FFmpeg + LLM

FFmpeg is an really useful command line tool. Sadly it’s hard to remember all the commands. As a user I’d rather type in what I want, and then get an LLM to figure out the correct command to run. Then users can type things like:

• “Rotate this video 45 degrees”
• “Join these videos together”
• “Resize this to 480p”
• “Grayscale”

It’d be great if this could run offline in the browser, I did try doing this but ran into a lot of difficulties. Now I think it’s easier to just have it as a local desktop application that bundles FFmpeg.

Lately countries have started requiring eVisas even for countries that used to allow visa free travel. It’s very annoying. A month ago I signed up for an eVisa to get into Canada. Someone sent me the link, and after doing it I realised I didn’t use the official Canadian government website.. Instead I used signed up with evisatravel.org, they seem to sit in front of the real eVisa application process and forward the application to the Canadian government.

I wrote a book about how I created Bank Statement Converter. You can read it here. At the end of the book I wrote this:

A lot of people have emailed me asking for my ideas.

This is kind of funny I think, when someone comes to me and says they have an app idea I think “oh man please go away and leave me alone”. I guess it’s different because I’ve actually made apps that make money.

Midway through 2007 I was playing StarCraft and someone nuked my base from his base. This shouldn’t have been possible because StarCraft requires you use a ghost (an infantry unit) to target the nuke. The ghost can target the nuke a maximum of few inches in front of itself. The targeting phase lasts about 10 seconds and if the ghost is killed in this phase the nuke does not land.

A few weeks ago I added voice acting into Busty Barrister Barbara. It worked fine, until I tested out a Web build on my Windows PC. The audio sounded terrible, it sounded like it had gaps in it. Interestingly the bug only occured on Google Chrome for Windows.

Windows Chrome     ❌
Windows Firefox    ✅
MacOS Chrome       ✅
MacOS Firefox      ✅
MacOS Safari       ✅

Sadly about 3.22 billion people use Google Chrome for Windows. It’s too large of a segment to ignore really.

Happy new year to you all, hopefully Busty Barrister Barbara will sells billions of copies in 2024. I can’t believe it has been over a week since I’ve written a blog post.

✅ Hire someone to make music and SFX

I placed a job ad on Upwork. A lot of people applied. I hired three of them for paid trials. They should all be done by Friday this week. I’ll share their work here.

Christmas Day is my birthday, so please say “Happy birthday Angus” to yourself as you read this blog post. I had a pretty good Christmas. Spent a lot of time with my girlfriend’s family. Interestingly my Dad’s side of the family did not meet up for Christmas this year. My Mum’s side of the family live in Australia, so yeah, didn’t see those guys either. I spent a lot of time working on Busty Barrister Barabara actually. In the last post I put together a list of high level tasks that need to be done to complete the first level of the game. I smashed through a lot of them so let’s go through the ones I did one by one.

The main character of this game is loosely based off my Aunt who is a barrister. She’s going to be mad if she ever finds out. I saw her for lunch today, and asked her a bunch of questions about the various courts in Hong Kong. She told me the district courts have open galleries so I can just go in and watch a case. She also told me that The High Court is used only when the penatly for a crime is expected to be greater than seven years.

Try out the latest build.

I started working on Busty Barrister Barbara on November 17 2023. Just over one month ago. The game not done, and it probably wont be done for at least another three months. Game development is very different to business application development. When I made BankStatementConverter I coded it for a week, and got it into production. I spent the next three years improving it.

You can’t really do that for a visual novel, gamers want to play the game when it’s done, not when it’s full of bugs and temporary art. But I want to get people playing it as soon as possible. That’s why I’ve been making web builds. It is difficult ot get someone to run your exe. It’s easier to get someone to click a link and play your game.

Try out the latest build.

The development of the engine for Busty Barrister Barbara has been going well. A few days ago I figured out how to deal with branching which was one of the last missing features. I’ve done this before in plenty of other games. What I normally do is:

1. Make sure every event has an identifier.
2. Chain events together with a nextEventId
3. Create Decision events with multiple nextEventIds.

const event1 = { id: "1",  nextEventId: "2", message: "hello" }
const event2 = { id: "2",  nextEventId: "3", message: "hello to you too" }

const decision = { id: "3", options: [
    { text: 'Say hello again', nextEventId: '4' },
    { text: 'Ask what time it is', nextEventId: '14' },
    { text: 'Stare at them', nextEventId: '24' },
]}

That works pretty well. Then I’d store all the events in a HashMap like this.