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Working on one of the admin sections of the project I was alluding to yesterday. Here’s a screencast of how it’s looking so far.
The styling and layout is not quite final. I’m focusing more on functionality, and getting layout and whitespace looking good always takes time. But compared to how it looked before I started working on it this morning, I think it’s a good start.
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In the end it took significantly more time to write about it then to actually do it, but the dot product approach seems to work.
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Making some progress in learning Elm for building frontends. Started working on a Connections clone, which I’m calling “Clonections”. This is what I’ve got so far:
It’s been fun using Elm to build this. So far I’m liking the language. Of course, now I’ll have to come up with puzzles for this. 😐
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Spent a little more time working on my idea for Dynamo-Browse this week. Managed to get it somewhat feature complete this weekend:
I probably should say a few words on what it actually is. The idea is to make it quick and easy to run pre-canned queries based on the currently selected item and table.
Let’s say you’ve got a table with customer information, and another table with subscription information, and they’re linked with some form of customer ID. If you wanted to see the subscriptions of a customer, up until now, you’d have to copy the customer ID to the paste-board, change the currently viewed table, then run a query to select the subscription with that customer ID. It’s not difficult but it’s extremely tedious.
This change is meant to streamline this. Now, in a script function, you can define a “related item” provider which, if matched against the currently displayed table, will be given the currently selected item, and will return a list of queries that will display items related to the current item (depending on whatever definition of “related” will be). This will be presented to the user as a list. When the user chooses the item, the query will run and the results will be displayed.
Here’s an example of the script used for the screencasts:
ext.related_items("business-addresses", func(item) { return [ {"label": "Customer", "query": `city=$city`, "args": {"city": "Austin"}}, {"label": "Payment", "query": `address^="3"`}, {"label": "Thing", "table": "inventory", "query": `pk=$pk`, "args": {"pk": "01fca33a-5817-4c27-8a8f-82380584e69c"}}, ] }) ext.related_items("inventory", func(item) { sk := string(item.attr("sk")) return [ {"label": "SK: " + sk, "table": "business-addresses", "query": `pk^=$sk`, "args": {"sk": sk}}, ] })Notice how the last
business-addressesitem specifies the “inventory” table, and that the “inventory” provider actually uses an attribute of the item. Here’s a screencast of that working:This feature has been on the idea board for a while. I was trying to work out how best to handle the pre-canned queries, especially considering that they will likely be different for each item and table. Some ideas I had were adding additional UI elements that the user could use to configure these queries. These would go into the workspace file, a sort of an embedded database which is created for each session. This was pretty crappy, especially when you consider that workspaces usually only last until the user exists. It was only a few weeks ago when I considered using the scripting facilities to implement this (which, honestly, shows how much it remains under-utilised).
Anyway, I’ve only just finished development of it. I’d still like to try it for the various related items I tend to use during my day-to-day. We’ll see how well it works out.
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Idea For Mainboard Mayhem: A Remote Pickup
Sort of in-between projects at the moment so I’m doing a bit of light stuff on Mainboard Mayhem. I had an idea for a new element: a remote control which, when picked up, will allow the player to toggle walls and tanks using the keyboard, much like the green and blue buttons. I used ChatGGT to come up with some artwork, and it produced something that was pretty decent. Prompt: pixel art of a remote control with a single red button styled like the tiles found in Chips Challange, rotated 45 degrees to the right. Continue reading →
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More work on Mainboard Mayhem today. Had a bit more success getting the Windows build into a releasable state.
First thing was the app icon. That blog post I talked about yesterday worked: I was able to set the icon of the executable. I did make a slight adjustment though. The post suggested using ImageMagick to produce the ICO file, but I wasn’t happy with how they looked. There were a lot of artefacts on the smaller icon sizes.
So I looked around for an alternative, and found this package by Lea Anthony. He’s the maintainer of Wails, a cross-platform toolkit for making browser-based GUI apps in Go, sort of like Electron but without bundling Chrome. In fact, most of the build for Mainboard Mayhem was put together by reading the Wails source code, so I trust he knows what his doing. And sure enough, his package produced a nicely scaled ICO file from a source PNG image. Better yet, it was distributed as a Go package, so I could no need to install and shell-out to run it: I could just integrated it directly into the project’s build tool.
Using rsrc to generate the SYSO file with the icon worked as expected: Go did pick it up and embed it into the executable. I did have some trouble getting the Go compiler to pick up these files at first. In short, they need to be in the same directory as the
mainpackage. So if you’re runninggo build ./cmd/thing, make sure the SYSO files are in./cmd/thing. Other than that, no real issues here.
A beautiful site: Mainboard.exe with the embedded app icon One last thing I had to deal with was the console window. Running a Go app in Windows shows the console by default. Perfectly fine for command line tools, but less so for games:
Mainboard Mayhem with that annoying console window. Even the log messages are dull (well, unless you're working on the app). So I had to find a way to hide the console on launch. Since Mainboard Mayhem is using SDL, I’m actually using MinGW to cross-compile the Windows release on an Ubuntu build runner. The documentation for MinGW suggests adding
-mwindowsas a linker option to hide the console:# What I was doing before, which didn't work CGO_ENABLED=1 \ CC="x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc" \ GOOS="windows" \ CGO_LDFLAGS="-mwindows -L…" \ go build -o dist/cclm/mainboard.exe ./cmd/cclm'This didn’t actually work when I tried it: launching the app kept bringing up the console. Turns out what I should’ve done was follow the advice of many Stack Overflow answers, and set
-ldflags "-H=windowsgui"on the Go command:# This works CGO_ENABLED=1 \ CC="x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc" \ GOOS="windows" \ CGO_LDFLAGS="-L…" \ go build -ldflags "-H=windowsgui" -o dist/cclm/mainboard.exe ./cmd/cclm'This works even without the
-mwindowsswitch. Not completely sure why though. I guess MinGW is not actually being used for linking? Or maybe-monly works with C header files? Don’t know. 🤷 But doesn’t matter: the console no longer shows up on launch.
Mainboard Mayhem without the console window. A much nicer experience now. Finally, there was testing it all, and for this I just bit the bullet and set-up a Windows 10 virtual machine in Azure. The rate is something like $0.16 AUD an hour, an easy decision compared to spending time trying to get a VM with Windows 10 running on my machine.
One remaining thing that’s slightly annoying is Windows Defender refusing to launch it after download, doing effectively the same thing as Gatekeeper on MacOS does:
Gatekeeper a.la. Microsoft. I’m sure there’s a way around it but it’s probably not worth learning about it at this stage. It’s easy enough to dismiss: click “More Info” and the click “Run Anyway”:
Clicking 'More Info' gives you a way to launch the app. But other than that, I think the Windows version of Mainboard Mayhem is ready. I’ve updated the website to include the Windows archive if anyone’s interested.
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Spent some time today on Mainboard Mayhem, trying to finish the Windows build. I’ve actually got Windows version of the game being built for a while now. I just haven’t published them, mainly because I haven’t got the app icon set-up yet.
But this week, Golang Weekly had a link to a blog post by Mahmud Ridwan on how to do so. It looked pretty straightforward, so I thought I’d give it a try.
And yeah, the instructions themselves were easy enough, and I wish I could say if they worked or not. But in order to test it, I need a Windows machine. And I don’t have one, and I wasn’t about to get one just for this.
So I tried setting up Windows in a VM using UTM. I got this far:
Yeah, this infinite spinner has been staring at me pretty much all day. I got a Windows 10 installer ISO using CrystalFetch, and it seemed to work. But it just doesn’t want to boot up for the first time.
Not actually sure what the problem is. The error message seems to suggest that it’s having trouble connecting to the internet. Might be that? Or maybe the installation didn’t complete properly? Could be anything. 🤷
So no luck getting this tested yet. I’m wondering if it might be easier to forget virtualisation and just launch a Windows instance in the cloud somewhere instead.
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Mainboard Mayhem
Project update on Mainboard Mayhem, my Chip’s Challenge fan game. I didn’t get it finished in time for the release deadline, which was last weekend. I blame work for that. We’re going through a bit of a crunch at the moment, and there was a need to work on the weekend. The good news is that there wasn’t much left to do, and after a few more evenings, I’m please to say that it’s done. Continue reading →
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Project update for Mainboard Madness. Well, today’s the deadline for getting the thing code complete, and what a surprised, it’s not finished.
To be fair, it’s pretty close. All the levels are more or less done, and the beats of the in-game lore have been added. It all just needs tightening up a little. I spent today working on the end-game phase, which mainly involved coding up the credit sequence, and making sure I include credits for those involved in the original game (and who’s artwork I lifted).
The work remaining is to finish one or two game elements, adding a proper app icon, and finishing off the website. I’m wondering whether to add sound, but I feel bad enough taking the artwork from the original game, I rather not take the sound effects as well. That will mean the game will remain silent for the time being, but I can probably live with that for now.
I think we’re still on track for getting this finished by this time next week. Last dash to the finish line, then I can put this 9 year project to rest for a while.
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Small project update on my Chips Challenge fan game.
Started working on the final level. I was dreading this a little, thanks to my awful level design skills, but I made a great start to it this morning and it’s actually coming along pretty well. It’s a good opportunity to use all the elements that I didn’t get a chance to use in any of the other puzzles, and it’s also shaping up to be one that has a bit of climax.
I’ve also started working on the website, which is little more than just a landing page. This meant finally coming up with a name. I’ve chosen “Mainboard Mayhem” which is… okay, but it’s one that’s been rattling around in my head for a while, and I really couldn’t use anything close to “Chips Challenge”. I’m already using the tile-set from the original game, I rather not step on any more intellectual property.
Anyway, one more week of development left to go. Still need to setup the app icon, finish all the levels, and maybe add a menu. Then I think we’re code complete.
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Working on my Chips Challenge “fan game” this morning. Added the notion of “lower thirds,” which will show text at the bottom of the play field. I’m hoping to use it for narrative or way-finding, like here in this hub level:
Also working on puzzle design. There’s about 19 or so “real” puzzles but I’m wondering if it’s worth adding a few tutorial ones for those that have never played the original Chip Challenge before. I’ve done about 5 such puzzles and I think I need to add maybe 3 or 4 more to cover everything I’m hoping to demonstrate. I wish I liked puzzle design more than I like tinkering on the engine.
Of course, the big question is why I’m working on this at all. There is, for lack of a better word, a vision for this, in terms of narrative and structure, but this project has been in development on and off for about 9 years or so, and I’m wondering if it’s time to just stop working on it altogether. I really am starting to get sick of it, in a way. And yet, this project has shown remarkable staying power over that time that I feel like if I don’t actually wrap it up, it’ll just continued to be worked on. It feels like the only way to end this project is to finish it, in one way or another.
So I’ll set myself a dead-line: something releasable in two weeks, and actually released a week after that. After that, no more! I’ll work on something else.
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Attempting to design an app icon for a Chips Challenge fan game I’m working on. Going for something that looks like the fireball sprite in the original game with a hint more realism and tinted in the colour blue. For reference, here’s the original fireball sprite:
And here’s my attempt:
I started with Stable Diffusion to get the base image:
Prompt: a blue plasma fireball shaped like a throwing star with four points on a white background, pixel art Then imported into Acorn to rotate it, colourise it, and distort it to look a bit closer to the original sprite.
Desaturating the original image got rid of the purple centre, then applying the Glowhoo and Hue Adjust effect recolourised it to the blue I was looking for (I’m not sure what the Glowhoo effect does, but it seems to adjust the colour based on the pixel intensity, so it was good enough for what I wanted). Finally, I added a Twirl Distortion effect to achieve the slight warp in the star.
And yeah, it’s not going to win any design awards, but it’s good enough for now.
Oh, and just for kicks, here was my first attempt of producing the sprite using Affinity Designer.
That’s definitely not going to win any design awards. 😂
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Success! Managed to get a Go app built, signed, and notarised all from within a GitHub Action. It even cross-compiles to ARM, which is something considering that it’s using SDL. Here’s the test app being downloaded and launched in a VM (ignore the black window, the interesting part is the title).
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Spent most of the weekend going down various rabbit holes to get a Go application signed and notarised as a MacOS app. I’m trying to do this in a way that would make this easy to automate using GitHub Actions. This means things like no implicit access to the system keychain: I want to make a temporary keychain, add my secret stuff to it, then delete it once signing and notarisation is done.
It also means no XCode GUI either: command line stuff only. Not that I had much hope of using XCode here anyway, since this is a Go application.
But that’s fine, preferable even. I’ve never liked all the manual steps needed to get code signing work with XCode. What are you going to do when you change systems? Would you remember all the steps you took several years ago, when you last setup developer certificates?
So this is why I’m trying to get it working with the terminal. But it’s not easy. Lots of esoteric commands that I need to learn and be made aware of. Just hope it’s not a huge waste of time.
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I’ve been working on Micropub Checkins over the last week. It’s been a bit of a rush trying to get it into a usable state for an upcoming trip. And by “usable”, I mean a form that I can tolerate, and when it comes to projects like this, I can tolerate quite a lot. It can have a really dodgy UI (which this does) and miss some really important features that are annoying to work around; but if it works, and doesn’t loose data, I’ll be fine with it.
The main screen showing the recent check-ins. Note the lock next to some of them. These won't be published until the locks are removed. The last week was dedicated to making the act of checking in distinct from publishing it. Until now, check-ins were published the minute they were entered, meaning that you cannot check-in somewhere unless you’re comfortable with people knowing where you are the minute you do. Yes, some people like it that way, but not me. And I’m aware that this’ll only be the case if people are following my check-in blog, which I’m doubtful of.
So pressing the floating action button and choosing a check-in type now starts the flow of a new check-in that will get saved in an SQLite database. You can edit the check-in whenever you like, so long as it’s not published. Currently there’s no real way of deleting a check-in unless it’s been published. This is a bit dodgy, but it’s a good example of how tolerant I am with working around these feature gaps for the moment.
The newly styled edit screen. Notice the rating field, which will appear for eateries. Check-ins can be published by tapping the upward facing button on the main screen. Any check-in with a lock is private and will not be published until you toggle the “Ready to publish” switch in the properties. Doing so will not change the date of the check-in: it will still have the date and time that check-in was created.
The targets are currently hard-coded but they can be turned on or off. I had a bit of trouble publishing a check-in to two targets, so I'm not sure if I'll keep multi-target publishing. On the subject of publishing, I had some issues with Dart’s date and time methods. The method on the DateTime class used to produce an ISO-8501 date-stamp don’t include the time-zone if the date and time is not in UTC. This is important as I want the post date and time to be as close to the check-in time as possible, and in the time-zone of the phone. DateTime knows all this, including what the time-zone we’re in. So why didn’t the developers include it in the ISO-8501 date-time string?
This is really strange. Fortunately, ChatGPT stepped in to help out, writing a function which will add the time-zone offset to the ISO-8501 date-time string:
String formatTimeZoneOffset(Duration offset) { String sign = offset.isNegative ? '-' : '+'; int hours = offset.inHours.abs(); int minutes = (offset.inMinutes.abs() % 60); return '$sign${_padZero(hours)}:${_padZero(minutes)}'; }Honestly, ChatGPT has been so helpful over the past week with this project, I probably should give it a credit if I get this polished enough to release.
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Back working on Micropub Checkin. Re-engineered the home page to now include a list of what would eventually be check-ins — both historical and soon to be published — complete with the check-in type emoji as the icon:
Main screen for Micropub Checkin The same list of emoji icons now adorn the check-in type picker as well (except for the airplane one which seems to always be shown as what I can only describe as the “Wingding” representation):
The check-in type picker I went around a bit trying to work out how best to use these emojis icons in the
leadingslot of theListTilewidget. I expored trying to convert them toIconData, but it turns out just using aTextwidget with a large font worked well. I wrapped in in aWidgettype with a fixed font-size and so far it looks quite good, at least in the emulator:class EmojiIcon extends StatelessWidget { final String emoji; const EmojiIcon({super.key, required this.emoji}); Widget build(BuildContext context) { return Text(emoji, style: TextStyle(fontSize: 26.0)); } }Also started working on a Cubit to handle state for the main page. I had a bit of trouble working ont where the soon-to-be database call to get the list of checkins should go in the cubit. After asking ChatGPT, it looks like the initializer is the best place for it:
class CheckinListCubit extends Cubit<CheckinListState> { CheckinListCubit(): super(LoadingCheckinListState()) { loadCheckinList(); } void loadCheckinList() async { var listOfCheckins = await read_database(); emit(FoundCheckinListState(checkins)); } }I’ve got some scaffolding code in place to simulate this, and so far it seems to work.
I need to start working on the database layer and having the ability to edit and delete check-ins before they’re published. I think I’ll tackle that next.
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Building F5 To Run
At the risk of talking about something that I’ve only just started, I’d thought today I write about what I’m working on right now. I’ve been going through my digital archives this weekend, trying to get it into something more permenant than the portable USB drives it’s currently stored on. Amongst all that stuff is a bunch of QBasic apps and games I wrote way back when I was a kid. Continue reading →
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Updates To Dynamo-Browse
In the off-chance that anyone other than me is reading this, it’s likely that there will be no update next week due to the Easter weekend. It may not be the only weekend without an update either. If I find that I didn’t get much done for a particular week, I probably won’t say anything and leave the well to fill up for the next one (although I do have some topics planned for some of those weekends). Continue reading →
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Updating Bocce Scorecard
I didn’t get to a lot of side-project work this week, but I did have to make a large change to a project we use to track scores for our “bocce club”. So I’d though I’d say a few words about that today. We had our bocce “grand final” a few weeks ago, and one of the matches resulted in a tie between two players. Unfortunately, the Bocce Scorecard web-app I build could not properly handle these, which meant that I had to fix it. Continue reading →
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Updates To Dynamo-Browse And CCLM
I started this week fearing that I’d have very little to write today. I actually organised some time off over the weekend where I wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on side projects. But the week started with a public holiday, which I guess acted like a bit of a time offset, so some things did get worked on. That said, most of the work done was starting or continuing things in progress, which is not super interesting at this stage. Continue reading →
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Dev Log - 2023-03-12
Preamble When I moved Working Set over to Micro.blog, I’d thought I’d be constantly writing micro-posts about what I’m working on, as a form of working in public. I found that didn’t really work for me, for a few reasons. I’ve got a strange relationship with this blog. I wanted a place online to write about the projects I’ve been working on, but every time I publish something here, I always get the feeling that I’m “showing off” in some way: ooh, look what I’ve done, aren’t I cleaver? Continue reading →
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Completed the release of Dynamo-Browse 0.2.0. Most of the work in the last week was updating the manual, especially the scripting API. Some more updates need to be made for the query expressions as well, but I’ll publish what I have now and update that over time.
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Here’s a bit of a blast from the past. I managed to get ccedit working again. This was the original level editor for workingset.net/2022/12/2… my Chips Challenge “fan game” I’ve been working on.
I’ve been designing a few levels for it recently, but since moving to a new Mac, the level editor I was using was going to be difficult to port. It’s QT application and the QT bindings were a pain to setup, and I rather not go through that again. I was using a Mac at the time I started working on it, but I wasn’t yet ready to go all in on MacOS. So to hedge my bets, I decided to go with QT as the UI toolkit.
This was 5 years ago and I’m unlikely to go back to Linux, so choosing QT was a bit of a bad decision. I think if I had my time again, I’d go with something like AppKit.
Anyway, the level editor still works but I have to log into a screen share to use it. I’d like to be able to edit levels on the machine I’m using now.
The code for the original level editor was still around but it hasn’t been touched in ages. It’s basically an SDL application — the same graphics library I’m using for the actual game itself — and the SDL v2 bindings I’m using are still maintained, so updating those were quite easy1.
One thing I did have to pull out was the Lua VM2. The editor was using old C Lua bindings. Better Lua VMs written in pure Go are now available, so I didn’t want to keep using these old bindings anymore. In fact, I didn’t want to use Lua at all. Lua was originally used for the level scripts, but I replaced this in favour of another language (which is no longer maintained 😒, but I’m not changing it again).
The original CCLM Editor So far the editor boots up, but that’s about it. I can move the cursor around but I can’t add new tiles or load existing levels. There seems to be some weird things going on with the image name lookup. I originally thought image name were case insensitive, but after looking at the image name lookup logic in the game itself, I’m not so sure.
How much time I’d like to spend on this is still a bit of a question. It all depends whether I’d like to release the game itself in some fashion. There are still questions about whether I’m allowed to, given that the graphics are not my own. Still need to think about that.
But in any case, good to see the old editor again.
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Spent some time closing off the Dynamo-Browse shortlist. I think I’ve got most of the big ticket items addressed. Here’s a brief update on each one:
Fix the activity indicator that is sometimes not clearing when a long running task is finished.
How long running tasks are dealt with has been completely overhauled. The previous implementation had many opportunities for race conditions, which was probably the cause of the activity indicator showing up when nothing was happening. I rewrote this using a dedicated goroutine for handling these tasks, and the event bus for sending events to the other areas of the app, including the UI layer. Updates and status changes are handled with mutexes and channels, and it just feels like better code as well.
It will need some further testing, especially in real world use against a real DynamoDB database. We’ll see if this bug rears its unpleasant head once more.
Fix a bug in which executing a query expression with just the sort key does nothing. I suspect this has something to do with the query planner somehow getting confused if the sort key is used but the partition key is not.
Turns out that this was actually a problem with the “has prefix” operator. It was incorrectly determining that an expression of the form
sort_key ^= "string"with no partition key could be executed as a query instead of a scan. Adding a check to see if the partition key also existed in the expression fixed the problem.Also made a number of other changes to the query expression. Added the ability to use indexed references, like
this[1]orthat["thing"]. This has been a long time coming so it’s good to see it implemented. Unfortuntly this only works reliably when a single level is used, sothis[1][2]will result in an error. The cause of this is a bug in the Go SDK I’m using to produce the query expressions that are run against the database. If this becomes a problem I look at this again.I also realised that
trueandfalsewere not treated as boolean literals, so I fixed that as well.Finally, the query planner now consider GSIs when it’s working out how to run a query expression. If the expression can be a query over a GSI, it will be executed as one. Given the types of queries I need to run, I’ll be finding this feature useful.
Fix a bug where
set default-limitsreturns a bad value.This was a pretty simple string conversion bug.
Add a way to describe the table, i.e. show keys, indices, etc. This should also be made available to scripts. Add a way to “goto” a particular row, that is select rows just by entering the value of the partition and optionally the sort key.
These I did not do. The reason is that they’ll make good candidates for scripts and it would be a good test to see if they can be written as one. I think the “goto” feature would be easy enough. I added the ability to get information about the current table in the script, and also for scripts to add new key bindings, so I don’t force any issues here.
The table description would be trickier. There’s currently no real way to display a large block of text (except the status bar, but even there it’s a little awkward). So a full featured description might be difficult. But the information is there, at least to a degree, so maybe something showing the basics would work.
Anyway, the plan now is to use this version for a while to test it out. Then cut a release and update the documentation. That’s a large enough task in and of itself, but I’d really like to get this finished so I can move onto something else.
