Etherplex » MicroBlog

“AAA Indie” Game Development

Rick — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:17:03 +0000

Notice that an independent game development studio, Zero Point, is working with the community fairly closely to produce a space shooter called Interstellar Marines. They are funded largely by pre-sales of the game, and to maintain credibility, they release video and game demo material so the community can see their progress. Their “Bullseye” training area demo is playable on Mac and PC on the web because they are developing the game using the Unity engine, which is cross-platform and runs in a browser. They don’t currently have, and don’t plan to have, a “publisher” in the traditional sense, which is kind of exciting; the people working to make the game are the ones who will distribute and profit from it. There’s something pure about the simplicity of it. And, true to Zero Point’s claims of Interstellar Marines being an “AAA” title, it actually looks pretty good!

Elisp Bytecode Compilation for Speed

Rick — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:38:27 +0000

My Emacs startup time was stretching beyond 10 seconds, which seemed a bit offputting even for a text editor cum operating system. I do have a fair amount of elisp loading at startup, however, and though I have played with byte-code-cache, I determined there must be an easier way to compile all my elisp files in one go, rather than calling byte-compile-file for each file in my elisp directory. It turns out there is:

C-0 M-x byte-recompile-directory

will recursively traverse a directory stucture and compile all .el files encountered. My startup time is back to 4 seconds.

Rationality

Rick — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:19:35 +0000

It took me 30 years, but I woke up this Sunday morning and realized that rational numbers can be expressed as the ratio of two integers.

Fibonacci

Rick — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:01:17 +0000

By far the most brain-bendingly elegant definition of all the Fibonacci numbers I have ever encountered:

(def fibs (lazy-cat '(1 2) (map + fibs (drop 1 fibs))))

Found over an the clojure-euler wiki.

Project Euler

Rick — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 07:53:06 +0000

Just watched the December 2007 Google Authors session with Randall Munroe, creator of the XKCD webcomic. Really good talk; he seems like a real geek, which is awesome. He inspired me to sign up for Project Euler, which I have. I did the first problem in a couple of minutes, and visited the forum to find out what kind of code others were writing. I continue to love lisp, so I think I’ll be tackling the challenges in Clojure. The first problem yields to some basic list operations:

(reduce + (filter #(or (= (rem %1 3) 0) (= (rem %1 5) 0)) (range 1000)))

We’ll see how well Lisp holds up for the later problems.

admin — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:09:05 +0000

Discovered that WordPress has a great built-in feature that allows you to post entries by email. Setting it up was easy…and it may give me a way to post updates when I’m behind Nazi firewalls.

Rick — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 21:31:58 +0000

Trying to figure out if there is anything in the canonical definition of streams (lazy lists) that says that you need to keep the initial elements of the stream after use (if, for example, you’re recursing down the list and the head elements are getting garbage collected). Can streams be used as iterators when traversed recursively?

Rick — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:51:56 +0000

Discovered Backpack a while back (February), a service from 37Signals that allows you to manage your data online in a variety of ways. It seems like a shame to use their service when you have your own domain, so I decided that some of their features I could make use of with a “journal” approach to blogging, rather than only essays. We’ll see if it works out.

Rick — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:49:23 +0000

Figured out how to generate a list of all k-element combinations from a set of n elements using double recursion. Apparently, the solution I developed is the “classical” way to do it, but it was challenging nevertheless.