Here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on with my writing and coding projects lately!
Progress. I made so much that I forgot where to begin.
Green Folk: Hit 16k words yesterday. I’m going to go back and do some editing for it and add a layer of polish. It’s shaping up to be an OK book. Not a great book, not as good as the last one, but OK. Hence the small rewrite before I start calling it 100k words.
I got the InDesign template finished! Now I have all sorts of paragraph styles that I can apply across projects to help keep things uniform (or delightfully ugly, depending on your taste).
I also made a .jsx file to go through the document and automatically place filigree images and background images based on tags in the master page. That means I can populate a directory with, say, 100 images, and if I make a 65-page book, the script can auto-fill those background images from that directory.
This can happen sequentially (page 1–65 = images 1–65), randomly (page 1–65 = random images), or assign single images across specific page ranges. So I think I’m just about ready to start cobbling it together.
KLEP: I fixed the key loader issues where if a behavior is assigned to a KLEP agent, but that agent doesn’t have a key loader assigned, the behavior would just break and never fire. Now it makes a default key loader on awake and logs a warning to remind you to populate that field.
I also simplified property additions, with a short tutorial at the end of the property manager script.
I got my micro-controllers! I’m planning to move KLEP over from C# to C to show real-world applications. I’m thinking: toy death bots!
The idea is one base chassis bot with a magnet-based hard-point attachment. When you slap on a weapon, it automatically integrates its battlefield role and coordinates with other bots via KLEP’s AI logic.
KLEP already coordinates AI agents in games—why not in the real world? The biggest hurdle is communications. I might start with Bluetooth (easy to implement), but in genuine battlefield conditions you wouldn’t want something so easily hacked or spoofed. Frequency-hopping or optical/laser backups would be ideal, but building a robot is tough enough. The DoD can figure out that part!