Please Read before going on

Okay, so I know this is really late, this is a really old blog post that I had promised years ago, fuck almost 2 years ago damn. Apologies for that, life really got in the way. This blog here has a lot of issues, spelling mistakes, weird formatting and more. Please overlook that as it gets better with the future ones. This is also me from a entire different state of mind.

WOW has it been a while, 7 months to be exact. Sorry about that, a lot of things got in my way, especially with the OLfL project, the open source project that I am trying to work on.

Some of you may be wondering where have I been these past couple of months, well its a long story, and I have a lot to talk about. Plus some new stuff about OLfL that not even the discord knows. Well, actually they may know by the time this comes out.

Now a while ago I did promise an update video 3 for OLfL, an unfortunately its in writer’s hell right now, since i’m trying to make it in a different way than I made my other ones. The last update video was a weird type of a script. Basically I just had bullet points on some of the stuff I wanted to talk about, and then just went more in depth for it.

I think the same thing can be said about the blog too, since it was in a similar spot to the video and I actually was going to do the video first before doing this, Another think was that the videos would be more brief but more quick, while the blog posts are a more in-depth thing. I still don’t know if I am going to do this, since it will take forever for one.

Now you may be wondering, where is the Update video #3, its still in writer’s hell, i’m trying to become a better Youtuber, and that means putting more effort into the videos, like using scripts. I’m not used to doing that, but also that I want to make it somewhat good, and become one of my better videos. Since as you know, the rest of my videos, aren’t really edited at all. I think that’s my video can not do as well, since there isn’t really any quality to them. One more thing about this is that, i’m not really good with writing, its kind of hard for me too. Even though I am in honors Eng its still kind of hard to do this, I guess I can talk better than I can write. So yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I haven’t been as active on the blog and or Youtube.

Issues I have been having

So over the past couple months, I have been dealing with some medical, mental, and physical issues; and one of them actually made it harder to work on OLfL. If you are on the Discord server, you should know this. It’s mainly my eye, so for context, I have contacts, since I really can’t see. Now that’s not the bad thing. The bad thing is when my contacts indirectly caused my eyes to go bloodshot red, like a deep red, it almost got to the point where it was such a deep red, it looked like I was bleeding. The issue?(Disregarding the obviously bloody eye issue.) I have to wear my contacts to play the Quest, since my frames for my glasses are way too wide to actually fit into the Quest, and I don’t have $70 to buy that one lens that has your prescription on it.

Now it had been happening for the past 4 months, which was interesting, since my family and me couldn’t really figure out what was going on. My parents chalked it up to my eyeballs not getting used to my contacts, something in my contacts, I needed to replace them, yadda yadda. 1 thing I would like to point out is that my eyes never felt itchy, scratchy, or whatnot. When I take out my contacts, I could just mainly feel the air hitting my eyeball and causing me to blink, which that isn’t a bad thing per sé. I think that it’s normal for your eyeballs to be somewhat sensitive after having something on said eyeball.

Now, here’s where it got weird. I would go to school and already have my eyes pink/a somewhat red, my teachers saw this, friends, and I even did. I started to make the joke that I high, since due to how pink my eyes were when I got to school. It would already looked like I was stoned, tack that on to the frizzy hair that I have in the morning, makes it worse. Even my coaches started to ask me what was going on to see if I had pink eye, since even they couldn’t grasp their heads around this. It was mainly more visual than actually affecting me, but it wasn’t until this summer I started to have a ton more issues with them.

Part 2

Summertime starts, we get out of school, and the sports goes on during this time. Basically we get to go to camps during the summer to stay active and just play some sports, now here is when I started to see a ton of issues. These were actually during the months of May-July. I’m in basketball, and this is where most of my issues arose, so during this time, we were just working out in the morning, and then later on actually practicing and or playing with the others. Obviously, you would have sweat running down your forehead, now I thought my eyes got red due to sweat. You know, an educated guess, since I didn’t have basketball on Wednesdays and Fridays, and it would seem to get better. So I decided to bring some contact solution and or artificial tears, in the event that my eyes get too much sweat. And unfortunately, it didn’t help. I would come out of the High School with really red eyes, my parents were concerned obviously. Then they made me start to wear them for a less amount of time, which is normal. This was fine for like a couple weeks, got taken to a doctor to get some eye drops due to how red my eye was one day, iirc it was the reddest it had ever been and it was scary. Then fast-forward to like a week ago, when I got taken to the eye doctor to ask questions about said contacts, said it could be allergies to the contact or other things. Then they decided to get me a different contact that is made out of something different than I already had. Right now, as of writing, I have not felt any issues with them.

Oculus Link for Linux

So, during the summer, and when I had time, I was working on OLfL, and here is some of the new updates that are going to be coming, or already came to the main repo.

AT THE CURRENT TIME: 02/12/2024, this entire section for OLFL is COMPLETELY incorrect, I have another blog post coming soon that describes all what has changed and more.

• Decided to not do flatpaks (for right now)

  • Had to do an android app, see below image for reason why

  • Sad thing is, no root available, so definitely does limit what I can do and what not.

• Android app will be in separate repo

• Still deciding if I really want to do Qt, can do a basic wxWidgets thing.

• Removal of build(should come in later commit)

• the src dir has a different subfolder to handle Quest Usb

  • I am going to see if I can get some stuff to work without an android app, but mostly likely I have too.

• A brand new Readme file, Install.md file, and much more tidying up for the readme’s

• COC and contributer guidelines coming soon

• After update video #4, concept video will come soon after it.

• Some of us are trying to get some of the Oculus Programs to run through wine.

• ODH(Oculus Developer Hub) is another app that Oculus develops that allows us to see some debug logs of link and actual quest, along with gpu timings and more.

• AND MANY MORE TO SOON COME.

  Now I haven’t really been working on it that much, I’ve been too busy learning LibUSB, how the quest works, its sdk’s, figuring other issues, mental health, and much more. This was all alongside the many basketball games that I kept playing in, so it really decided to take up all of my time, but the times that I did have, I tried working on this.

  Right now, I have nothing else to say about it, all I will say is the fact that I had to start from scratch again since I forgot to stash my changes to the cpp branch before having to format, and fortunately I lost all of my bad code but also the progress to getting quest working on USB, luckily i will have the chance to rewrite it again.

During the writing of this, I actually found out that the Oculus driver executables were updated to obfuscate(technically not used correctly here) parts of the code from being reverse engineered, with this in mind, it directly affected the single file that allowed me to find the exact EXE that handles everything with the Quest. Which looking at it now, could of fucking helped me here.

Video Ideas

During the writing of the OLfL update video 4, I decided to try and work on other videos that way I won’t get burnt out, but also so that I can improve my writing experience.

One such video is still being worked on as of the moment, which is a Minetest video.

It’s just going to be video talking about it, its differences between MTG and Minecraft, modding, and more.

Some of you may not even know what I am even talking about, for the unaware, Minetest is a open-source voxel game engine, has been since 2010.

From their wiki, it created in order to replicate Minecraft Alpha at the time all in C++

The very first version of Minetest was intended to replicate what Minecraft Alpha had been shown to do at the time (2010)[1]. It’s goals soon diverged from Minecraft and eventually became a game engine instead.

Minetest isn’t a eyeopener when you first hear it and or see it, but it does have a fun modding community that can make MT act more like MC. So, what exactly is MT, well like I said before MT is a open-source game engine that comes with a “game” called MTG, Minetest Game. It looks and functions really similar to minecraft alpha, but the good thing you can do is add on mods to said game, on a per world basis.

Now all of the mods run and are programmed via lua, an actual really easy language. During the time of writting this I was able to get some basic addon working, in like 5 minutes. Felt so easy, and was entirely better than dealing with Minecraft modding.

Here take a look:

It actually was fairly easy to do with following, The Minetest Modding Book from RubenWardy, one of the main devs. Just take a look at the amount of lines it took just to do this:

Now this picture is from AstroNvim, and the yellow squares are because the lua stuff I have installed doesn’t know what Minetest is since you don’t have to include a minetest file or whatnot.

Now I just did this for fun, since I just felt like I could do it, and also to get a feel of MT modding. Along with the fact I just wanted to see how hard it was, and also how it was done, I actually was thinking about doing something with modding, but i’m not entirely sure yet. Though I do want to contribute to the Minetest project sometime soon so yea.

Steam Deck

As I was writing this blog post, I got an email from Steam to actually buy the 256GB model Steam Deck that I got, and reserved like a year ago. Actually, it was August 18, 2021, when I first reserved it, and its almost August 18, which is a bit weird to think about. And so I bought it, I can’t wait to actually mess with this.

School Things (start of school)

Also during the writing of this, I started school a week ago(depending on when I posted, or when I posted this.)

Unfortunately, it has affected my daily life and schedule. One of the main reasons why I haven’t been working on OLfL was, that I am trying to prepare myself for school, and all of the shit that brings. Along with that, it is good to note that as of writing, I’m taking a lot of HS credit classes, I am doing Algebra II(pretty easy actually), Geometry(a bit harder than algebra II for right now), and Spanish along with ASL, plus some more to come. And this isn’t even including the amount of honors’ classes I am also taking.

A little context, I have such a good understanding of math that its a bit weird to place me, as I am in stuff like decathlon and academic superbowl(basically a baby version of decathlon, where there is a team for each subject), each talking an already high level of math, that is actually a bit above my current classes. It actually helps me later down the road, since my actual math teacher will cover it, but also my math coach for that stuff also will give me another way to look at it. Plus, with me in the past trying to make my own game engine(or something like that), I have dealt with Algebra II and some weird Linear Algebra.

Due to how I usually talk about school, I’m going to keep this section short, as to not dox myself, family, friends, and other peers here that know me. So yea, HS is going pretty good right now.

School Now (End of School :))

That above section that you see above you right now is what I was thinking of school when I first went into it, currently as of writing this it is May 27th, 2023, and I’m officially a sophomore. Looking back at my previous texts and stuff that I wrote when I was about to go into school is funny, I had such a different view of High School and more, I can’t say it was more naive but it is something different. Coming out of High School, to say that it was an experience is an understatement. It was a fucking adventure. Honestly, I did so much and became an entirely different person. From me being in basketball, whether being a manager towards the end of the season or playing during the beginning was a night and day differences, I got to experience things that changed my whole view of the world. I’m much happier now than what I was when I started this all, plus you might be able to tell the differences in writing here and before. I got to do so much, hell I even got to go to state with my English Superbowl team that ended up placing 4th in my entire damn state. I’ve changed so much now than what I was going into school.

Physically I’ve also changed, much more than what I originally thought, I’m taller now, I’m much more stocky-er, built a bit more too, and able to handle shit that my past self couldn’t of. There’s also been a new development with me, that I don’t really know how to explain. Since this being more of a website that talks about my projects, rather than my personal life.

To say it bluntly, this school year introduced me to a relationship that I never predicted, but I’m happy with. I actually really love it, though I’m not going to talk about it much here since this isn’t the spot for it. Though to let you guys know, there will be references to her here and there, just by simple comments probably. I don’t know. My math part of me has gotten so much better, I passed Algebra 2 with a A, Geometry with also an A. In Academic Superbowl, there were things that covered Spherical Triangles. Something that is kind of confusing, but once you get the hang of it and look at it. You’ll be able to understand it. I actually made notes in Obsidian about those topics. As we were kind of forced to in our team. I studied the hell out of it and I even got a medal at the end of the year showing how hard I worked for it. Not only that, because of all of the time that I had to deal with school, which affected me programming since I had no time for it, I got to refresh my mind about programming and languages in general. I know much more about Rust now than I did before going into school this year, I finally got to understand some of my topics with programming languages that I’ve always had issues with.

It was a crazy school year, but I adapted to it. And finally figured out study habits that I’ve always had issues with. I got to know so many people, people who were either in my grade or way above it. From people in basketball to the older people in my Superbowl teams, somehow I got to be in many different groups both of entirely separate qualities, from the jocks/sports people, to the interesting band and orchestra people. I didn’t go into it thinking that it would be bad, but I didn’t think I would come out actually almost liking school. It was very fun and even though I struggled in some spots, I had a lot of fun. It made me the happiest I’ve ever been in the past 5 years. Mainly because of the relationship that I’m in. I’ve also focused on trying to improve my physical s self, which you guys might actually see in some of the posts here and there. Just some updates on how I’m doing in weights and if I have improved or not. By the way, I was not that strong going into that year, I think my PB for back squat was, I think 125, now it’s 165 lbs, and I’m doing 125 lbs regularly. My stamina and my arms have changed so much since the beginning of this year. I did take photos of myself from back then and looking at me now its soo different. My writing has also seemed to improve much more. As you can see above, I was just starting to get into Honors English, now having an interesting style of writing was weird for my English class, though I managed and I had to do multiple essays and research papers that actually were somewhat good, the style of writing and more. Something I didn’t think I would do so good on.