The short version: I’m at the University of Sydney doing the Master of Computer Science (Advanced). It’s the end of semester two, 2024, and exams are nearly here.

# Studying

Time is tight. There’s a lot of practical work here, though I’ve written my share of reports too.

Classes usually come in two flavours. In a lecture, one professor teaches a whole room of students. A tutorial is smaller and more hands-on: one tutor to a dozen or so students.

The assignments come one after another, and they’re often a headache. Some courses have weekly tasks on top of that. It’s hard to get a breather during the week, and I usually have to set aside a day of the weekend for coursework.

I’ve learned a lot, though. Some reports taught me precious little about the subject, but at least my written English got better. And reports are only a small part of it. Quite a few of the assignments have been genuinely interesting and helped me figure things out.

# Everyday life

By my reckoning, most things here cost about five times what they do back home. A few things cost about the same.

On an ordinary day I spend upwards of 150 yuan on food alone. I can live with that.

The rent is what gets me. I pay 2,100 yuan a week, or 8,400 for four weeks, and that’s about as low as I’ve seen in Sydney. Paying less would mean competing for one of the few university rooms. Even those run to around 1,600 a week. Still a lot.

# Games

After finishing the main story of The Witcher 3 and Hearts of Stone, I completely lost the urge to play anything. I even bought Black Myth: Wukong and haven’t started it yet...

The Witcher 3 really is that good. It’s about a decade old and the textures show their age, but the story, the mechanics, the combat — I had fun with all of it. Especially the story. One choice can open up so many possibilities. It was the first time I’d really felt how a story could branch and weave back together. Even the little side quests and contracts were worth doing.

Oh, and I can’t exactly leave out Gwent 🐶.

I can see why people felt Cyberpunk 2077 fell short of what CD Projekt Red could do. The mountain of bugs at launch didn’t help, but even now that the game runs much better, its story just doesn’t come close to The Witcher 3 for me.
(Phantom Liberty was pretty good, though.)

# Plans for the summer

My main plan is to work on a university project. It should be fairly relaxed, at least compared with this semester.

That leaves some time to write code for things I actually want to make. These are ideas that occurred to me in class or in everyday life and still seemed feasible after a little digging. Most tempting first:

• Cyberpunk 2077 mods. Ciri once travelled to what looked like the world of Cyberpunk 2077. I’d like to bring together some existing mods and put together a Ciri cosplay set.
  • Improve Always First Equip. It’s very configurable, but what I really want is something like the weapon inspect animation in VALORANT.
  • Replace the main menu background. There was a mod for this, but it barely works since 2.0 and Phantom Liberty. I’ll try to fix it.
  • Ciri’s clothes. A mod already exists, but the hands don’t line up properly in first person. I’d like to fix that.
  • Ciri’s sword. Tweak the weapon stats in an existing mod. A little boost does help keep things fun on hard difficulty 🐶.
  • Ciri has that distinctive dash you trigger with the space bar. There’s a similar ability in 2077, but in cutscenes she can actually teleport. That last bit is very much an idea; it sounds hard.
• Game saves. I contributed a few features to mcthesw/game-save-manager early on. It’s passed 600 stars now. People are still suggesting improvements and features in the issues, and I’d like to see if I can contribute again.
• OCR for novels. I think Qidian changed something about its paid chapters. Scraping no longer works on most of the sites I’ve seen, but OCR is a different matter. The app blocks screenshots on the device itself. In an Android emulator, though, a script could turn pages and Windows could capture a fixed area for OCR. It struck me that one subscriber could then make pirated copies available to other people.
• Subtitle translation. I could integrate a translation service with Windows Live Captions. That would mean working with both the Windows API and the translation service’s API. I found SakiRinn/LiveCaptions-Translator on GitHub. When I tried it, quite a few things didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. There might be something I can improve there.