On Being Successful

For the majority of my life I couldn’t give two shits about being ‘successful’. As a natural born contrarian troublemaker child, the more and more people told me about the importance of finding a successful career, the more and more I wanted to disprove them all. Through the counter-culture crowds I was interested in at an early age – skateboarding and punk rock music – the idea of putting down my childhood interests and focusing on work was instilled in me to be something only dull conformists did. So I went on like that, even into my adulthood, carrying this concept of a good life only containing the activities and passions that gave me fun in the moment. Disregard the long-term plans, put it all into what’s fun right now.

This strategy works for a while, and the more practice that’s put into those activities and passions, the longer that lifestyle can be kept up. Yet, then there’s the problem… practice requires work. It requires doing less child-like play and more adult-like detailed refinement. It takes repetitively doing the same few things until it’s not fun anymore, and then continuing to do them until you’ve gained some mastery.

If you’re interested and passionate about something, you’ll naturally be better than the average Joe at it… but that only gets you so far. To be truly good enough at something to earn money from it, you’ve got to work hard at it. If it’s something that a lot of people enjoy doing, a lot of people are going to be moderately good at it. Quite a few people will be even better because they put more time and energy into it. A smaller fraction of people are going to be amazingly talented and skilled at it because they worked their hands to the bone to achieve that. So to make money from an activity, you’ve got to be on the same level as the hard workers… since there’s always only a limited money to be made from any given passion you might be interested in. You have to earn your share.

With all this competition, hard work, and practice… the process of gaining skill doing something you love can start to feel like serious work. That flies in the face of the childhood concepts of just having fun and enjoying yourself. If the goal is to spend your life doing the things you love to do because you think it will be easier and more fun… turning those things into a difficult grueling process of achievement can end up making you enjoy doing them less. The only other choice is to avoid putting in the hard work to get better at them and instead sacrificing your quality of life for it. Don’t strive to be one of the best, just do your thing and be happy with what you get from it. For the love of the passion and the ease of the experience, you’ll give up the opportunity for an improved lifestyle. You’ll give up money and the comforts that come with it, you won’t go as many places, you won’t meet as many people. At the end of the day it will be same as it always was: you having fun playing with your passions, taking only what you can get, reliving your childhood all the time – all the enjoyment with none of the responsibilities.

We’d all like to think that we’re unique enough or naturally gifted enough to not have to push to get that much better. It’s easy to get clouded by ego and confidence to think that some how, since we enjoy our passion so much, there’s got to be someone out there that enjoys what we make or do enough to give us money for it. No effort required. Picasso scribbled on napkins and sold them for thousands of dollars, so why can’t you? Reality TV stars can sit eating chips on a couch and making hundreds of thousands per episode, so why can’t you? Online social influencers just write tweets or make short silly videos all day and make millions, so why can’t you? It’s all just a cop out. It’s an easy way to avoid the responsibility of working hard. You don’t see all the hard work they actually put in behind the scenes, and you don’t see the millions of other people that tried to do those things but wound up with nothing to show for it.

People play the lottery and make millions without having to lift a finger, but they just won the money of the millions of people that bought a ticket that week and wound up with nothing. Millions of people try to get famous online, or get casted for TV shows, or skribble on far more creative things than napkins… and where are they? You pass them on the street everyday without a second thought, they’re the everyone and anyone that surrounds you at any given moment.

After all is said and done, only doing what’s fun and avoiding what’s difficult will only force you into bigger difficulties. Children can play and enjoy their pass-times all day long because they don’t need to pay bills. They’re relatively carefree and the world is still a huge unexplored place of wonder. We all vie to return to that childhood state of wide open fields of free time, without a care in the world. That’s why deep down everyone wants to be somewhat rich and successful, with all their dreams coming true, without ever putting in any more work than they’re comfortable with. Then you can enjoy that child-like state endlessly. We hear stories or witness instances of this happening with others so we sit and wait for it to happen to us. “Take it easy”, “enjoy”, “relax”, “have fun”, “don’t worry”, “if it’s meant to happen it will just happen”. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Expecting to suddenly fall into the perfect life without having to struggle or put serious work into it is the same as expecting the wind to blow a winning lottery ticket into your window one day with enough velocity to land on your TV remote to turn it on just as the winning numbers are being drawn and suddenly you’re awoken from your couch to thrust into the fabulous life. I’m sure it could possibly happen one day, but I wouldn’t spend my whole life waiting for it if I were you.

Success can be defined in so many different ways. Happiness with friends and family, contributing to a good cause, earning a good living, collecting the last Pokemon card for your completed collection, finding the perfect cherry blossom in a Japanese forest, or just not waking up with a sore knee. I can’t even begin to pretend that I know all of the different ways you might describe the concept of success but I do know 2 things for sure. ALL of those things still require incredible effort, and no matter what it is – sacrificing instant rewards for long time benefits will ALWAYS make your improve your success. So regardless of what you value, if you want to have more of it – focused hard work is both unavoidable, and will always lead you to it.

A major component to all of this is being stuck on the concept of being content with what you have. It drums up admirable images of a humble, lovable, joyful baker – just happy to make a few cookies and earn only enough to get by. Maybe you envision the impoverished guy that worked for Ebenezer Scrooge in ‘A Christmas Carol’ who struggled to make ends-meet for his family and disabled son ‘Tiny Tim’. There are plenty of examples from popular culture that glorify and tunnel the audience into emphasizing, identifying, or just out-right feeling sorry for them. We like them because they don’t step on any toes. They’re always nice. They value being kind or generous with the little that they have over anything else. We want to be like them because they have so little, but do so much. At the same time we see characters that are the opposite. We see the evil characters in suits holding briefcases going to high-power board meetings and we’re taught to equate a successful mind-set, lifestyle, or wealth as being evil – with efforts put more into gaining and taking, rather than sharing with others.

In the real world, the lines aren’t so clearly defined but it’s still easy to mimic these stories and caricatures. It can be easy to assume that it’s honorable to live a meager life and be happy with only what you have. Yet, the reality of the situation is much different than it appears in fantasy. Tiny Tim’s father should have put as much of his effort as possible into finding a way to make a better life for his family and he should have quit working for Scrooge a long time ago. It’s a disappointing day when you have to rely on unlikely occurrence of Christmas ghosts to improve your life. I’ve met many, many people who make due with a low earning wage, low expectations for themselves, and high resistances toward working for bigger goals to improve their life. They use the excuses of making time for their family, or not being smart enough, or not knowing what to do, or where to start. You may be one of them and at their face, those excuses can totally feel valid. The tragedy is that your family and friends are worse off because of it. Your loved ones would benefit right alongside you if you realized that being smart is something you must practice daily. If you simply spent an hour or two every night to focus and look for what to do… you’d realize that’s a perfect way to start. Nowadays everyone living in a developed nation is a dozen google searches away from finding what they need to do to live a better life. If your time is limited, then finding ways to make time for it is the perfect way to start. Anyone who ever achieved any success at all had to do the same exact thing, you can too.

We’re taught that it’s neglectful to put all our effort into our career, because it doesn’t leave any time for our families. There are millions of examples of this in real life, you may be or you may know someone who was ignored by their parents because they were too consumed with work to spend enough time with them. It’s a story as old as time, and a topic that would warrant an entirely different blog post of this length. It’s awful to feel ignored. I’m not suggesting that you do that either. The thing is, those driven people that disregarded their family still didn’t put in enough effort to be truly successful either, despite what their bank account totaled, because they didn’t go the extra mile for their loved ones. Most of the time, “over-working” yourself and pouring dozens of hours of overtime every week at your job may be an act of avoidance toward other things, like your family or other important responsibilities.

As with all things, there’s always a balance that one needs to keep in their life. That’s where the effort should be placed. That’s what truly successful people strive for. I’m a firm believer that on this topic, you can certainly have your cake and eat it too. If the goal is to make more money or become amazingly talented at a skill or profession, then dumping all your attention into it and ignoring EVERYTHING else indefinitely is not the answer. Some people do that from the start and always regret not focusing on starting a family. They dive endlessly into their passion or career, then curse themselves for not ever taking a moment to pull their head out of it and look around.

In fact, including as many people as you can and involving your loved ones is often the key to it all. If you want to be a world-class actor or musician, then play some songs with your kids and let them be involved. Run some lines with them from their favorite shows or movies, paying delicate attention to your voice and delivery as you would with an acting coach. If you want to be the most skilled craftsman to have ever walked the planet, then build things for your significant other or your relatives that will help them and put a smile on their face. Let them watch you work and take in all of their comments and any constructive criticisms they might have, it will only make you better. Sometimes they’re the hardest to please. If you’re an accountant, then show your kids how they can turn $10, which only buys a small toy, into $200 … which buys numerous toys and a fun night out.

You won’t capture their attention with a single occurrence of something like this. At first, they may respond with the same resistance you felt before you ever started. That’s OK. It has to just become something you do every day, all the time, any chance you get, regardless of who’s watching. Find ways to involve them and captivate them, have them join your team, and always do it in a way that they can see the success you’re striving for so they realize it’s real – not just a daydream you’re poking at. Show them the failures of your attempts so they’re involved with the process, and they can celebrate with you when you succeed.

If you think you don’t have time to spend quality time with your loved ones while also pursuing success, pay attention to how you spend time with them now. Choosing to sit and watch TV with your kids isn’t quality time, you’re just near each other as you vege out in your own worlds. Neither is always doing the same things with them just because that’s what you’ve always done, and changing it up would ruffle their feathers. Showing your kids what driven passionate people do with their time and all the work that’s required to become skilled at something, or earn money, or make progress in life – now that’s real quality time. Show them the basics, it gives you a chance to revisit them for practice and it gives them the opportunity to join in.

If you’re interested in pursuing this success without them and it involves doing things you don’t want to involve them with… something is out of place, something is misaligned. Either you’re trying to find ways to avoid them and ‘take breaks’ from them, or they’re not in touch with what makes you truly genuinely happy. Those are tough topics to consider and even tougher situations to confront… and they don’t always have to be involved, or even accept what you want to do. However, it’s up to you to rectify that in the best way you can find.

Your family and friends might hate it and think you’re wasting your time, but that’s ok – that’s the constructive criticism that you need. Why do they hate it? Work to make them see what you see, or realize that it should be hated and find something better that works with your life. Why do they think it’s a waste of time? Work to give them assurances that it’s not a waste, work to become so good that it’s undeniable that you should be striving to get better, or again – find something to pursue that makes more sense. Even then, they may still have their criticisms, but that’s OK – if you focus, work, and challenge yourself enough every day toward the right thing – the benefits and rewards will be undeniable, they will provide their own proofs for further effort, they’ll make their own sense so that you don’t have to justify them with anything that doesn’t make sense. Then you can use that humble, loving, joyful personality to give the people in your life what they need to follow their own callings and passions. You can convert the dedicated hard work in what you love into a more comfortable life for the people that you love with more opportunity to do what they need to do.

The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to get started.

To sum it up: Productive effort over indulgent fun, proactive focus over the luck of the draw, building more of what you value over making due with what you have, maintaining a balance of attention over a single-minded pursuit, and the inclusion of others over a selfish hoarding of ‘work time’. No matter what you define success to be, that’s the recipe to have more of it. If you can honestly say you’ll always be happy with the success that you have, feel free to forget you ever read this. Thanks for your time.

That’s all the babbling I have time for today, have an awesome day.

Happy New Year! It’s now 2021 and no matter who are, where you are, or when you’re reading this – I hope you have/are having/had a fantastic life this year!

Colorado Vacation

I was lucky enough to spend the first week of the year on vacation in beautiful snowy Colorado. We visited my girlfriends family out there and had a great time. Here’s a video of the scenery from the drive and a few pictures from hikes we went on with the fam:

Being around friendly new people, listening to funny stories, eating delicious family dinners, and taking a break from my usual routine was the perfect way to start the new year. A reset button. It put my whole daily schedule on pause so I could take a breath and experience something new. We hiked and watched the siblings play the new Final Fantasy 7 Remake on my girlfriend’s new Playstation 4. It was nine days away from work and an escape from being quarantined in the house. Fresh air, good people, and good conversation. It really rejuvenated me to start the year with full force.

Game Update for Omnia

Throughout the last week during downtime I worked on my laptop coding more of the fun video game project I’ve been playing with lately, Omnia. Over those 9 days away I was able to make 34 commits to the code base – which was a lot for me. I was able to finish adding the JavaFX framework to the project and get the game running on it without a hitch.

I used that to convert the menus into clickable buttons that look exactly like the old menus…

Then I added the first UI window to the game, a Chat Window. It might sound slightly unimpressive, but I’m really happy I got it working the way I envisioned it. Main breakthrough is that the window works the way windows do in your computer: you can hold a mouse click on the title bar to drag it around and position it in the game screen…

With this ability to drag UI windows and position them in the game opens the door to creating all the other UI windows for the game.

The chat window accepts messages and displays them in the main area of the chat window. I added three different chat commands to test different outputs and colors. Much like popular MMO games like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, or Elder Scrolls Online. Right now this includes ‘Saying’, ‘Shouting’, or ‘Whispering’ messages. They all show up with different colors and outputs…

The idea is that ‘Say’, ‘Shout’, and ‘Whisper’ will allow NPCs in the game to see and respond to your messages.

So next, I added a few NPC characters from a sprite sheet I found from one of the original Pokemon gameboy games. Then I added code that lets two different NPCs respond to your messages differently. The NPC named ‘Doc’ will respond to a message that contains his name and either ‘Hello’ or ‘Greetings’. The NPC named ‘Bro’ will respond to a message that contains his name and either ‘Yo’ or ‘Sup’. Each of them respond with a chat message with one key trigger word in brackets. Doc’s trigger word is [synchotrons], and Bro’s trigger word is [gnarly]. If you include these words in a chat message, they respond again with a message that will begin a quest dialog… here’s another demonstration:

I’m really happy with this progress, if you couldn’t tell. I honestly didn’t expect to figure out how to create the UI window, the chat, the messages and responses, and the other smaller things I worked on this week – I think taking my vacation and getting out of the house helped ALOT with that.

With as excited as I am, the truth is… there’s still more to do. A ton more. I’ve made it so that the NPC will stop pacing back and forth to speak with the Player, but I’d like them to continue their pacing movement after a certain amount of time if you don’t talk to them again. I’d like to improve the architecture of the code that does all this, too. My work over the next week or two will be focused on fine tuning things like that and adding a quest system so that you can start and complete a quest.

Beyond that, I’ve done a ton of planning so that I have a rough outline of everything I’m going to add to the game in the next couple months. After I create a few quests I’ll be adding a money system so that you can get a reward from the quests. Then a merchant system and NPC so that you can buy items with the money. Then an inventory system so that you can store and equip/use those items. A ‘worn’ inventory so that your character’s appearance changes depending on the equipment you’re wearing. Finally, I’ll be adding a lot to the world… that includes structures like buildings and caves, adding doors so that you can enter them, and indoor levels so that you can walk around in them. Adding movement improvements, like jumping and dodging, is on my list too.

My girlfriend talked for hours about the storyline of the game, the world, the flow of playing the game. We got many great ideas started… and if we can pull off even a few of them I think this game will be worth finishing and giving it out for people to play. Yet, that’s entirely different side of creating the game that can’t even start until I write much… much.. more code.

So, with all of that work lined up, I’ll wait until I have a large portion done before the next time I blog about it here…. with the exception of a short video or two. No more long drawn out explanations. I’ll save that for the Omnia website – whenever that gets started! I was just so happy to have figured those few things out this week that I felt like I had to include it in this post.

Interesting Videos

Enough about me and that silly video game. Here’s a 90 minute playlist of random videos I found interesting over the last few months. Let me know what you think of them…

Until tomorrow… have a great day!

On Being Rich

Earning money is important in our society. It decides your freedom by giving you more choices. It’s not everything, but it can really change things. From the places you can afford to visit, to the things you can afford to buy… earning more money can provide you with a better life. For most of us, we earn it a few thousand at a time. If you reach the pinnacle of your career and you’ve really got things going well for yourself – you might be able to clear $20,000 per month. That’s just about $200,000 per year after taxes and to most people – that’s rich. With that kind of money coming in, for the vast majority of people on the planet – you’re considered wealthy. With the proper spending/saving habits, you’ll be a millionaire in less than 10 years.

Yet, that’s the ceiling for someone who only earns their living by working a job that pays a salary. Sure there are plenty of careers out there with big bonuses and stock options that can substantially increase your earnings… but for the most part – if you only earn money by working at a job, even as a Doctor or a Lawyer… it will be difficult to earn more than $400,000 per year.

So after a couple decades of working a high earning career, you can expect to have a few million dollars in net worth, a house or two, a great car, and some nice vacations. I think this is what we all aim for, and a few of us actually accomplish that level of success in life.

If you do more than this, and work at earning more money outside of your career the ceiling raises. With proper investments into the financial markets, real estate, and starting/running businesses… you can multiply your earnings and the money you’re saving in the bank. With your money in stocks you can expect to earn 10% of the money you invest every year, at the most. Put $100k in, and you get $10k more out of it. With your money in real estate, buying houses to fix them up and sell them, or buying houses to rent them out … and some combination of the two… you can earn up to 30% to 50% on your investments depending on your strategy over the course of several years. Put $100k in, and you get $50k more out of it. Starting a businesses could earn more or less depending on how well you do, there are so many variables that go in to it. You can invest in other’s businesses and lighten your workload. You can buy an established business and take over running it… or simply hire others to do that. With all the options it’s hard to pinpoint a rate of return, but over the long run this can earn substantially more if you’re lucky.

So if you earn $500k in your career, and you invest a large portion of that you might earn an extra $100k on top of that in a given year if you’re extremely successful in your investments and other ventures. That can snowball into earning more if it’s reinvested. Your investments and opportunities can grow as you make the right decisions over the years. Eventually, you might be able to end up with a net worth of $10 million .. or even $100 million after enough time. This would be incredibly “lucky”, to say the least. There are so many risks and problems that arise from them. Businesses fail, houses go unsold, the stock market is volatile and your business partners may rob you blind. Even if you try to make every ‘right’ decision and devote your entire life to it, there’s still a chance that you’d never be able to be worth that much.

To you or me, the average Joes, the thought of $100 million is an astronomical figure. It’s a life’s work of endlessly and consistently putting in 100% effort in everything you do. But on the world’s scale of wealth… that’s just getting started.

If you had $100 million by the time you were 70 years old, you’d need another 100 lifetimes to earn $1 billion dollars. We hear the word ‘billion’ so much, that I don’t think it carries the weight and impact it really should. It’s hard for our minds to wrap around the concept of a billion. The only way I’m able to get close is by remembering that 1 million seconds is equal to 11.5 days… but 1 billion seconds is equal to 31.7 YEARS.

Even if you earn $10 million per year, it might take 100 years to eventually save up and accumulate $1 billion. Well, perhaps not… given that idea that the more money you have, the more money you earn. So maybe you land on an amazing idea that revolutionizes an industry, or you’re born into wealth, and you begin your adult life earning $10 million per year. By your 40s or 50s it’s possible to be worth $1 Billion … or perhaps multiple billions of dollars. You could do so much with that much money. Buy a chain of islands or a skyscraper in New York… and still have plenty left over to live an extravagant life off of interest alone. You could afford to give everyone in America $3, or give $1 million to 1000 different charities… and still have $50 million left over from one year’s interest earnings if you held the money for a year first. One billion dollars is truly an other-worldly sum of money, so far removed from the earlier concepts of earning just $200k per year which most of us won’t ever be able to manage successfully.

That’s why, while having many millions of dollars is impressive and difficult to achieve… it’s not necessarily “rich”. Especially not when you place it on a scale with the most wealthy people alive today.

The richest people in the world (that we know of) have over $100 billion. That means … well… I looked up videos about it, and you can see for yourself:

Jeff Bezos, the richest person on the planet until recently, focused on business in his career. He started an online book business with the vision of turning it into an online marketplace, and that vision erupted into the Amazon we know today which not only provides an online marketplace but many other verticals like an online cloud platform that powers many thousands of websites, logistics, warehousing, delivery, smart cars, and who knows what else. He has a hand in other ventures as well, including BlueOrigin which is developing spacecraft and flights.

Yet, our boy Elon Musk, now the richest person on the planet, has held a different strategy throughout his career – hyper-specializing in multiple disciplines of computer programming, physics, engineer, and aeronautics. Building many different businesses that are focused on advanced/next-level ventures and helping to grow them into incredible success, instead of focusing on just one, the list of work he’s be involved with is exhaustive. He was behind early internet companies that included PayPal. He was an early investor and CEO of the most popular electric vehicle company Tesla. He was a major part of the solar power company SolarCity. As well as the first and most successful commercial space flight company SpaceX that created a self-landing reusable rocket and internet based high speed internet network StarLink. He started a company focused on underground high-speed transit The Boring Company. He started a company called Neural-link which is working on connecting computers to our brains (whoa). Finally he helped found OpenAI a non-profit artificial intelligence company that’s recently released GPT-3, one of the most advanced AI products known to date. Altogether, he either created, ran, funded, or developed so many businesses and so many products that are truly “ground-breaking” in so many industries… I can’t even imagine attempting one of them if I had 20 lifetimes to plan for it.

I mean, he created a video game when he was just a kid… on technology that was far more difficult to work with than I have at my disposal. Yet I’m still tinkering with getting my simple video game off the ground.

I think the juxtaposition of these two ‘richest people’ is interesting.

On one hand, we have a man of business and on the other hand, we have a man of science. You can speak endlessly about the money Bezos has raised, the companies he’s acquired with Amazon, the companies that Amazon has run out of business, the working conditions of his employees, and so on… yet the focus of his accomplishments are relatively singular. He runs Amazon. Amazon has changed our lives and given us convenience, but it’s just doing what was already done… only better, and all at once. It’s highly possible that Bezos had limited contributions to producing the technology and inventions involved, he simply paid people to do it and followed his goals. Admirable and inspiring, but singular and focused on combining what’s already been done to make something larger.

When you dig in and talk about Elon, the conversation is different. What’s notable isn’t that he run a successful business and made money, instead the focus is more closely tied to the actual accomplishments and technology that his business ventures were based on. He’s the Chief Engineer in at least some of his companies, he was directly involved with the invention of the products. He learned the rocket-science, he plans the Mars missions, he conducts the interviews to hire the scientists, he wrote the code for the early website businesses that led to PayPal.

The focus in many of Elon’s public talks is about broader concepts, about making science-fiction a reality. About the end game. Not just the end game of his life, or the next few decades, or even the next century… but about the true destiny of humanity. Do we want to keep using old motorized vehicles or do we want to revolutionize how we drive to reduce death and increase efficiency? Do we want to stay on Earth and wait to get hit by an asteroid, or do we want to settle other planets to spur the expansion of humanity to other stars? He talks about the pure notion of doing things to excite and inspire people, and being guided by that vision.

Even when you hear Elon talk publicly, which he does often, his thought process is expressed in a slightly scattered way, he explains and communicates the core principals of the subject, he describes the foundational elements of what’s being presented and the underlying reasoning for the claims he makes. Compared to Jeff Bezos, it’s almost like night and day. Bezos speaks in prepared speeches, broad basic concepts, and with curated ideas that are composed to speak to a point that usually isn’t ‘backed up’ by the same rigor that Musk communicates with on the fly. He talks about products and business strategy, marketing and earnings, monetary value and service like a somewhat interesting pamphlet that’s handed out at a seminar. These are just my impressions, but even if you disagree – you must admit that the differences are stark.

Still – both of them are famously wealthy. Wealthy beyond reasoning. Their net-worth is tied up in stock, ownership stake in their companies, so it’s not quite “real” in the same way as having money in the bank. With that type of wealth, you can certainly do anything someone with hundreds of millions of dollars can do, you can just comfortably do more of it. You’ll be living off of substantial amounts of interest and capital gains that your stock and notoriety can earn… with the benefit/responsibilities of calling the shots at just about anything you desire… with the notoriety of having all eyes fixated on your existence. Want to start a new global company? You can do it. Want to rebuild an entire city with a charitable foundation? No problem. Want to buy or create any material item or group of items on earth? There’s probably a way. However, in the case of Musk or Bezos, if either of them sold off their stocks/ownership and liquidized their finances to actually have $100+ billion to spend all at once… the companies value would tank, the American economy would react negatively, and things might not turn out very well for any of us. The entire global economy might crash if you went around spending it aimlessly. The same can’t be said for Alphabet/Google’s founders, who have taken a FAR less of a public-facing appearance… or the Koch brothers, who you’ve probably never heard of, yet still were in the list of the top 10 richest people in the world for years.

Much of Google’s technology relies on algorithms and inventions made by people neither of us have probably ever heard of, either. For instance, a technology called Spanner, which is what makes it possible for you to store data on Google from one location and have it instantly available across the world. I can type into a Google Doc here in California and people anywhere in the world can see my changes to that document instantly. It’s stored instantly. It’s replicated in all of Google’s data centers immediately. So if one goes down, it won’t disrupt it’s availability. This type of technology had already been invented, but it took time for all those things to happen. Time to save changes and distribute them, time to reliably provide access to it, and time to shift it around in data centers correctly. To allow for the instantaneousness of Spanner, a ground-breaking technology called TrueTime was invented.

I brought this up because the inventors of Spanner and TrueTime are virtually unknown to the common person. Names on the Spanner research paper “JAMES C. CORBETT”, “JEFFREY DEAN”, and others allude to some high values of wealth, with Jeffrey Dean being worth $500 million … but when reading about all the names on this list – they allude to far less wealth but so much more knowledge, research, PhD.’s and academic achievement. The products and services that companies like Google provide run our world. If Google went down or tech like Spanner stopped working… we would be virtually lost for a while, businesses would fail, ads would go unclicked, and soon enough we’d lose far more than just the values of stock crashing… we’d lose the tools we need to do almost everything in the professional world we’re accustomed to.

I’m starting to see more and more that these companies that run our world, and the “richest person” faces that are plastered on them, have so many unseen people that actually do the work and revolutionize their industries. They contribute to the actual value of Bezo’s billions. The thought of people that discover new things, invent or build new solutions and products make looking up “Richest person” and naming their ownership stakes as a valuation of their contributions begin to mean less and less. Bezos and Musk, Jobs and Gates, Buffet and the Koch brothers, as skilled and dedicated as they are… only direct and pay the people who actually develop the science and build the products required to make those famous names what they are. Without the James Corbetts of the world, who would the Donald Trumps really be?

This last year I read two books that gave me food for thought on the less known artifacts of the life of the rich. Namely, Kochland by Christopher Leonard and American Oligarchs by Andrea Bernstein which both use their many hundreds of pages combined to drudge through the family histories, personal lives, and business decisions of some of the most wealthy families on earth. The Koch brothers are oil tycoons and the Trump/Kushner families have each amassed a vast real estate empire. I won’t go into the rather unsettling details involved, but I will say that what we publicly know about the rich – what we see in news headlines and on the TV – only scratches the surface of what they’ve done to create the wealth they have. Now, I acknowledge that it’s probably not easily possible to become a multi-billionaire by never doing anything to harm anyone in any way. It’s probably more efficient to cut corners than to neatly fold them away. Especially in a world where everyone else is cutting corners too.

I have a lot of other thoughts on this topic and I’m sure I’ll come back to it some other time, but for now, I’ve got to get back to work. Today I intend to meditate on all this. I hope someone invented something today.

Game Update for Omnia

I know I won’t always be able to work on Omnia every day, so I’m adding updates on these blogs as I can. I mean, I worked on it for almost all my free time today… so it’s one of the only things I have to share about today…

My task today was to get the Top-Down view of the game running on JavaFX and I really struggled with it until I found a dead simple solution. Here are some details, for the code-minded readers out there:

In AWT, the framework the game uses right now to render it’s pixels to the game window, the code uses the Graphics2D object. The game code figures out how the game should look every frame and renders it’s pixels to that Graphics2D object in the form of an array of RGB integer. For each pixel, you have a number that represents the Red, Green, and Blue color information. Those pixels are added to a BufferedImage, then you just call the ‘drawImage’ function on Graphics2D and pass it that BufferedImage. Relatively easy.

In JavaFX, to render it’s pixels to the game window, the code uses the GraphicsContext object. After looking through the documentation for a while, I couldn’t find how to use my old algorithm to render pixels. For hours I tried to come up with another solution for taking my RGB pixel array and rendering it to the GraphicsContext the same way. It doesn’t natively work with the BufferedImage I had, so instead I started monkeying around with the JavaFX equivalent. You’re suppose to use a WritableImage, PixelFormat, and PixelWriter to loop through your pixel array and “Write” them to the WritableImage… then call the drawImage function on your GraphicsContext.

The problem was… my RGB pixels didn’t easily translate to the ARGB pixels that PixelWriter wanted. But man, did I try to make that happen. After a few hours of trying to shift the bits of the RGB integers around to show up as ARGB integers… this was the best I could do:

The greens came out yellow, the grey solid tiles were pink, the blues were grey… and everything was aliased so it came out kind of blurry.

So, after working 8 hours at my day job… then bumbling 5 hours on this problem… and 2 hours of researching and reading… around midnight I was tired. When I was about to give up for the night (something I hate doing)… I found a dead simple solution: FXGraphics2D! It’s an interface that will allow you to use your old Graphics2D object functions on a newer JavaFX GraphicsContext! Yes! Soon enough, I was able to just plug that in and go. I could keep the old rendering algorithm and the game renders with the correct colors in JavaFX.

The next problem was the blurriness….

Sure enough, I found that JavaFX has a “setImageSmoothing” function that you can use to turn off anti-aliasing, which would reduce that blurry appearance. The next problem was, it’s not supported by the JavaFX version I was using and if I wanted to upgrade the version I would have to manually install it and include it in the project. Stuff like that is always a pain, especially in a language and IDE you’re not familiar with. An hour or so later I got it all set up and this is what I found.

First, I went ahead and installed the newest version of Java JDK 13, got that running and yes – it doesn’t support JavaFX at all. I think that’s incredibly silly, I mean JavaFX is the newest most widely used Java UI framework … why would you stop including it in your language?

Next, I found where to get this new JavaFX 15 that supports “setImageSmoothing” (and probably other new stuff). To include it in my project and get it working I needed to add it as a dependency in the Maven pom.xml file. From what I could tell, I only needed javafx-fxml and javafx-controls artifacts…..

Then, I found that I had to add a module-info.java file to the root of the game package. I don’t know anything about this but it seems like it mimics JavaScript modules slightly? It appears to declare dependencies and which of your code packages are using which dependency. I’ll have to read more about it when I can make the time.

So, with all that set… I could use “setImageSmoothing” and the appearance of the JavaFX game rendering looks just like it did on AWT…

With that all in place, I got the Top-Down view of the game running and accomplished what I set out to do for the evening.

That’s it for now, on to the Platformer view of the game.

Today after work I spent some hours working on my video game, so I figured I could blog about it here while it’s on my mind. Whenever I mention it in future blogs, I’ll just give a link to this post for the backstory on it.

What’s Omnia?

I’m calling my video game ‘Omnia’, which is a latin word that means ‘All things’ or ‘Everything’. I named it that because its a fun project for me to work on “everything” I’ve wanted to see in a game, and try to demonstrate/practice “everything” I know how to do when it comes to programming. In the story of the game, you’re going to end up being the hero that saves “everything” – not just the world, or the universe, or the multiverse, but… everything. I don’t know, it just made sense when I thought of it so I kept rolling with it.

I worked on Omnia for a total of about 2 months, spread out over 6 years! That’s… a month of work in December 2013 to start it, another week or two in 2015 when I got bored, a week in 2019 when I stumbled across the code in a random folder, and now I worked on it this last week here in 2020 to take a break from school/responsibilities.

Thinking I’d keep working on it regularly back in 2013, I started making little YouTube videos to demonstrate my progress with it… calling it ‘Project Naturalist’ and posting as ‘Submodern studios’ so I didn’t have to use my real name. Weeks later I got my first real tech job and didn’t touch it for years!

So now that I’m busier than I’ve ever been, I figured it would be the perfect time to start working on Omnia again…

What did I work on today?

So – today I added a big task list of plans to the readme file in the game’s repository which you can see on its github repo here and I worked on rewriting the game engine to use JavaFX.

If you don’t code, that last sentence probably didn’t mean anything to you. I’ll explain some of it here so non-programmers might understand. Then I’ll go into some more detail about my plans for the game.

What’s a repo?

Video games are basically just fancy apps. Whether they run on a computer, a smart phone, or a PlayStation… at the core, they’re just another app. Apps are made with code and programmers keep track of their code in something called a repository. Repositories (or ‘repos’ for short) track the changes you make to your code over time. They make it easy to undo changes you’ve made to your code. They make it easy to have multiple people work on the same project without messing up each other’s work. They make stuff like fixing bugs (mistakes in your code) easier. They just improve a programmer’s life overall. Repositories, repos, are good.

What’s a github?

Github.com is a website that makes it easy to put your code repository online and share it with other people. I use it as a portfolio to showcase what I’ve worked on, and what I’m working on right now. When I work with other people on a project we’ll usually use github to organize our work.

What’s a readme file?

When you go to a repo page on github, and scroll down a little, you’ll usually see some description or info about the repository, the code in it, or the project. Here’s a screenshot of Omnia’s github page:

What you see there in that screenshot is a basic description of my video game project. It’s 2D, that means 2 dimensional. It’s ‘retro’, that means it looks and plays like an old video game from the 90s like something on Nintendo, Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis.

What’s a game engine?

Just like the engine of a car makes it go, so does the engine of a video game. It’s all the logic that lets the video game know what to show on the screen while you’re playing it. Every video game has an engine. Most older video games had engines that were designed specifically for that video game and wouldn’t work for other video games. Nowadays there are video game engines that can make a trillion different types of video games, available for anyone to use. Two of the most popular ones are called Unreal and Unity, but there are literally hundreds out there to choose from. If you want to create a video game but don’t want learn how to code, you can use one of those engines and be well on your way to getting started.

My main reason for making a video game is to get better at programming and practice it outside of work. So I’m making my own game engine to run Omnia. That means A LOT more work to create relatively simple things in the game, but I’ve found it to be a lot more fun and rewarding.

Every time you plat the game, the game engine works by going through a 4 step process.

1. You set up all the stuff the game needs when it begins. Like the window, images, and other resources.
2. You set up the actual game code. Like all the logic for the menus, levels, player, enemies, and set them up with their resources and images.
3. You start the Game Loop. This is the most important part of most types of games. The loop is a repeating cycle that takes your controller/keyboard input, updates the game logic, and renders the game images to the screen. It does that cycle over and over, 60 times every second – or more in better performing games (120 times, 240 times, etc. every second).
4. You get rid of all the stuff you setup in steps 1 and 2. This last step happens when the Game Loop ends and you’re turning off the game.

I made Omnia’s game engine by following a few YouTube tutorials and making changes to the code to get what I liked out of all of them. There are a bunch of different ways to do each of those 4 steps I just described, some of those ways seemed like they worked better than others. I tried to learn, experiment, test, and retest as much as I could.

What’s a Java?

Java is a programming language. It’s the programming language that Android devices run on and when you make a computer app with it, that computer app can run on many different types of computer operating systems. Even ATM machines, cable boxes, servers, and a ton of random devices and companies use Java. So even though Java isn’t the best language to use for game development (compared to C++ or C#), I’ve opted to use it for this game to practice. It’s really hard (almost impossible) to make incredible, realistic, modern, 3D video games with Java. That’s ok because this game isn’t like that. Java can make games with more simple graphics, but fun game systems/logic. A good example everyone uses to defend the idea of making a game with Java is Minecraft, because it was made with Java. When I started learning Java in 2013, Minecraft was really picking up popularity. Even though Minecraft was made by just one person, it’s become the best-selling video game of all time, and it was sold to Microsoft for $2.4 Billion in 2014. Either way, that’s not the point – if I can make a game that sells just 1 copy I’ll be happy.

What’s this games story?

Well, I don’t know yet. But I have a lot of ideas! I just need to start writing them down. Today I started writing down ideas for the world that the game is set in. I figured that would be a good first step toward a story. I put those ideas on this page: https://wforbes.net/omnia-story-notes .. I’ll probably change that page a lot, so if you’re reading this in the future, it’ll probably be different. Hello future person, I hope the future is nice and better than 2020 and you have many cute puppies and chocolate-chip cookie dough icecream.

So, without a story… what can you do in Omnia so far?

Not much! It’s really basic. That’s why for the longest time I just called it a ‘Game Engine’, not a ‘Game’. Here’s what it does so far….

Main Menu

When you launch the game, the Main Menu opens. The clouds in the background slowly move from right to left. You use the arrow keys to select an option from the menu:

This week I made it possible to open either the Top-Down game level or the Platformer game level from this Main Menu. Before, these engines had to be run separately. The goal is to switch between the levels directly, but doing this with the menu was an easier way to start working on and comparing the two types of game levels.

Top-Down game level

The Top-Down option opens a view of the game that looks like the first Zelda or Final Fantasy games from the late 80s, or the first Pokemon games on GameBoy:

In the screenshots, your character is the one with the name ‘ghosty’ above its head. You can walk around in this Top-Down view and as you move the game screen follows you. There’s one enemy ‘skele’ that can pace back and forth, or randomly wander the level. When you collide (walk into) the enemy, you both stop moving. When you stand in the water your character is submerged. The water animates to make it look like theres little waves. When you collide with the grey tiles they act like walls, you can’t walk over them.

Top-Down algorithm concepts

The level that you see in those screenshots was designed by a 64×64 pixel image – the level map, where each pixel represents a type of tile by what color it is. Green is grass, blue is water, grey is a wall:

The level rendering algorithm reads the pixels in that image and decides which type of tile to render for the level based on the pixel’s color. Then it gets the full graphic for the tile from these portions of the Spritesheet image:

The level rendering algorithm sees a light green pixel in the level map image, goes to get the third tile in the first row of the spritesheet, then renders it to the screen. It sees a blue pixel in the level map, and goes to get the first tile in the 5th row, then animates it with the other two tiles in the 5th row to create the wave effect. The pink tiles you see there aren’t being used yet. The algorithm sees Black, Dark Grey, Light Grey, and White on the spritesheet and translates those to any color you need when the game is running. So far I’ve used Black as transparent color.

The full spritesheet is 256×256 pixels and contains all the graphics for the Top-Down view of the game:

Here you see the tiles for the level up in the top left corner of the sheet, as well as a few sprites for different characters, fonts, and other random things. Since each tile is 8×8 pixels, the spritesheet has 32×32 tiles. Characters use 2×2 tiles each for all their walking positions. The algorithm mirrors these walking positions if they’re facing left. So there’s enough room for 32 different characters.

Why do it this way? It’s really efficient on storage and RAM. The Spritesheet takes up 4.2kb of space and the level map takes up 520 bytes. Even if this was expanded to a huge level with dozens of different tiles and hundreds of different character models, it’d be almost impossible for the storage requirements to go above 100kb. Even with hundreds of levels of this size, you’re looking at less than 20mb.

Storing the game’s graphics this way is also necessary because of the way the code renders the graphics. The rendering algorithm uses an array of integers to represent the pixels with color information bit-shifted into and out of each integer to store the Red, Green, and Blue data in it. It renders each individual pixel to an object in the code that represents the screen, then renders that object to the game canvas. It’s very different than other more simplistic algorithms I’ve seen for drawing graphics, but it’s fast and really efficient.

To render something on the screen, you give it the X and Y position on the level you want it to appear, what tile on the spritesheet to use (which is stored as a single number, you add the X tile position to the Y tile position multiplied by 32), the color information for that tile (stored into another bit-shifted integer that contains number rgb data of 4 different colors) and you can either mirror it in vertical or horizontal direction or you can scale it to appear larger on the screen.

So, it’s extremely easy to design new tiles and sprites… everything is so small and the details are so simple that quickly producing a lot of content quickly would be easy for people without many digital art skills. It performs very quickly and doesn’t use very much memory too. The trade-off is that it’s more challenging to code this way in comparison to other techniques. For example, to have the player do anything aside from walking around (or swimming) will require many new functions to control how that activity should be rendered.

Top-Down: weekly progress

This week I added a simple Pause menu that you can open by pressing the Escape key. It stops all the logic and rendering; and opens a menu similar to the main menu. You can use this to return to the Main Menu or quit the game. This was the first time you could easily switch between Menu, Top-Down, and Platformer without restarting the game – a big milestone 🙂

Platformer game level

The other ‘Platformer’ option on the Main Menu opens a game view that looks similar to games like Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Mega Man 7, Sonic, or other platformer action style games of the early 90s:

Walk in either direction and jump. Holding the jump button causes you to jump a little higher. Holding the Shift button while jumping causes you to ‘glide’ so that you fall at a slower rate. You can perform a few different attacks: shoot a ‘fireball’ for a ranged attack, ‘scratch’ for a melee attack, and ‘phase’ to avoid an enemy. Shooting a fireball uses your fire resources, and shooting while scratching causes a stream of fireballs to shoot.

Platformer algorithm concepts

Instead of rendering with small tiles and individual pixels with many different game objects on each spritesheet, the Platformer algorithm uses entire spritesheets for each game object. Full-sized images for backgrounds, and much larger images for the tiles of the levels.

These larger sprite sheets obviously take up more storage. Just for this one character and the few tiles that make up its level, it uses 9Kb. The background image is about 16Kb. So storing the dozens of characters, dozens of more tiles, and a few backgrounds (to give a parallax effect) to create a fully finished level might take up to 20Mb of memory if they’re really detailed and production-ready, if you aren’t careful. That’s 10 times more memory than the Top-Down game view, but still, rather tame compared to professional realistic 3D games.

To draw out the level, it uses a map file made up of numbers to represent which tiles to place where. Surprisingly this needs 2Kb which is 4 times more memory than the tilemap of pixels that Top-Down uses!

Although the sprites, tiles, and map files that Platformer needs uses much more memory; the code to render the platformer game view is much simpler and easier to work with. It just requires more work to design and manually draw out the images for the the graphics.

The logic of the movement and actions you take while playing determine what to render. That ‘animation’ variable is an object that cycles through sprites on the sprite sheet. The actual rendering itself is done with the Java Graphics2D object provided by the Java language libraries, so this avoids having to code the pixel by pixel rendering logic yourself. I’m not sure how much better or worse this performs for the processor of the device, but it’s certainly more simple.

Platformer: weekly progress

This week I added a ‘Death Menu’ that appears when you die – like falling into a gap in the level. It works like the Top-Down pause menu and gives you the option to retry the level, go back to the main menu, or exit the game.

Concepts on a User Interface

This week I also started to work on a UI, User Interface, for the Top-Down game view when I quickly started to realize that it would be a huge undertaking. I added a white box with black borders and had some realizations…

Not only would I have to code the logic and render all the graphics for text, buttons, and other visual elements… I’d have to figure out the text inputs so users could type things into the UI. I would have to make the UI respond to mouse input to work the buttons and drag the UI windows. And then rework the rendering algorithm to more easily enable partial transparency so the UI doesn’t completely block the view of the level and the characters. That could be made easier by using the platformer rendering logic for the UI instead… but I slowly started to get a headache as I started to plan the code for this.

It was time to try a completely different solution…

What’s a JavaFX?

Java comes with a UI framework and library built in called JavaFX, it can make creating a UI much easier. If I can use JavaFX in Omnia I won’t have to sit there for weeks toiling over buttons and game windows that only kind-of work right. Many headaches avoided. The problem is that it would require rewriting the game from the ground up because JavaFX needs to run totally different code for the Window, Game Loop, Canvas, and Images to render onto it. So I spent the last few days learning how JavaFX works and researching different solutions having to do with that. This is what I have so far…

I got the basic parts of the game logic working and the Main Menu runs – and it runs much better than it used to. The background animation moves more smoothly, the text is rendered more smoothly. Everything is more smooth. Like a dolphin or a seal or something. It’s nice.

The code that JavaFX needs to run is much more simple, too… here’s the code that runs the old game loop:

And here’s the code that runs the JavaFX game loop:

That GameLoopTimer has a ‘handle’ method that runs every time a frame is ready to render in the window.. so pausing and calculations on the time between frames can happen here:

With everything so far, this includes some trade-offs. JavaFX tries to always run at 60 fps, I don’t have to code anything to try to make that happen. This simplicity sacrifices some customization … the old game loop was able to run at over 300 fps (on my mid-range gaming computer) if I wanted it to. I would just put an extra loop around the render function that counted down a different nanoSecond difference. I also can’t see a way to access the Thread that JavaFX is running on. It’s just not always clear what all the variables are or where to get them. I may just need to learn more about it, or just learn to get over it and be happy with the 60fps game loop that it provides.

Either way I’m mostly excited to see what kind of UI system is possible with JavaFX and other things it might provide me to use. I’ll be working on this a little bit at a time for the rest of the week and update on my progress in a later blog post or a video or something.

What’s the task list I made today?

It’s clear that the game still needs a gigantic amount of work. Many different fixes, changes, new systems, and a ton of other stuff. I made a long list of ideas that I’ll be working through during 2021. The list is on the Omnia repo readme on github … and man, is it long. Here’s a couple screenshots that show the next stuff I’m working on:

Beyond just working on the UI windows I’m planning stuff like adding Buildings, Doors that take you to other levels, Chat Bubbles, Merchants and other types of NPCS, Money, Inventory, Quests … and thats just in the Top-Down game view. I want to add a Turn-Based game view and other types. I want to have it connect to the internet for online play, run it on Android or a web app, and… just so much stuff.

The funny thing is, I might end up only working on it for a few weeks and then ignore it for another 6 years 🙂

Thanks for reading….

A cute puppy

As promised by this post’s title. Here’s a cute puppy.