Forum (SoCoder)

Christopher Alexander Wagner. Unfortunately, "er", as pronounced in American English, is one of my least favorite phonemes.

View Topic : The Science of Computing

Think of it on the bright side. At the average college over here it would probably have been:

<B><I>GO TEAM</B>

View Topic : Win8 Lovin'

Windows 8 is indeed very fast. Metro apps are all but useless on a desktop PC, though, and like others I found the context-switching between the desktop and Start screen mildly irritating.

I have to admit that I installed Classic Shell and haven't looked at the Start screen since. Basically just gives you a faster version of Windows 7.

(I only installed the start menu part, the rest of it seems kind of useless, honestly.)

Also have to admit that despite my desktop being massively more powerful I spend most of my time on a Mac from 2008...

View Topic : Your Top 10 Games

1. Tetris - I don't need to justify this.

2. Sam & Max Hit the Road - Steve Purcell would pretty much just have to say the word and I'd give him my firstborn. This game has had a profound and lasting impact on my idiolect. Grim Fandango would also be in this list were it not for the "family" restriction - it's another game that should not be missed.

3. Super Mario Brothers 3 - The greatest platformer ever made, bar none.

4. Fallout 3 - it was a really close call between this and Skyrim, but I'm giving Fallout 3 the advantage because I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic scenarios. Also, it doesn't report the amount of time I've been playing back to Steam correctly, so I have no idea how much time I've played that game, whereas with Skyrim, it's staring me in the face that I'll never, ever get those 120+ hours of my life back. I have a problem, okay

5. Pokemon Gold - I was exactly the right age for these games when they came out, and the older ones are still extremely satisfying games. I never caught them all.

6. Secret of Mana - One of the greatest RPGs from the SNES-era.

7. Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - This was always my favorite Zelda for some reason.

8. Katamari Damacy - Not that We can remember very clearly, but We were in all Nature's embrace. We felt the beauty of all things, and felt love for all. That's how it was. Did you see? We smiled a genuine smile.

9. Street Fighter IV - I enjoy fighting games, although I'm not actually any good at them. This one was nice.

10. Mario Party 2 - I recall playing this with friends and having lots of fun, even though it's mostly an extremely prolonged coin flip. That having been said, I always have a hangover the next morning so I'm not sure how much credit I can give the game itself.

View Topic : Too Hot

You talkin' CPU temperatures there?

(7C here...)

View Topic : Raspberry Pi update.

I got mine back with one of the earlier batches and only now finally got around to using it. RetroPie is super-nice - the NES emulation is pretty much perfect, and the SNES only seems to hiccup with later-gen games.

Sorry to hear you've been having so much trouble with it - I had issues getting mine to start up at first (just the red power light, nothing else) when I first got it and it turned out the SD card hadn't been written correctly (dodgy SD card dongle thing.) Overwriting it with a new image made it work just fine. But if you've already gone through that many I doubt it's your issue...

View Topic : Who is Wario?

Japanese is if anything even punnier than English - there are a lot more homophones to facilitate this, and similar-looking characters can also be a sort of "visual pun" that doesn't really work in alphabetic writing systems.

The thing is that trying to translate a Japanese pun into English is usually difficult if not completely impossible to do... so a lot of the time they're just dropped. It's hard to translate a pun when it depends on "love" (koi) and "carp" (koi) being pronounced the same.

"warui" means "bad." Waruiji is also an anagram of ijiwaru - "a mean-spirited person." Also he's a stupid character.

I think the main difference between Wario and Mario is that Mario can't actually gather more than 100 coins - they all just disappear and his life is magically extended. So he basically gets to live forever, but must remain a pauper. Meanwhile, Wario is building castles more or less directly out of stolen coins, because he's got so many of them he doesn't need bricks.

View Topic : Git GUI push

I will note that GitHub for Windows actually does indicate when you're formatting your commit messages wrong - it just gives you such a minor visual cue that it's hard to notice unless you're looking for it. When a line of the commit message gets beyond the recommended length, the rest of the characters on that line turn gray instead of black.

Won't fully address the GUI / console disparity, but hopefully knowledge of that will at least make commit messages more palatable to command-line users.

View Topic : Jay's Crappy April

Disease is a really, really terrible hobby - you should go back to writing games instead...

Wishing you the best.

View Topic : Jay's crappy March

(Not good at emotion-talk, but...)

Your March has definitely sucked. I hope things go as well as possible, all things considered. Hospitals suck even when you're not actually all that sick, so when you're actually in condition to need one...

View Topic : Learning WebDev

I mostly agree with Jayenkai, but if you don't know HTML yet, I think you should get a decent handle on HTML / CSS before you delve into the others too far.

Although I disagree with Afr0's advice to not learn JavaScript, I do not necessarily disagree with his assessment of the language.

That having been said, don't use JavaScript for evil, as many of your forebears have.

View Topic : Auto = Nought?

I do not ultimately condone its sentiment, but it seems relevant to the current scenario:

giveupandusetables.com/

View Topic : X-- vs X>0

Well, that's not entirely an accurate conversion.

If x starts at 0,

while (x--) {
    ...
}

-->

will not execute, but

do {
    ...
} while (Convert.ToBoolean(x--))

-->

WILL execute once.

Convert.ToBoolean on ints isn't really "idiomatic" C#; I'd suggest just going with the following if there's no better looping construct:

while (x > 0) {
    x--;
    ...
}

-->

View Topic : array Problem

That's because you're passing in a single element of the array with INS(R[0]) instead of the array, when what you need is just INS®. You also can't print the result of that, since it doesn't return anything.

View Topic : array Problem

Passing in the array works; the line doing it was just commented out in your example above and I did not change it back.

View Topic : array Problem

Blitz's array support is anemic. You can pass string arrays to methods, but the so called "blitzarrays" break if you specify the type anywhere but declaration. That is to say, the following will work:


Function INS(E$[10])

Local J:Local S
For J=1 To 6:For S=1 To Len(E[J])
If Mid$(E[J],S,1)="B" Or Mid$(E[J],S,1)="b"
	E[J]=Mid$(E[J],1,S-1)+"/"+Mid$(E[J],S+1)
EndIf
Next 
Next 

End Function

Local R$[10]
;Local K
For K=1 To 6:W=Rand(10,30):
For TT= 1 To W:Q=Rand(26)+64
R[K]=R[K]+Chr(Q)
Next 
Next

For O=1 To 6
Print R[O]:;Print INS$(R[O])
Next

-->

No idea what you're doing, though...

View Topic : Blitz 3D math source

@JL235 - I am aware of how floating point math works -- it's not that 10 million is an odd choice but that "infinity" is expressly given a finite value. I'd probably have to call it something more like "MAX_SIGNIFICANT_VALUE" if I wanted to be able to read my own code without giggling.

View Topic : Blitz 3D math source

I have to admit that my favorite part of this code is the fact that infinity is defined as 10 million.

View Topic : Shoppy Shouty

My wife works retail, and she alerted me to the existence of this creature:

F- Yeah Retail Robin

It's kind of like Art Student Owl but with a different kind of ennui.

View Topic : Making an array of arrays in blitzmax?

BlitzMax supports two different kinds of multidimensional arrays out of the box:

"Rectangular" arrays:

Local myArray:Int[10, 10]
myArray[0, 0] = 5

-->
or, if the size of each dimension isn't known until later:

Local myArray:Int[,] = New Int[10, 10]
myArray[0, 0] = 5

-->

The kind of array you were trying to do also exists, but "jagged" arrays are a bit more awkward in BlitzMax. As far as I am aware you have to manually new up the arrays inside each level of the array.

' Create an array of arrays of Int; they're all null now
Local myArray:Int[][] = New Int[][10]
' Set each array in the array of array of Int to
' a new array of Int
For Local i:Int = 0 Until Len(myArray)
	myArray[i] = New Int[10]
Next
myArray[0][0] = 5

' It goes without saying that New Int[10][10] won't work.

-->

I'm not sure what the original code is doing, but it'd be nice if you could use the "rectangular" arrays instead.

Jay, Blitz3D had issues with 'real' multidimensional arrays in types, IIRC, but it was also crazy enough to have multiple types of array to begin with. You don't have to live like this anymore.

View Topic : Call The FBI!!!

Smeagol doesn't have schizophrenia so much as dissociative identity disorder, but as far as I remember, Noel has never once complained about tricksy Hobbitses or killed his brother to get a "birthday present," which I think are diagnostic criteria under the DSM IV. On that note, I've also never seen him exhibit a single symptom of actual schizophrenia. "Being nice one moment and annoying the next" is usually indicative only of the human condition.

This is a lovely chain of overreaction that I wish I could somehow have been involved in. Maybe I can start making subtly creepy statements every now and again.

[ed] I want to make it clear that my goal was to plant the mental image of Cower saying "tricksy hobbitses," not to pick on Afr0 or anybody else. It just seems like it's been one of those off days; nothing that won't blow over in a few days or minutes.

View Topic : Debate - should external links open in a new tab/window?

I personally prefer the Wikipedia approach of giving some visual indication that the link is off-site, but otherwise not trying to control where the link will be opened.

View Topic : complex if statements.

jedimastersterling: that is using a stringstream, and it is the correct way of doing it in "plain" C++. Strings don't ordinarily allow the stream operators; a stringstream lets you write to / read from a string using the same operators you'd use with any other stream (like cout). Here you're writing the string to the stream, so you can read it back just like you would with cin >> myInt does.

It's a little convoluted, admittedly -- if you're using Boost (which you absolutely should, once you get more familiar with C++), you can just use lexical_cast like so:

int myValue = boost::lexical_cast<int>(std::string("100"));

-->
This is what I would personally go with.

atoi is technically deprecated, even in C (in favor of strtol), so it should probably be avoided.

View Topic : Gameplay: RPG combat without magic

If you've got a grid-based battle system then you already have a lot of room to vary attacks up a bit - there's more than one way to attack with a sword, even if you only have one type of sword.

You might have a knight that can run forward n squares, slashing enemy combatants in the squares next to the ones he traveled, or a spinning sword attack that hits all targets in adjacent squares. He might have a shield-bash attack that would shove the opponent back a square, which would put him in your archer's line of sight - especially nice if your archer goes next. Your archer might be able to fire multiple arrows at a target at once at the expense of more movement points, or use specialty arrows (flaming, poisoned, etc.)

You might have enemies turn to face the target that attacked them -- and then make attacks from the back or side more effective. Your knight hits some enemy, then your rogue stabs him in the back.

You can definitely keep things interesting without magic -- I think the trick is in developing a smallish move set that is still complex enough to allow players to set up efficient / interesting ways of dealing with enemies, beyond "I can hit him, so I did."

View Topic : Self Teaching Help!

The lovely thing about coding is that you'll ask 10 people a question and get 23 different answers.

For what it's worth:

- Cards shouldn't randomly set their suit / value in the constructor -- this is kind of like if at a playing card factory, each card off the printing press had a random suit and value. Instead, you'll want to tell each card what suit / value it has when you create it.

- After you've created all the cards, shuffle the list. A Knuth-Fischer-Yates shuffle is both effective and easy to implement. Creating the whole deck and shuffling is necessary because otherwise you could easily end up with more than one of the same card.

- For the moment, I'd just go with an array lookup for the number ( static readonly string[] _valueNames = new[] { "Ace", "Deuce", ... "Queen", "King" } -- might get fancy later on. If your Suit is an Enum, just a ToString() will work for now.

This is about what I arrived at:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

namespace ConsoleApplication4
{
    public enum Suit
    {
        Hearts,
        Diamonds,
        Clubs,
        Spades
    }

    public class Card
    {
        private static readonly string[] ValueNames = new[] {"Ace", "Deuce", "Three", "Four", "Five", "Six", "Seven", "Eight", "Nine", "Ten", "Jack", "Queen", "King"};

        public Suit Suit { get; private set; }
        public int Value { get; private set; }

        public Card(Suit suit, int value)
        {
            Suit = suit;
            Value = value;
        }

        public override string ToString()
        {
            return string.Format("{0} of {1}", ValueNames[Value], Suit);
        }
    }

    public class ListShuffler
    {
        private readonly Random _random;

        public ListShuffler()
        {
            _random = new Random();
        }

		// This is a generic method -- if you don't want to deal with this yet,
		// you can replace the next line with:
		//public void ShuffleList(IList<Card> listToShuffle)
        public void ShuffleList<T>(IList<T> listToShuffle)
        {
			// Knuth-Fischer-Yates shuffle - loops from the back of the array to the front.
			// Items after the "i" have been shuffled, before the i are still unshuffled.
			// The value of list[i] is swapped with the value of one of the "unshuffled"
			// cards before i is decremented. When i = 0, all of the cards have been shuffled.
            for (int i = listToShuffle.Count - 1; i > 0; i--)
            {
                int swapWithIndex = _random.Next(i + 1);

                T temp = listToShuffle[i];
                listToShuffle[i] = listToShuffle[swapWithIndex];
                listToShuffle[swapWithIndex] = temp;
            }
        }
    }

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
			// Create the deck using a LINQ "select many" operation.
			// This could alternately be written as nested for loops over the suits and values,
			// inside of which cards were appended to a list.
            IList<Card> deck = (from suit in new[] {Suit.Hearts, Suit.Diamonds, Suit.Clubs, Suit.Spades}
                 from value in Enumerable.Range(0, 13)
                 select new Card(suit, value)).ToList();

            var shuffler = new ListShuffler();
            shuffler.ShuffleList(deck);

			// Take the first five cards from the shuffled list with LINQ's "Take".
            foreach (Card card in deck.Take(5))
            {
                Console.WriteLine(card.ToString());
            }
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

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