I spent last weekend on Linux low-latency audio stuff. Eventually, I gave up, made a little 32gb partition, and installed a distribution suited to low-latency audio work. It does all its recording etc. to my larger data partition, and works with two microphones running through Ardour (I want to do some noise-gating, so I don’t get my own breathing sounds as much). The process was annoying, but the results are pretty cool.
Now that I’m done with that, I’ve been getting back to my reading for Random Carrier Battles, a project I announced in the Grognard Wargamer thread a few months ago. I have a copy of a book by Norman Friedman on the design and development of US Carriers; among all the pretty line drawings and blueprints are some doctrinal facts that mean I have to do a bunch of rewriting of the code. My view of aircraft handling (and of carrier design) was insufficiently detailed—American practice in the interwar years, for instance, frequently led to hangars which were not large enough to contain the entire air wing. Some planes would have to be parked on deck, and because that obviously presents problems for aircraft recovery, American carriers usually had arresting gear at the bow and provisions for running at high speeds astern. You’d leave the aircraft parked at the back of the flight deck, run the engines up to back full, and land whatever you had to land over the bow.
Anyway, I’m not sure how much of that I’m going to expose to the player/admiral, but I think I will have to do some extra simulation of flight deck space and takeoff rolls to more accurately get at the difficulty of getting a strike in the air in a coordinated fashion. In any event, I’m waiting until Godot 3.0, because the single-precision-only in GDScript is killing me.
