Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Items
After finishing yesterday’s post about generating images for user-combined substrate items I realized that I never really provided an explanation about how items work in general (or how they work for now, anyway).
Images for combined substrate
The Laravel 5 migration is complete and I’m back to substrate mixing and brain bug fixing!
Actually, I think now that basic mixing is done I’m going to do a few weeks of just bug fixing. The substrate has no effect on snails’ attributes or behaviour yet, but it will. For now you can just mix different substrate items together into new substrate items.
Migrating to Laravel 5
A few days ago I decided that there’s no use putting it off any longer - it’s time to upgrade to Laravel 5. I’ve been sitting on 4.2 for months and 5 is a major revision to…well…everything.
Thinking through substrate
After checking in the basic substrate item implementation yesterday I got to thinking - never a good sign.
The original idea was to have some pre-set types of substrate - garden dirt, rock, potting soil, pellets, whatever. But how would these items affect the snails and the jar? Would I need to invent some sort of set of attribute templates? Like “Oh well this garden dirt item is going to decrease jar temperature by 1C.” and “Oh well some snails somehow don’t like gardend dirt and prefer other substrates”. But why? Why would a snail prefer one template to another and how would this be decided?
Jar substrate is a go
It’s finally in. Well, the beginning stages anyway. Jar substrate. Anyone who knows anything about snails knows that they can’t live in a glass box without some sort of substrate to hide in, get moisture from, and burrow under. So now you can apply one type of substrate (so far) to a jar. Eventually there will be different kinds of substrate, and maybe even substrate you can mix together from other types of substrate. Currently the substrate has no effect on the snails or the environment outside of being present and visually represented, but eventually it can impact everything from snail nutrients to jar temperature and what kinds of plants you can grow inside the jar. Here’s how it works.