I am exhausted.

What have I been up to?

I’m starting university, and between the six month gap between this post and the last post I’ve done a bunch of things.

  • Contributing to the Centuria GitHub repository
  • Working on a bunch of side projects, but no progress
  • Studying stuff related to computing, economics and mathematics

My contributions to the Centuria repo

Centuria is a Java server that allows people to play the game Feral (use cntr+F) after its servers closed, something akin to Club Penguin private servers. (To be clear, my contributions did not contain anything cryptocurrency or blockchain related.)

I contributed to the project because I was always fascinated with the idea of game hacking.

My contributions are as follows:

  • Reimplementing server-side support for minor room editing features
  • Reimplementing server-side support for minigames

It was very difficult because:

  • Studying the game’s behaviour is difficult because the game’s code is obfuscated
  • I didn’t know how to debug Java programs in my IDE of choice

Progress on other side projects

  • IR blaster that controls lights: Progress stalled due to difficulty with writing C++ code, as well as technical issues with electrical components.
  • Loop Labyrinth: I haven’t done anything with it because its about complicated math, and I have made the decision to private the repository containing its code.

Topology

I tried to study topology for Loop Labyrinth and my grasp of it is still very loose.

Regardless, a topology on a set of points S is a collection of subsets of S (regions within S where there are points that are connected to each other) such that the union of all subsets gives back S (every point makes up S), and the intersection of all subset is still in the topology (there is a smallest possible region that still contains points that are connected to each other).

A homeomorphism from space 1 to space 2 is a continuous one-to-one function that assigns each point in space 1 to a point in space 2. For example, take the points on a cube, normalise the coordinates of those points(divide by the length from origin), and you now have the points on a sphere.

Loop Labyrinth isn’t very topology related but it does revolve around homeomorphisms. By teleporting objects from one edge of a plane to another, I effectively created a homeomophism that sewed together the two edges of the plane.