As I’m coding, managing lists of millions of vertices, swapping buffers, keeping track of state and building optimization caches (in time and space, as we say), it is wonderfully overwhelming. There is so very much more to do. Collada imports, managing interactive object types, state saving and recalling, and many fine details that can’t yet be revealed.

To say nothing of the joy of actually crafting the puzzles, and the graphics and the music.

I am reminded of an excellent SF book by Greg Egan called “Permutation City”, which takes place mostly in a simulated world. (The world has become detached from reality, because the computer that generated it was turned off, so they are free-floating.)

One of the persons inside it has found a way to cope with immortality; from time to time he is reborn with a new obsession. After he has cataloged the last of the several billion species of butterfly and moths in some imaginary world, he wonders who he will become next.

The room goes fuzzy, and he is disoriented… he realizes he is in a workshop with acres of bins of wooden dowels… all waiting to be lathed into table and chair legs.

He is in heaven.