Good Thoughts

Been playing with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra together, and between them we finally cracked the reverse engineering needed to get a new level playing in Sonic R.

I ported the level editor I'd been building for Sonic R straight into Blender, so I get all of Blender's modelling tools for free. Then, with a bit of trickery, we increased the buffer size so the game can handle far more vertices. That count used to be capped by a 16-bit integer; it's now a 32-bit one.

The result is a new level,...

Genuinely blown away by GPT-6 Astra and Blender.

As you've probably seen, I've been reverse-engineering Sonic R to build a level editor and run custom tracks. So I loaded up the original Resort Island track and asked Astra to expand it. Not tweak it. Expand it, from a racetrack into a world.

The result is incredible. Game changer.

The fact it also made this video is just wild. It animated the camera in Blender, built the flythrough and exported it with music from Suno.

Got a nice little surprise in the mail today. The original inks and pencils from a page in the uk Sonic the Comic issue 4 1993. Bigger than I expected and so strange to be looking at the original art work of something I poured my little escapist head into during my formative years. Shout out to the original artist Ed Hillyer (Ilya)

Got the Angel Island map from Sonic Adventure (1998) running natively in the Sonic R (1997) engine this weekend. Same minimap, same leaderboard, completely different terrain. You can race the loop.

Texture remapping was a nightmare, and there's still some clipping where the falloff fights the mesh segmentation, but it's racing. Had to rework the engine's per-track memory limits to swallow the higher-poly Sonic Adventure assets, which was its own little adventure.

A Sonic Adventure import turne...

Spent a few hours mucking about with one of my favourite games, Sonic R, with Claude Code as a co-pilot. Genuinely amazing how far you can get reverse-engineering this thing: swapping textures, tweaking the course layout, messing with character behaviour, even hacking together a fast-load straight into a stage so I could test changes without sitting through the menus every time.

Changing the lighting was the bit that surprised me most. Felt like proper dark magic.

Makes me wonder what becomes...

Full moon ceremony coming up.

Just captured this cycling to the gym and thought the city is looking nice, intimidating, welcoming, mysterious yet beckoning. Happy Sunday all.

Pretty proud moment for me.
It’s a fair and balanced review all in all.
Good is places I’m happy about and work needed in others.
Overall really excited it seems to resonate overall.
https://www.science.org/content/article/journal-giant-elsevier-unveiled-ai-tool-scans-millions-paywalled-papers-it-worth-it

For every power has its double: one that lifts and one that breaks,
And the line between them thins with every promise that he makes.

Listen here: https://suno.com/s/Cw2XE2hMNCJTavEU