Jamis Buck

No, that’s just the seed used to initialize the PRNG, so that running again with the same seed produces the same result.

A city skyline at night, reflected off of water in the foreground, with a large moon rising behind.

Going through some old stuff of mine I found a random side project I threw together back in 2017. It generates an image of a random city skyline at night, then produces a random name and description of the city. (Pretty silly, to be honest.)

jamisbuck.org/skylines/

The Ray Tracer Challenge — Learning C++ through Computer Graphics Over the past year, I’ve been working on creating a ray tracing engine in C++, following the incredible book The Ray Tracer Challenge by…

Joseph Grosso posted a very thorough (and glowing!) review of my book, "The Ray Tracer Challenge": medium.com/@jogrosso/th... -- includes tips for troubleshooting and optimizing your renderer!

Sentinel Comics RPG is an amazing system. I wrote a random character generator for it: jamisbuck.org/scrpg (repo: github.com/jamis/scrpg-...).

This is the first software side project I've tinkered on in a long time! It felt pretty good to get back to my roots. :)

Yeah, you're not wrong. I know Java and BASIC are very different. That wasn't my point. My point was that BASIC was about 30 years old when Java came out. Java is now 30 years old.

BASIC was developed in 1964. 31 years later, in 1995, Java came out. Here we are now, 30 years since Java's release, and it occurs to me that Java is now the BASIC of any language being developed today. 🤯

GitHub - jamis/lux-kernel: A C++ implementation of a ray tracer, written circa 1998. Unoptimized, proof-of-concept, experimental. Historical interest only. A C++ implementation of a ray tracer, written circa 1998. Unoptimized, proof-of-concept, experimental. Historical interest only. - jamis/lux-kernel

For preserving my own personal history more than anything else, I've posted the source code on GitHub: github.com/jamis/lux-ke... -- it probably is of no interest to anyone but me, but at least check out that readme and boggle at how obsessively thorough I was at documenting this thing!

The image itself was patterned after a more famous image called "1984", where the four balls at the top were the "1", "9", "8", and "4" balls (from a July 1984 paper titled "Distributed Ray Tracing", here: graphics.pixar.com/library/Dist...).

Five billiard balls viewed from above on a green table. Three of the balls are involved in a collision, and are blurred with motion.

I just found the source for a ray-tracer I wrote in 1998. I hardly believe it's mine, but it has my name on it! I barely remember writing it. It's in C++ (which I don't remember ever being particularly fond of) and includes support for motion blur and several advanced primitives. Here's a sample:

Happy Cake Day, u/jamis! 17 years on Reddit!

17 years?!?!

Oh, that’s good to know! I’ll bump it up on my to-read list. :)

I loved Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell", so "Piranesi" has been on my radar for a while. Did you like it?

Thanks for giving the book a try!

A final bit of trivia: my dungeon generator was actually included (with my blessing) on a CD distributed with the 25th anniversary edition of Dragon Magazine (issue #284)! That was flattering. :)

Other generators I wrote from that period are also on GitHub, posted a few years ago: github.com/jamis/dnd-npc and github.com/jamis/dnd-du... . I also wrote a town generator, but I can't find it anymore. 🤷🤷

Interestingly, this was the *second* version of my treasure generator. I almost certainly do not have the first version anymore, but it was probably a little bit less over-engineered than this one. :)

The other two repositories were different UI's for a random treasure generator built on top of Basilisk. (One UI for web, the other for Win32.) Both (including the web UI!) are written in C. github.com/jamis/dnd-tr... github.com/jamis/dnd-tr...

"Basilisk" was a kind of simple scripting engine for parsing data files. It was honestly more than a little over-engineered, but I was passionate and didn't have any kids yet, so I was practically made of time. :) github.com/jamis/basilisk

Just finished converting some ancient repos of mine from cvs (!!!) to git. They were written in 2001 at the height of my fascination with the newly released 3rd edition of D&D, and were part of a suite of random generators that I wrote for that game.

Same! It might be the primary reason I bother roasting a turkey :)

Today, my wife and I are celebrating 10,000 days since we were married! We’ve ordered a few Lego(-ish) sets with a combined total of at least 10k pieces to celebrate. Feel free to do likewise :)

Had a wonderful time at #rubyconf! Met some old friends, and made a few new ones. Learned some wild Ruby syntax. And even got to playtest my entirely-non-Ruby TTRPG with a few folks!

Thank you for the stickers! They turned out so well 👍

Credit for that goes entirely to Adviti! I think she said she saw it online somewhere?