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Heartbeat - May 2025

· 3 min read
Admer456
Admer456
Le me

It's been a while since the last post, but don't worry! I've been doing stuff.

Let's get a few quick little things out of the way:

VRChat avatar​

In February, I made a little bit of progress on my VRChat avi:

It's shaping up. I'll have to redo the hair, possibly the cheek fluffs and of course, add eyelids. But then the rest is just texturing, adding physbones and other things. Yay!

Avalonia​

I've been toying around with Avalonia more, and honestly it has so much potential. I might use it for all my desktop UI apps.

I just need to do a bit of Vulkan interop, and write some custom widgets/components. That'll be very fun, and will pave the way to a custom map editor project one day. I wanna write a colour picker and some standardised property editors (e.g. 3D vector sliders).

You might know Avalonia as this XAML-oriented UI library, but I'm actually using it in pure C#. There's a library that adds a ton of builder extension methods, so that's great. It's going to get even better with the new extension types... mm.

Childhood​

I finally got off my lazy butt and dragged that 2005 Compaq PC into my room. I pulled a bunch of files off of it and I found some old gold:

This was captured around 2015. My brother and I were watching these.

I believe this might be 2013. This is Cicko, an old cat that used to live at my grandparents'!

This one's from 2012, when I got my hands on GMod for the first time. Crazy. You know, I never thought I'd appreciate them this much. I ought to make a gallery of these at some point.

HL SDK Programming​

Honestly, I haven't done all that much lately (in general, not just the video). It feels like my brain's been on low-power mode for months. It's starting to recover though.

The latest Half-Life SDK Programming video has taken a rather long time. It may likely come out in July, and then I'm gonna be taking a break from the programming series, so I can focus on the mapping series.

After that, I need to work on the NPC chapter, and finish the series with the clientside/HUD chapter. The thing that made it take so long were viewer-submitted ideas. For the past 2 videos, I've written nearly a dozen weapon classes, I think?

It's a lot of work and there were plenty of edge cases along the way. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't feel I'm getting too much educational value out of it, it's mostly turning into a copy-paste video tutorial at that point. As such, the AI chapter likely won't have viewer-submitted ideas, since I'd love to focus more on explaining and analysing the SDK instead. Returning to form, if you will.