incredibly personal reviews of old paperbacks from my father’s library or modern films. The whole development staff here at the website were devoted to getting certified for some cloud products from Microsoft. These certifying efforts will pay off when the robot wars start and this house has sworn fealty to the Azure crest as their liege lord. That’s not likely to happen right away, so let us get to more short term stuff to blog about.

The ongoing refactoring work has had some pioneering use of data architecture, class methods, and decorators. By data architecture, I mean there is a concerted effort to diagram the data i/o for storing ‘dimensions’ that come from my big ‘fact’ tables that get appended daily. My dimensional tables that I call ‘catalogs’ are getting one more metadata column so I can keep track of changes in the data. I have hit my first rate limit wall from the Spotify API when I kept asking to make 970 API calls in each function of mine to update my dim table. Luckily I stashed a CSV this morning. Coupling that with the class method + decorators, I think I can make some scaffolding or failsafe functions that are very re-usable. I’ve had them before but they were functions that are usually forgotten after they were used for one particular purpose or error correction.

Along with that, the track catalog has the backend built and some rought templates are already up and running on the dev version. That’s a rapid development pipeline!

The review for today is a video game. An exhibitionary review. A preview, if you will. The word preview is a bit superficial considering I have put in over 48 hours of total play time on Satisfactory. I have seen the furthest depths of effort this game could require, so 48 hours is actually about the time it takes to break-in almost every facet of the game and what is left is mastering. In this game’s case, mastery would be maximizing the efficiency of manufacturing products. That concept does not sound like it would normally make me untearable from my PC, but that has not been the case.

What separates this game from Factorio, another notable entry in the ‘automation of production’ as video game genre, is the first person perspective. That actually turned me off at first glance. I had the suspicion that foraging and survival would be more a consideration in the gameplay rather than factory planning. Satisfactory does offer some refreshing FPS aspects here and there. The heart and soul of the game is organizing moving parts to pump out increasingly complex items. Moving around the factory as a first-person jumping shooting video game character becomes its own mini-game. Assembling tractors, jetpacks, and Futurama style people moving tubes come into play.

The game is in ‘early access’, something else about this game that put me off for years despite hearing an accolade from a friend. Eventually I am told the ‘final’ release will have a story driven mode and a fully fleshed tutorial. At the moment the game is a very big sandbox with not that much internal documentation. I try to limit my exposure to what is the most popular way of handling the obstacles the game can provide. The one tidbit I am glad I learned is the difference between manifolds and load balancers.