I have a large number of keyword bookmarks in whichever browser I happen to be using at the time that I’ve been building up over the years1. One of the ones I particular enjoy is text: data:text/html, <html contenteditable>. What that does is open a new tab where I can take notes, completely locally. It’s really handy… but there’s one big problem: I often accidentally close the tab and lose whatever I had been typing. So I decided to take a few minutes to write up a simple extension of the idea that would save the data to LocalStorage.
JP's Blog
Sandbox Battle!
Ludum Dare 30: Demo mode
Quick update this morning: I managed to get a ‘demo mode’ working. Now when you first start the game, the boxes will be whizzing around in the background giving you an idea of what you’re about to get yourself into!
Ludum Dare 30: Programmer art and simple AI
A few hours later and we’ve already finished (or at least made good progress on) two of the goals that I was hoping for:
- AI players; at the very least one that moves randomly, but optimally several different kinds
- Pending the previous, a selector on the options screen that can turn each player either off, on, or to any of the current AIs
- Stylings around the page; probably some sort of thick border that bleeds a little in and out, looking different per player
Ludum Dare 30: 24 hours
Here we are, 24 hours into the competition.
A lot of the last few hours has been spent doing a fair amount of restructing. Before, I had a single ’thread’1 for each of the tiles, along with another thread listening for user input. Unfortunately though, that lead to all sorts of race conditions. Specifically, whenever two tiles overlapped, it was often the case that one was doing the falling step (which copies from one internal buffer to another) while the other was in the swap step (which copies from tile to another). Then after the first finished, it would copy the second buffer over… overwriting anything that had been swapped.
Oops.
Ludum Dare 30: Hints of a game
We’re getting there. 18 hours in and I have the first hints of what might actually be a game…
Ludum Dare 30: Sandbox Battle
And here we are again. Ludum Dare. Taken directly from their about page…
Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event. Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community.
More specifically, the goal is to make a game from scratch in 48 hours. You’re allowed to use publicly available frameworks and code libraries, but no art or other assets. Previously, I missed the original start time. So although I made my game in 48 hours, it didn’t qualify. This time around, I’m starting on time.
Approximating Pi with Buffon's Needle
I’m a bit late for Pi Day, but Programming Praxis had a neat problem on Friday that I wanted to check out:
Suppose we have a floor made of parallel strips of wood, each the same width, and we drop a needle onto the floor. What is the probability that the needle will lie across a line between two strips?
Partitioning the Dutch national flag
Yesterday’s post from Programming Praxis asks us to solve a problem known as the Dutch National Flag problem (attributed to Edsgar Dijkstra): sort an array of red, white and blue symbols so that all reds come together, followed by all whites, followed finally by all blues.
Translate CSV to HTML
Yesterday’s post from Programming Praxis asks us to write a function that will read content formatted as comma-separated values and output the result as an HTML table. Their solution uses the text file database library that they posted about (which is a neat concept, you should check it out), but I think I’m going to work out the solution more directly.