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Weekly Update - 3 Nov 2024
I probably should stop calling these “weekly updates,” seeing that they come up a lot less frequently than once a week. Maybe I should switch to something like “Sunday updates,” or maybe something closer to what this is, which is an excuse to procrastinate by writing about what I’ve been working on, rather than just working on it.
But I’m sure you’re not interested in my willowing about the frequency of these updates, so let’s just get straight to the meat of it.
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Title design this morning. Trying to get as close as I can to the Cyberspace Raceway font as my pixel art skills will allow for.
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Try-Catch In UCL - Some Notes
Stared working on a
trycommand to UCL, which can be used to trap errors that occur within a block. This is very much inspired by try-blocks in Java and Python, where the main block will run, and if any error occurs, it will fall through to the catch block:try { echo "Something bad can happen here" } catch { echo "It's all right. I'll run next" }This is all I’ve got working at the moment, but I want to quickly write some notes on how I’d like this to work, lest I forget it later.
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Weekly Update - 20 Oct 2024
Yeah, I know, it’s been a while… again. A lot has been happening in life and there’ve been many days that I haven’t done any work on anything. Things are starting to settle down now, although I am expecting a few more bumpy days ahead, so we’ll see how we go with project work.
Cyber Burger
Yeah, I’m getting pretty tired of this one. I’m right in the trough of despair here, where the initial excitement has worn off and I just want to finish it. All the remaining work for it has been defined, which I think helps, and now it’s just a matter of plowing through the tasks.
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I’ve spent the last week working on a small puzzle game called Coasters, where you presented with two images and a clue, and you need to guess the word or phrase. One puzzle a day, sort of like Wordle. I’ve got 10 puzzles ready to go and I may add more but no promises. Check it out if you like.
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Weekly Update - 22 Sept 2024
No preface today. Let’s move on to the update.
Cyber Burger
Cyber Burger now has sound!
I started added some basic sound effects to the laser and the items flying across the screen. They may change, depending on how I find them after a while, but it’s a start. I do like how Pico-8 makes these easy to make: select a waveform, then just draw out the pitch and volume graphically:
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Weekly Update - 15 Sept 2024
Two projects to discuss this week.
Cyber Burger
I’ve decided to ditch game mode A, where the player is given a series of stages they need to clear. Instead, I’m changing this to be closer to an old-school arcade experience. In this mode, you start the game with a 45 second timer, and you need get as high a score as you can before the timer runs out. Your score depends roughly on how large and “interesting” your burger is. Every burger you make also adds 10 seconds to the clock, so the ultimate aim is to balance making interesting burgers for a higher score, vs. trying to avoid letting the clock run down to zero. Or at least that’s the idea. I need to do some rebalancing, as I think the game is a little easy.
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Project Updates
Well, it’s been three weeks since my last post here, and as hard as it was to write this update, not writing it would’ve been harder. So let’s just skip the preamble and go straight to the update.
Cyber Burger (That Pico-8 Game)
I’m terrible at being coy, I’ll just spill the beens. That game I’ve been working on is call Cyber Burger. It’s based on a DOS game I saw on YouTube, and it seemed like a fun project to try and work on, with some tweaks to the gameplay that I think would make it more forgiving.
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I enjoyed reading Kev Quirk’s post about building a simple journal. I’m still using Day One, but I am still thinking of moving off it. So I was inspired to build a prototype similar to Kev’s, just to see if something similar works for me. Built using Go instead of PHP, but it also uses Simple CSS.
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Project Seed - A Pico-8 Prototype
Oof, another long stretch between updates. This has not been a productive winter.
Much of the project I’ve been writing about here are, shall we say, “on ice”. UCL is still being used for the project it’s been built for, but there’s been no further work done on it recently. I think we can safely say Photo Bucket is dead, at least for now. Blogging Tool and that interactive fiction project is still ongoing, but both are running on a slow burn. I was hoping to get the fiction thing done by the end of winter, but it’s likely that timeline will slip. Maybe some time in spring.
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Current Project Update
Hmm, another long gap between posts. A little unexpected, but there’s an explanation for this: between setting up Forgejo and making the occasional update to Blogging Tools, I haven’t been doing any project work. Well, at least nothing involving code. What I have been doing is trying my hand at interactive fiction, using Evergreen by Big River Games.
Well, okay, it’s not completely without code: there is a bit of JavaScript involved for powering the “interactive” logic part. But a bulk of the effort is in writing the narrative, albeit a narrative that’s probably closer to a video game rather than a work of pure fiction.
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More Tools For Blogging Tool
Spent the last week working on Blogging Tool. I want to get as much done as a I can before motivation begins to wain, and it begins languishing like every other project I’ve worked on. Not sure I can stop that, but I think I can get the big ticket items in there so it’ll be useful to me while I start work on something else.
I do have plans for some new tools for Blogging Tool: making it easier to make Lightbox Gallery was just the start. This last week I managed to get two of them done, along with some cross-functional features which should help with any other tools I make down the road.
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Blogging Gallery Tool
Oof! It’s been a while, hasn’t it.
Not sure why I expected my side-project work to continue while I’m here in Canberra. Feels like a waste of a trip to go somewhere — well, not “unique”, I’ve been here before; but different — and expect to spend all your time indoors writing code. Maybe a choice I would’ve made when I was younger, but now? Hmm, better to spend my time outdoors, “touching grass”. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
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Bulk Image Selection
Some light housekeeping first: this is the 15th post on this blog so I thought it was time for a proper domain name. Not that buying a domain automatically means I’ll keep at it, but it does feel like I’ve got some momentum writing here now, so I’ll take the $24.00 USD risk. I’d also like to organise a proper site favicon too. I’ve got some ideas but I’ve yet to crack open Affinity Design just yet.
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The Site Page Model
I opened up Photo Bucket this morning and found a bunch of commits involving pages. I had no idea why I added them, until I launched it and started poking around the admin section. I tried a toggle on the Design page which controlled whether the landing page showed a list of photos or galleries, and after finding that it wasn’t connected to anything, it all came flooding back to me. So while what I’m going to describe here isn’t fully implemented yet, I decided to write it down before I forget it again.
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Indexing In UCL
I’ve been thinking a little about how to support indexing in UCL, as in getting elements from a list or keyed values from a map. There already exists an
indexbuiltin that does this, but I’m wondering if this can be, or even should be, supported in the language itself.I’ve reserved
Continue reading →.for this, and it’ll be relatively easy to make use of it to get map fields. But I do have some concerns with supporting list element dereferencing using square brackets. The big one being that if I were to use square brackets the same way that many other languages do, I suspect (although I haven’t confirmed) that it could lead to the parser treating them as two separate list literals. This is because the scanner ignores whitespace, and there’s no other syntactic indicators to separate arguments to proc calls, like commas: -
Tape Playback Site
Thought I’d take a little break from UCL today.
Mum found a collection of old cassette tapes of us when we were kids, making and recording songs and radio shows. I’ve been digitising them over the last few weeks, and today the first recorded cassette was ready to share with the family.
I suppose I could’ve just given them raw MP3 files, but I wanted to record each cassette as two large files — one per side — so as to not loose much of the various crackles and clatters made when the tape recorder was stopped and started. But I did want to catalogue the more interesting points in the recording, and it would’ve been a bit “meh” simply giving them to others as one long list of timestamps (simulating the rewind/fast-forward seeking action would’ve been a step too far).
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UCL: Brief Integration Update and Modules
A brief update of where I am with UCL and integrating it into Dynamo-browse. I did managed to get it integrated, and it’s now serving as the interpreter of commands entered in during a session.
It works… okay. I decided to avoid all the complexities I mentioned in the last post — all that about continuations, etc. — and simply kept the commands returning
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UCL: Breaking And Continuation
I’ve started trying to integrate UCL into a second tool: Dynamo Browse. And so far it’s proving to be a little difficult. The problem is that this will be replacing a dumb string splitter, with command handlers that are currently returning a tea.Msg type that change the UI in some way.
UCL builtin handlers return a
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UCL: The Simplifications Paid Off
The UCL simplifications have been implemented, and they seem to be largely successful.
Ripped out all the streaming types, and changed pipes to simply pass the result of the left command as first argument of the right.
"Hello" | echo ", world" --> "Hello, world"This has dramatically improved the use of pipes. Previously, pipes could only be used to connect streams. But now, with pretty much anything flowing through a pipe, that list of commands has extended to pretty much every builtins and user-defined procs. Furthermore, a command no longer needs to know that it’s being used in a pipeline: whatever flows through the pipe is passed transparently via the first argument to the function call. This has made pipes more useful, and usable in more situations.
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Simplifying UCL
I’ve been using UCL for several days now in that work tool I mentioned, and I’m wondering if the technical challenge that comes of making a featureful language is crowding out what I set out to do: making a useful command language that is easy to embed.
So I’m thinking of making some simplifications.
The first is to expand the possible use of pipes. To date, the only thing that can travel through pipes are streams. But many of the commands I’ve been adding simply return slices. This is probably because there’s currently no “stream” type available to the embedder, but even if there was, I’m wondering if it make sense to allow the embedder to pass slices, and other types, through pipes as well.
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Imports And The New Model
Well, I dragged Photo Bucket out today to work on it a bit.
It’s fallen by the wayside a little, and I’ve been wondering if it’s worth continuing work on it. So many things about it that need to be looked at: the public site looks ugly, as does the admin section; working with more than a single image is a pain; backup and restore needs to be added; etc.
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UCL: Procs and Higher-Order Functions
More on UCL yesterday evening. Biggest change is the introduction of user functions, called “procs” (same name used in TCL):
proc greet { echo "Hello, world" } greet --> Hello, worldNaturally, like most languages, these can accept arguments, which use the same block variable binding as the
foreachloop:proc greet { |what| echo "Hello, " $what } greet "moon" --> Hello, moonThe name is also optional, and if omitted, will actually make the function anonymous. This allows functions to be set as variable values, and also be returned as results from other functions.
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UCL: First Embed, and Optional Arguments
Came up with a name: Universal Control Language: UCL. See, you have TCL; but what if instead of being used for tools, it can be more universal? Sounds so much more… universal, am I right? 😀
Yeah, okay. It’s not a great name. But it’ll do for now.
Anyway, I’ve started integrating this language with the admin tool I’m using at work. This tool I use is the impetus for this whole endeavour. Up until now, this tool was just a standard CLI command usable from the shell. But it’s not uncommon for me to have to invoke the tool multiple times in quick succession, and each time I invoke it, it needs to connect to backend systems, which can take a few seconds. Hence the reason why I’m converting it into a REPL.
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Tool Command Language: Lists, Hashs, and Loops
A bit more on TCL (yes, yes, I’ve gotta change the name) last night. Added both lists and hashes to the language. These can be created using a literal syntax, which looks pretty much looks how I described it a few days ago:
set list ["a" "b" "c"] set hash ["a":"1" "b":"2" "c":"3"]I had a bit of trouble working out the grammar for this, I first went with something that looked a little like the following, where the key of an element is optional but the value is mandatory:
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