JetstarForever

The past few week or so I've been hard at work on something a bit outside my area of expertise: a peer-to-peer file sharing program called "Crescendo." From the documentation:

When the first semester ended and we were all sent back home for three weeks to annoy our parents, I found myself really starting to get into programming in a different way. Not like before, where my coding consisted almost entirely of PyRooms and CS projects, but in writing little things to help me out (mostly with my Linux server at home.) It seemed I was enjoying a different aspect of programming.

It's been a while since I've last updated this. I'm sorry for the wait, but I have nothing to show.

These past few weeks I've been doing a different form of programming, and have more-or-less focused on applying my knowledge elsewhere. As a result of this hiatus, I've learned quite a lot about other computer-y things, like getting down to the nitty-gritty of the Linux operating system via a weird experience when installing Arch to a flashdrive.

I worked on PyRooms today.

Nothing visual has changed, which is disappointing, as most people relate that to "progress," and I'd be lying if I said I didn't believe that partially. Oh well, at least you can see the map generator doing it's work, here.

I've been on another break from PyRooms, but not programming entirely. I've updated the projects page with something I've been contributing some code to; some people might find it very useful, so check it out.

It's been a little under a month since I last updated PyRooms/this blog. I had finals to deal with and family to catch up to, but I'm finally back in the developing mood. Actually, that's jumping the gun a bit; I'm almost ready to start developing again.

I'm off for a few days to spend time at home for Thanksgiving. What does that mean for PyRooms? The Thanksgiving v0.3.5 update!

I don't expect people to be paying attention, but v0.3 was released today. It is the biggest change so far in the game's history, and I think you'll see these changes as a big step forward in terms of gameplay. The actual changelog which contains (most) of the major points can be read here.

ALife can flee from the player now using something called an "inverted Dijkstra map." It's a neat little thing thought up by the guy behind one of my favorite roguelikes: Brogue. If you've ever thought about developing roguelikes, then his article on the power of dijkstra maps should be required reading. I'd even argue that non-roguelike devs should read through it, but that's up to you!

One more item can now be partially marked off the list of things to do: Sound. All actions now give off noises that the player and ALife can pick up and react to (admittedly in a very limited fashion, however.) Tomorrow I'll elaborate on that and have the ALife take noises into consideration, along with some minor tweaks to the core ALife functions to make them less predictable. As it stands, everything is working the way I want it to, which means I'll be putting much more effort into moving the project forward instead of revising what I've already had done.

I write a lot of blog posts that never see the light of day. Usually, the majority of my writing is done in the mornings, and since I'm never up before 10am except Tuesdays and Thursdays, I end up with several half-written posts that our outdated by the time I would (potentially) publish them. For now on I will make blog posts a part of the PyRooms development cycle, so frequent posts will be made (hopefully every time I finish a major feature.) I'll keep things short in future posts, but there's been a lot of changes since the last update.