Ross Karchner

Today, with my family, I watched the first episode of Human Footprint, which is about invasive species. It’s full of US government employees (I noticed USGS, BLM, and Army Corps of Engineers) doing important science and engineering: keeping asian carp out of the great lakes, studying pythons in the everglades, and managing the wild horse population in the west.

I had to wonder, after these last few weeks… do these people still have jobs? What will happen without them?

The kiddo and I worked through this Godot Reinforcement Learning tutorial, and (after some troubleshooting to get onnx to install) it worked! We trained a model to be able to play a circular pong game.

I don’t necessarily understand most of what I did there, for example why I would pick “Stable Baselines” vs " Clean RL", but it definitely seems like something worth experimenting with some more. It might be fun to use to use RL to improve the the opponent in The Zummoning.

It’s a shame that in order to use a model in-game, you need to use the .NET version of Godot, which (apparently) can’t yet export to the web.

I’ve finished “Robo Rampage”, and thus I’m done with the Complete Godot 3D course.

Towards the end, I kind of wanted to just get it over with, so I didn’t put much effort into decorating the level (in fact, most of the decoration you do see was added by Benjamin). Still, I like that it’s got enemies that chase you, some interesting lighting effects, and two different guns that recoil and spawn little sparky-effects where the bullets impact.

What’s next? I want to get out of the tutorial headspace and work on my own projects for a while. I did start this Blender tutorial a few weeks ago, and plan to pick it up again. In the meantime, revel in this sweet-ass trash can I made all by myself!

This week, work is still in a holding pattern. I applied to a good number of jobs, talked to people, and un-mothballed one of my earliest Godot projects (a digital version the Balanced Attack Model game). My current thinking with that game: spend some time making the best version of that I can, then reaching out to the creator of the BAM deck to see if there’s some way we can collaborate and/or if he’d be OK if I make it available online.

Today, I’m working on the Amazon Bedrock Workshop, the first “homework” from the Become a Solution Architect program.

Starting Monday, and for the next four weeks I’m attending CISA’s “skilling academy” for System Security Analysis full-time.

So far it’s been four days since I and most of my colleagues were ordered not to work. I started the week getting over a cold, so didn’t do much of note Monday or Tuesday. Yesterday, I registered to take the AWS Security exam in April (my certification expires in May) and took a practice exam.

Will this last days? weeks? months? I have no idea.

Benjamin’s recent game jam entry is Rolling is Spinning. It gets pretty tricky at the end!

I did the coding, following his concept and directions. He also did the art/animation for the ball that represents the player.

The theme of the jam is “spinning”, hence the name, to remind the judges of that rolling should count as spinning.

• I’ve been helping my son on an entry for the Boss Rush Jam 2025– the concepts are his, most of the art is royalty free stuff from a humble bundle, and I do most of the coding and Godot-wrangling.
• I’m on the last project of Compete Godot 3D, which is a first person shooter. I’ve got a world to run around in, an enemy that follows me if I get too close, and a gun that can shoot then enemy and recoils when fired, and has a muzzle flash. There’s more to do, but it’s a satisfying project.