• Blog
• 2022
• January
• Tuesday Topics #22: Website Happenings & A Tiny Car

Introduction

Hey everyone, this is Loren from Donut Team and welcome to another Tuesday Topics blog post!

This week, I have some backend website stuff to talk about a bit. I am also joined by Borb who will have her own segment on a new car she's working on.

Let's get into it!

Website Happenings

This section will be rather technical, if you're not interested in that sorta thing, you can safely skip it.

Way back in Tuesday Topics #3, I discussed my internal library "donut-box" which is a library of shared code and classes used across our upcoming and recently launched websites and APIs.

Over this past week, I've been working on its successor "donut-box-2". The most notable difference between the original and this new library is that all of my code in "donut-box-2" uses ES6 modules instead of CommonJS modules.

Doing this has been no small undertaking but it offers various advantages such as the code being more efficient (in theory, at least) and also being able to use various newer NPM packages that require the code including them to be ESM.

It also provided a good opportunity to trim the fat of the library a bit, rearrange its files to make things easier to find and just generally improve things.

As always, my efforts are focused on improving the readability and portability of our codebases and I believe this to be just another step on the long road of doing just that.

To close out this segment, I'd like to say that I expect "donut-box-2" to be in use in production within the next week or so on this website as well as in our API, not that you'll notice much of a difference.

Tiny Car for Chubby Dudes

I cannot remember the specific reason I am making this car but funny car! Unsurprisingly the design of this car is somewhat inconsistent, as evidenced by this video.

If you look at the end of the video, you can even see they change the color of the headlight housings and attach them to the main body of the car instead of the fenders! The trim around the edge of the passenger compartment is also a particularly egregious offender, as it seems to be an entirely different shape on the CG model when compared to the drawn shots.

As a result, I'm finding I have to split the difference between various shots and figure out a way to actually attach the running gear to the car, since as far as I can tell the engine and suspension simply float in front of it, which is... unsatisfactory. Adding reference images of the car used as inspiration (a 1935 Morgan Super Sport as far as I can tell) into the mix simply complicates things further, as it's hard to discern the exact shape of the vehicle and slight variations within the model year (mainly the absence or presence of a spare tire and the resulting difference in the shape) make it appear as if the animators and modellers used various different examples and combined them.

Frankly, this is just a very confusing model to make.

A work-in-progress image of the car model.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading another one of our Tuesday Topics posts! See you again next week.

- Loren from Donut Team

P.S.: Borb thinks you should listen to this.

P.S.S.: Borb also thinks you should listen to the original upload so the creator of the audio gets a view too!