For those blissfully unaware, there was recently a bit of an uproar on Twitter after they announced they'd start charging for API access, which would have effectively killed the entire practice of making fun little bots overnight. It sounds like they did eventually back down on it—like most of the dogshit ideas that come out of that clown's mouth—but it did serve as a helpful reminder to me that I'd been meaning to port some of my own robot children over to Cohost.
Skybox Satellite is a bot that I wrote to take advantage of my very large collection of Half-Life maps (and associated mods), which I have amassed over many years. Like many first-person shooters of the time, Half-Life draws the sky as a textured cube which renders behind everything. The textures themselves are quite low-res, and often feature a pre-rendered environment created by an external program, though in the wonderful world of modding, not everyone has the same methods. Some skyboxes are clearly photo-sourced, some are hand-drawn, but they all end up blurry and distant against the harsh polygons of the levels themselves. This bot brings them into the foreground, albeit with an occluded, gently panning view.
In the Twitter version of the bot, I bodged together enough OpenGL to assemble a skybox into a cube, render it to a window, record the frames to video, and upload a short clip. Cohost doesn't support video uploading, so I decided to go one better, and do the whole thing on the fly with 3D CSS transformations. Here's an example:
This is all a bit hacky right now, so please let me know if your browser has trouble with it. I'm piggybacking off Cohost's 'spin' animation to actually rotate the sky, meaning that I don't have a whole lot of control over how it moves (and certainly can't get it to loop seamlessly). It's possible that it'll break at some point in the future, at which point I'll probably catch myself wondering how many times I'm really willing to come back to this project. Oh well, that's programming as a hobby for you.
