Late Night Push

It was late and I wasn't asleep for some reason, so last night / this early a.m. I made myself a revolver, added a modified version of the Linden Revolver Script and an explosive upwards-push bullet, created some target dummies - simple wooden pyramids with balls on top, physics and temporary - and took them all to a sandbox, where I spent some time shooting them and then trying to shoot them again on the way down. (Total score: zero.)

What struck me was how normal this seemed. Here I was in an area full of lots of other complex, scripted objects, blasting things up in the air in real time, watching them spin around, bounce on the ground and so on, all in real time, all of it relying on a general physics engine rather than something specialised for this purpose. I could have, and did, change the details, add new objects, modify the code, change the whole behaviour at a moment's notice, with very little time required to re-compile. That's actually pretty damn impressive stuff for a program to do. But it was only when I thought about it that I noticed.

Jaded? Jaded would have been if I'd said "this is rubbish" instead of having fun blowing things up. In any case, we can't sit around marvelling at technological advances, or we'd still be pointing at wheels and saying "wow, I just can't get over how good those things are". As I always say, the human capacity to find the most amazing things ordinary is something that stops us just spending our entire lives looking up at the sky.

I'll post some stuff about scripting bullets later.