An updated version of Tiny Player for Mac is out now.

• Fixed playback controls on latest OS
• Updated icon
• Added support for m4b audio book files

Full changelog here.

I’m rewriting my 3 shipped games. I call it “remastering”. It’s a big technical refresh without any major changes in gameplay or visuals.

Why?

1. It’s fun.
2. I want to keep the games playable on modern systems. I considered updating the existing Java implementations but switching to C++ just makes more sense in the long-term.
3. I can cut bits of content that didn’t age well and focus on the good parts.

Superforce is the most recent one, already written in C++ but I completely replaced the rendering and audio code with a new engine based on Sokol. Now it runs faster and should be easier to port to new platforms.

Type Raiders was my second game and it was originally written in Java. The C++ rewrite is almost complete. The game mechanics are pretty simple, so I can focus on getting the graphics right. I dropped the built-in level editor, since I’m not planning on making new ones.

Devastro was my first shipped game and it is by far the most complex one. AI, collisions, pathfinding, bots, vehicles, cutscenes, level editor… about 60000 lines of Java in total. An intimidating task at first, but since there’s no design phase, no experimentation, all assets are done and a reference implementation is readily available, it only took a weekend to import the levels, create a new SDF-based collision system and add an animated character that can move around.

Tiny Player version 2.0 is out now on iOS. This is a rather big update:

• Refreshed user interface
• Import from Files
• ZIP support
• Equalizer (high-shelf/low-shelf)
• Embedded lyrics
• Designated “incoming” folder

• Removed support for variable playback rate
• Removed “autosort” feature
• Requires iOS 15 or newer

Quick update: 2.0.1 is out:

• Drag playlist items to reorder
• Small fixes

For the last few years I had been using DigitalOcean to host this website & a few others, file sync and my git repos. Fairly low traffic stuff on a single VPS instance. It was nice and cheap. But still… the recent 20% price increase got me thinking…

Can I build my own server?

Turns out I could! And it was a lot of fun.

I used a 10th generation Intel NUC with a 6-core i7 CPU, 32GB RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD. Yes, overkill. But the key parameter is power usage. The whole system draws ~7W at idle. What a wonderful little machine!

For the OS I decided to install Ubuntu (22.04 LTS). I’m familiar with it and it was useful having the same OS on both systems. Then, some housekeeping on the old server:

• removed old disconnected websites
• put websites under separate user accounts
• moved from Gogs to Gitea
• organized my git repositories
• setup a more thorough backup procedure

When I had everything ready, I brought the NUC to the new Prague data center and turned it on. It went online and the migration could begin. I started moving websites and services one by one. A few days later, the old VPS instance was empty and I turned it off.

There’s plenty of headroom for no extra money and I feel like I’m more self-reliant.

To elaborate a little bit on the backup procedure:

1. daily rsync (soon → rsnapshot)
2. daily mysql dumps
3. /etc and apt package list versioned in git
4. secondary NUC ready for deployment
5. backup VPS account ready for deployment  (prepaid credit)
6. up-to-date checklist for configuring the whole software stack