Josh's Blog

My latest open-source project is hosted in Kubernetes on the Vultr platform. I've spent thousands on Azure, AWS, and bare metal servers. I highly recommend Vultr.

It uses ASP.NET, WASM Blazor, .NET 7 Code Generators, MongoDB

Check out the GitHub link at the bottom of the page.

I’ve been practicing in Star Citizen a bit lately.  I’ve played Freelancer at LAN parties since its release in 2003 and enjoyed several other space simulation games like the Egosoft X-series since.  And while I typically fight against the AI, I’ve grown fairly comfortable fighting players as well.  As a disclaimer, I’m a very non-competitive person so I don’t focus a lot on PvP fighting, there may be tips that do not translate well into player-on-player space battles.

Please note that this is focused on very basic getting started with Mouse and Keyboard.  There are some comprehensive YouTube video guides on particular maneuvers which are absolutely great and invaluable.

Equipment

The computer equipment you use to play is immensely important to your success in a space simulator.   You need quality equipment that will track and respond instantly. 

Laser Mouse

High-quality, laser-tracking mouse with tilt-wheel and thumb buttons is a must.

Overly large mouse pad or washed clean desk surface

Logitech MX Master ($80)

Logitech MX Anywhere ($60)

Darkfield Laser (tracks even on glass)

Bindable thumb wheel (Master) or tilt wheel (Anywhere)

Two thumb buttons

Built-in rechargeable battery

Gaming Keyboard

Gaming keyboards are important because the keys typically used in gaming do not conflict when pressed together at the same time.

Logitech G510s ($120) is likely a little overkill, but I love mine

LCD screen for displaying in-game or out-of-game messages (clock or Facebook)

54 macros that you can record to while in-game.

Volume slider to adjust volume quickly and accurately.

Windows key disable switch (CRAZY USEFUL)

Display

60+ frames per second

Objects in space appear small and move very quickly.  Your screen needs to update quickly enough so that your natural sense of motion can help you with hand-eye coordination.

60 FPS is ideal and if it cannot be maintained at or above this, then you need to lower your settings or get a better graphics card.  Above 90 FPS should be imperceptible to most people.

DSR or 4K resolution

You don’t need a 4K monitor to meet this requirement.  DSR in GeForce cards can net you the same result in 1080p.

Seeing the tiny details will help you to identify what you’re seeing.  If you monitor doesn’t have a DPI of 180 or better, then consider using DSR to help make up the difference. 

The rendering at higher resolution makes movement in graphics smoother and more perceptable so that it is easier for our brains to track.

Tips for wireless components: keyboard, mouse or gamepad

Put the receiver on a USB extension cable and tape up against the mouse pad, or under the desk beneath the mouse pad.

Plugging the receiver in near a PC chassis or laptop can cause intermittent EM interference.

2.4Ghz is a common frequency range and so is its interference.

Switch to 5GHz Wi-Fi or turn off any nearby 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi devices.

Turn off Bluetooth on mobile phone and nearby devices.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices in the same room or within about 12 feet can cause significant interference with keyboards and mice.

Use very high quality, long lasting alkaline batteries like Duracell Quantum. This will prevent unpredictable issues from low voltage and require replacements significantly less often.

Practice

You should practice the skills below so that you can use them all without thinking and searching for keys.  You should also rebind keys to what feels most natural to you.  Practicing even a few minutes (15 to 30) each day can help build the muscle memory and skills needed to becoming a great combat-ready pilot.  Reread two or three skills and focus on those during a practice session.  You don’t need to combine every skill into every practice but you should try to combine two or three each time and use them in different combinations.  Soon you’ll learn when to use what and transition between them.

Strafe in all six directions

Don’t set the throttle and forget it.

Use strafe controls to move through the battle field.

Mine are rebound to W, S, A, D, Space, C

Spirals

Practice performing spirals using roll and strafe.

Listen for key audio alerts

Weapon overheat to switch weapon groups

Missile lock to get your chaff key covered

Shields hit to begin evasive maneuvers

Gimbal Lock - MASTER THIS

Switch gimbal lock on for tight, precise maneuvers.

Switch between fixed and articulated weapons.

Mine is rebound to Mouse 4 (thumb button)

Negotiating cover

Fly close and fast around space stations, derelicts and asteroids

Use space brake, turn and boost to make tight turns

Your rear thrusters are the most powerful, point them at a wall and boost to escape a collision

Darting around with decouple and boost

Mine are rebound to Caps Lock and Tab

Location and entering cover while under fire

Maneuvers

Review some of the videos on LIS INN Videos

Focus on Defensive and Offensive Maneuvering

Defense

To win is to survive, so practicing evasion and endurance will give you the most benefit.  The longer you endure a fight, the more careless and risky your impatient opponents will become.

Use cover.

Pick a favorite piece of cover in the battlefield and master navigating it.

Be erratic and hard to track.

Strafe in all six directions at all times, avoid straight flight.

Decouple and change direction suddenly using boost.

Switch between weapon groups to avoid overheating.

Use gimbal lock for precise maneuvers

Distract enemies with missile locks that you don’t intend to use.

Listen for shield alerts to know about incoming fire

Keep enemies off your tail

Targeting

When a weapon group overheats, switch to another.

Gimbal Lock

Articulated weapons should use have gimbal unlocked.

Fixed weapons should always have your gimbal locked.

Fixed weapons are typically more powerful, but less versatile than an articulated weapon.

Also, gimbal lock gives you very precise maneuvering

Space brake can slow you down rapidly during a flyby to maintain your aim.

Try to disable one target before moving to another to reduce the number of guns on you during a fight.

Missile lock can be distracting to a player, even if you don’t intend to fire.

Maneuvers

Evasive maneuvers

This is the most powerful tactic that you can have and is essential to keep you alive.

Move erratically at all times

Use strafe controls to constantly adjust velocities

Use a very wide zigzag pattern to get to a destination

Use darting to break missile locks

Charge a nearby enemy and veer off

Circle around cover

If you’re always moving unexpectedly, it becomes impossible for enemies to get aligned into an optimal firing position.

Cover

Cover can be asteroids, stations, debris, civilian freighters or anything between you and the enemy.

You should seek cover when your shields are down, weapons overheated or your overwhelmed with too many enemies targeting you.

Cover provides opportunity to compose yourself while keeping your enemy on edge.

Moving in and around complex cover using just strafe controls is a great way to avoid missiles and make pursuit risky and disengage your pursuers.

When heading for cover, aim slightly beside the cover, not direct at.

This will allow you to decouple while in route and avoiding colliding with your intended cover if you get distracted

And you can start braking when behind cover, instead of before while still exposed.

Threading the needle is a maneuver than involves flying quickly through tight cover. 

Unprepared enemies may risk pursuit and crash.

Steps to finding cover in an emergency

Steer towards safe, open space

Decouple

Strafe randomly while searching for cover

Avoid cover which takes a straight path away from enemies tracking you.  This will give them a clear shot at you.

Sometimes the best cover is behind your enemy, shifting your shields forward and charging them directly so they have to divert can be a good tactic.

Recouple

Hold your boost until you’re at top speed.

This is a highly unpredictable maneuver and is hard to track.

Two against one

When you’re fighting two enemies, you tend to end up in the middle of a straight line.

Your rear shield alerts will let you know when this happens.

Up your evasive maneuvers as much as possible, even at the expense of targeting.

Try to break away and create a triangle where you can keep an eye on both targets.

Putting a missile lock on the other opponent briefly may distract them long enough to take out the other.  Missiles are harder to evade when they’re coming straight at you.

Switching up targets occasionally between the two may help keep them both in check. Don’t get tunnel vision against one target because it leaves you wide open.

Flanking

This is when you approach from around cover and come at your enemy from the side or behind.

Flanking can be done without cover if you have wingmen where each can approach from different sides of the enemy.

When going behind cover, don’t come out where one would expect you to.  Try to divert from the expected path around the cover.

Charging the enemy

To make up the difference between you and the enemy, you should avoid charging straight at them.

You could collide.

You could lose front shields if they have longer range.

You could get into a missile lock that you can’t escape from.

Been playing through Skyrim again now and all at once, the tediousness comes back to me.  Alt-tabbing back from checking a potion recipe and I suddenly have two mouse cursors when I return.  Not only that, but I have to alt-tab to the game twice to get back.  The other borderless window mods either require cumbersome-as-hell SKSE mod, some 6.5MB persistent process running as Administrator sitting in the background forever, installing another application like AutoHotKey, larger complex applications like Borderless-Gaming (your best option, if you prefer to support for other games).

My solution is simple.  A 0.003 MB process you fire up before or after the game is running and it fixes the Skyrim window and closes out.  It has a 2.2 KB working set and closes immediately after it does its job.

Get it here: http://dl.maragnus.com/skyrimbw.php

Make sure you select your desktop resolution and check Windowed Mode.

Dungeons & Dragons 5th-edition spell card builder

I've created a D&D 5e spell card builder from my Player Handbook.  Important things like attack rolls, saving throws, damage, components, at higher level are all pulled into separate boxes. Additionally, I iconized semantic, verbal and ritual components as icons in the top-right corner.  There may be some structural issues in the text, but everything should be there.

http://maragnus.com/5e-spells/

I'm quite non-committal.  My shipment of a 1 week supply of Soylent arrived today after countless months of waiting.  Luckily, I've read a bit about it prior to chugging my first glass.  I ordered the pitcher and followed the instructions preparing the first bag.  I used a warm jug of Poland Spring water and shook for several minutes each.  But it still went down like cold wet sand.

My plan is to replace my lunch for a month with the goop.  I'm hoping that after 24 hours in the fridge, the texture will subside.  Every second meal from the pitcher, I'll make a new bag, storing a glass in the fridge for the next day.

My motives are quite simple: I'm lazy and my nutritional intake suffers.

Tokens are a staple in many roleplaying games.  Miniatures are great, but expensive, and it limits your creativity to what you have in your collection.  You can certainly buy a large collection of printed tokens fairly cheaply.  But if you'd prefer to truly make your game your own, you need to make your own.

Most of the bytes associated with a webpage are images.  A site that has a lot of small elements in separate files requires a lot of separate requests.  And for small elements, a significant portion of that traffic is overhead.

I have built a Windows application to combine images into a single file and output CSS to use it.

Some solutions in reducing overhead can help.  You can use a server that supports keep-alive or spread your static content across multiple domains to work around the maximum connections to a domain.  But my preference is to make every request count.

Tiling smaller images onto a single image is becoming a common solution.  It has given me pure CSS hover overs with no need to precache the hover states.  And subsequent pages load much quicker if I combine the smaller elements for the entire site.

After numerous manual efforts of combining images and pixel counting the offsets, I have created an application to do all the hard work for me.

Drag and drop files onto the app and it will stack them together.  Files with a "_over" suffix will automatically have Hover as the state.  It will store the new PNG, the generated CSS and an XML file to load it back in for updates.  The CSS class names will be the filenames.

My wife bought three strands of lights on clearance last year in anticipation of decorating the outside of our house for the first time this year.  Big multi-colored C9 bulbs with dangling white icicle strands of T1 bulbs.  It didn't occur to me that they wouldn't reach around the roof, turns out they had a total of 10' lighted feet each, and nobody carried those strands anymore.  It was time to hit Google and learn about my options.

How should I hang them?

There are a ton of hangers available.  And there are tons of things that can hang lights that are not hangers.  I was not able to find any clips designed for hanging lights that would stay up, so I turned to instructibles and found a great solution.  Checking Ebay and Amazon, I purchased a cheap bulk order of 100 pieces, which turned out to be enough to hang two strands of lights over 90' (28m) with dozen spares.

You should definitely inspect each clip and prepare it prior to climbing on the roof.  I attached the clips at regular intervals ahead of time, and had a pocket full of ones ready for tricky spots like corners.

How do I pick out which lights to get?

This was a tricky problem, I hit up three stores to set some parameters.  Walmart (to set my base point), Home Depot (to set my high point) and then BJ's Wholesale Club (for comparison).

LED lights: These lights are a bit more expensive and rarely as bright.  Now that the cons are out of the way, they make up for it in several ways, and turned out cheaper for me up front.  Their light quality is higher even if they are not as bright.  They have a higher maximum chain length reducing extension cords.  They consume less electricity, about 13% of condescends.  They don't get hot.  The chain length is the selling point for me, I can light my entire house without concern for extension cords.

Maximum chain length: The gauge of the wire determines how many lights you can chain together, end-to-end from a single outlet.  Commercial grade condescends allow about 6 strands, while residential grade allow between 2 and 3 strands.  If you go too long, you risk damage to your lights and potential fire.  The solution is to run extension cords to each starting point which is no fun.

The LED lights are a different story, the ones I bought allow up to 48 strands on a single chain.  And that is the minimum that I've seen.

Cost per lighted foot: Some companies display the "lighted length" and some companies display the total length from plug-to-plug.  Keep this in mind when you are browsing.  Higher gauge wire on LEDs and commercial grade condescend lights is tough to work with.  It is springy and doesn't cooperate when it is new.  Make sure that you've got about a couple inches per each foot extra lights.  Other than that, just divide the lighted length by the price and multiply by your roof line.

What did I eventually purchase?

In a world where CLR and JIT are generating native code for our desktop apps on the fly and horribly inefficient interpreted languages are serving our web content, both server-side and client-side, Intel and AMD folks must think our cheese slipped off our crackers.

The x86 processor is incredibly complex, incrementally loaded with new instructions to solve common problems in fractions of the time.  Most of these instructions are added with SSE releases.  SIMD stands for single instruction, multiple data.  We were given 64-bits of data when we all lived with our 32-bit operating systems, then it was upped to 128-bits.  Now with the VEX prefix, AVX is giving us 256-bits for 64-bit operating systems, potentially moving up to 512-bits within a couple of years.

These 128-bit registers are broken up into components, such as 2 doubles, 4 floats or 16 characters.  Then operations can be performed on these components in parallel, with a single instruction.  This is compared to scalar processing of each component at a time.  Available to us now is everything from simple mathematics to complex comparison and matching at the reduced cost of single instructions.

The entire pipeline is improved for these SIMD operations.  All 128-bits are loaded into memory at once.  Then the operations are performed on each component in parallel.  Finally, all 128-bits are store back to memory in one go.  In contrast with scalar processing, each component has to be separately loaded into a register, processed and then loaded back into memory, one at a time.  SIMD can save considerable amounts of processing time for complex mathematics, but also for very linear processes, such as string processing.  SSE can test 16 characters at the same time, compared to a single character at a time with scalar processing.

We are moving backwards in computing.  Since Pentium 4, Celeron and Athlon 64, we have had SSE2, yet Microsoft's .NET platform only utilizes SSE for converting between int and float.  .NET compiles to the native CPU on the fly!  Why does it not check what the processor supports and generate native code which rivals C++ programs of even experienced developers?  Lua and php utilize hash table lookups with reckless abandon, why do they not utilize SSE's string matching capabilities.

That is all, I just wanted to point out that we are all being stupid.

All right, there is more...  Most of these projects that I mentioned are either open source or have open source competitors (like Mono to .NET).  My hope is that some of the research into SIMD that I provide here will ripple into those projects.  There must be reasons that rich companies are avoiding basic points of optimization that would give them a significant edge.  Even SQL database systems are missing these features.

Here are the cons that I know of:

Task switching in some OSes when SIMD is being utilized causes a hit to performance.  Registers that hold SIMD are quite large and stored when switching tasks when two applications are utilizing SIMD at the same time.

Adding SIMD adds a level of uncertainty to the compatibility and portability. It is possible that a functions could be slower, or unsupported on a certain CPU.  Intrinsic functions have not always been portable and are still not available in many compilers, or are poorly optimized.

Performance is rarely consistent with SIMD functions.  While the result is always faster than scalar computation, the performance of those functions can vary depending on other processes utilizing them at the same time or the alignment of data in memory.

There is a penalty of working with memory that isn't aligned to 128-bit boundaries with many instructions.  Entire architectures may have to be modified to align memory properly for these functions.

Supporting multiple platforms can cause complex branching of code.

Here is what can be improved:

Any vector mathematics with 3 or more components (single operations need aligned memory to benefit)

Any matrix operations (small matrices need aligned memory to benefit)

All String functions (strings of any length)

Working with large bitmaps

Interpreted languages can tokenize their scripts in a fraction of the time.

Hash table (dictionary lookup) functions can be improved exponentially with string compare as well as with new hash generation (CRC32)

3D mathematics can be performed more rapidly

Here is why:

Saving power for mobile devices due reduced processor and  memory utilization

More responsive applications due to faster run-time

Competitive edge due to utilizing the newest technologies

The final verdict: SSE2 is the best option.  It offers performance between 150% and 388% of the CRT strlen function. 32-bit CRT and libc strlen are quite slow and the 64-bit strlens are about twice as fast.

1. What about SSE4.2?

First, SSE4.2 is slower.  Though it can run on unaligned memory faster than SSE2 can, it seems searching only for zeros can be done more efficiently with SSE2.

Second, it is only available on processors designed after 2009.  That is a harsh penalty.

Noteworthy: The SSE4.2 pcmpistri instruction (_mm_cmpistri instrinsic) runs faster on all unaligned memory than with the overhead of aligning the initial block of memory.

2. Is a separate executable for 64-bit worth it?

The benefits of a 64-bit operating system show here using the traditional methods without SIMD.  However, when it comes to the 128-bit SIMD instructions, it really doesn't matter too much.  You would indeed get a boost running 64-bit code on a 64-bit operating system, but it is negligible for string functions.

3. What is more memory efficient?

None of these methods allocate memory.

4. Is it worth requiring SSE2?

While you can certainly fall back to a standard implementation, SSE2 has been around for a very long time and it is unlikely that any software that you write today will be run on unsupported hardware.

5. Is this faster in ICC 12 or MSVC++ 2010 SP1?

The results were inconclusive and appear equal.

The source code and raw data are available.  The tests were run on an Intel i7-2600K @ 3.4GHz with 8GB of RAM in Windows 7 SP1 64-bit.  Y-axis is the duration in seconds of 100,000 iterations multiplied by 100,000.  The alignment of the string increases by 1 byte for each string length.  The libc function is the source code from git on 2011-10-13 updated to utilize 64-bits in VC++.