A Trail Tale
atrailtale.com
atrailtale.com
I wrote a separate vue.js progressive web app that is installed on his phone so he can write updates while he's outside of cell coverage, and they sync when he has internet access again.
The backend is a Node server on an AWS EC2 instance that dumps all of his updates and hourly weather data into a postgres database. Everything is timestamped, so we will be able to replay the trip or add an interactive timeline when he's done.
1. I've heard different accounts of how well unity web GL is supported, did you run into any limitations?
2. What did advantages did wrapping this in Vue provide?
2. I have a ton of experience working with responsive web design using Vue/Angular/React, and I kept running into issues designing my UI in Unity that could have been solved with a single line of CSS. It was also nice to have a non-Unity controller for the project so I would be able to easily swap out the Unity animations with a fallback if I couldn't fix the Safari issues. Playing music in the WebGL player was a huge performance hit, especially once I started layering sounds, by having Vue handle that I could take advantage of browser optimizations with on caching music and detach the download of the audio files from the download of the rest of the assets (they were by far the largest part of the project data-wise), so a slow connection isn't waiting on the music to get into the app itself.
The trade-off was losing the ability to build the project as an exe and the loss of non-audio performance. We knew getting people to run a random exe from the internet was a hard sell, and the performance loss isn't really felt when the UI is run in the Vue side of the app. If I was making a game that needed high performance, I'm not sure the performance loss would be such viable compromise.
I was also having some annoying issues with scaling everything based on device screen size, and choppy performance, problems I would have fixed eventually, but nice that Unity behaved correctly right off the bat.
If I had another year, I probably would have built a unity scene file parser (or maybe an editor extension) to convert the object positions and script parameters so I could take advantage of the Unity editor while still cutting out a lot of the overhead, definitely a step I would have taken if I couldn't get the WebGL player to behave as well as I did.
It’s SO cool to see this on here. I’ve been tracking him using it when we get separated. Andy, if you see this, hello from Deadweight :).
The ridge is basically bare of trees, AIUI because of the plume of pollution from the zinc plant. A Walk In The Woods (the book, not the execrable movie) goes into some detail.
12 years ago when I hiked through, the ridge was covered in low berry bushes, possibly as some sort of bioremediation effort. I did not partake of the berries.
The pollution killed all microbial life, so the trees and dead vegetation could not decay and just lay on the ground for decades. There's a creepy photo in the PDF.
EPA developed a soil treatment and tested two ratios of ingredients. One ratio was good for grass and the other worked for trees. Finally, they used the average of the two ratios. They hoped that it would allow grasses to grow quickly and prevent rain from washing away the treatment and still allow trees to grow later. I'm curious if trees were finally able to grow. I think the answer is no, since there were few trees after fifteen years, when you visited in 2010.
Perhaps the ratio was good, but some areas (like the ridge) lost too much of the treatment material by erosion before grasses could grow and stabilize the soil? EPA could follow up and order a re-application of the treatment in the affected areas.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehigh_Gap#Lehigh_Gap_Nature_C...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070929101630/http://www.biosol...
In the bottom right, hit "Live" (which is the current status; UI is hard) to switch to "Demo" mode, where you can alter all the settings.
Also, one brother wrote the music and another brother of his coded the whole thing. Super cool. Apparently the inspiration was The Oregon Trail but powered by live data
https://www.amazon.com/Grandma-Gatewoods-Walk-Inspiring-Appa...
Here’s an online taste:
https://www.outdoors.org/resources/amc-outdoors/history/gran...
Is the background generative in some way, or is each layer in a loop?
Great idea.
One nitpick is that I don't like clicking left to access the older Journal entries (traditionally, right arrow shows older entries, like in pagination tables).
Maybe I should add 'First Entry' and 'Most Recent' buttons in addition to 'Previous Entry' and 'Next Entry' to make it feel a bit better.
Edit: fixed link
https://music.apple.com/de/album/2200-miles-ep/1578283523?l=...
Update, found in the About section:
> My brothers and I built this unique blog to give everyone the experience of reaching Katahdin (the trail’s northern terminus), no matter where or when you are in life.