WIP WednesdayWIP WednesdayWIP WednesdayDecember 20, 2023December 20, 2023December 20, 2023
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Hey everyone, I’m here for a quick pre-holiday Work-In-Progress Wednesday! This is gonna be a bit more of a chill one since Christmas is right around the corner. But… It’s not that chilly here in Minnesota this year! Where’s all the snow?! At least it’s not icy outside- That’s a big deal for me and Garnet when we’re out walking, so I’m happy with that! Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to the past couple weeks.
Christmas Card
Here’s my family’s Christmas card for this year! We do one most years, but I think this year’s turned out the best yet. I picked out some of my favorite pictures of my folks and Garnet and me to work with, and the collage look turned out nice. Garnet likes the Santa hat!
Garnet
I’m happy to report that Garnet is doing a lot better since last week. She turned 10 this summer, and began having seizures in October, which became more frequent in November and December. We first tried a medicine that stopped them, but it made her extremely tired and groggy. Last week we switched her meds and unfortunately had a pretty bad day because the new med didn’t work for her. However, since switching meds again last Thursday Garnet has been very VERY good!
The new meds are working fantastic, and she’s seizure-free and acts like she’s 4 or 5 again. She feels great and wants to walk, eat, play, and have good ol’ corgi fun! She is drinking a lot of water (one of the med’s side effects is thirst) and needs to go out a lot more, but we’re making it work. We’re all hoping she’ll continue feeling her best for a long long time!
Programming
I had the past couple weeks earmarked as “programming time,” but honestly I haven’t been able to get as much done as I wanted. Between Christmas prep / shopping / wrapping and Garnet’s health issue, it was a lot to manage and there were many sleepless nights. I did get a useful thing done though:
This is an addition to a small library I’m working on with a friend, and like it says, it lets you hook up editable variables with controls. That’s not special in and of itself, but it tries to make it super easy and has support for custom validation functions and for drawing special widgets.
For example, the code to edit the above variables is just one line for each property. It automatically handles limiting the min/max values you can input. For the most part it “just knows” what kind of input widget to use, but you can explicitly tell it to treat certain things as colors or sliders.
Using custom validation functions, it’s easy to restrict the input to what you want. Errors and warnings print automatically. Invalid values never get pushed to the actual variable, so dealing with invalid input is a thing of the past.
At the end of the day it’s really just a different way of doing things- This can all certainly be done with just Dear ImGui. I like to think this is easier and cleaner though, so I like it! It’s going to be useful in a lot of my projects.
Other than that, that’s pretty much all for now! I still want to swing around and work on my game engine, and I think I’ll have time for that in the new year. Maybe I’ll do a little before, but I’ve got to take some days off too! After all the stress of Garnet not feeling well, I really feel like I need to rest and reset. So glad she’s feeling better!
Long story short, happy holidays, and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the year! I’ll possibly see you sometime around New Year’s with a year in review video, and I’m already really looking forward to the first pixel art of 2024. I can’t wait to make more amazing things this coming year! Thank you all for being a part of it and following along on my journey.
– Will