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Some freelancing sysadmin work, some job interviews, and some PC breakfix work. Job Hunt 2016 is still in gear as well, although I’m hoping to land something this week or next. Personally I’m trying to learn Rails, and am just getting started. I’ve got to get a dev environment set up, and was going to use a Docker container to do that. I’m not familiar with Docker yet either so this is all new. Fun stuff, and a lot to learn!
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Last week I wrote a server for the extensible nREPL protocol in Lua which allows you to connect to a Lua program over a socket and evaluate code inside a sandbox: https://gitlab.com/technomancy/jeejah
I’ve already added it into my spaceflight/programming game (https://gitlab.com/technomancy/bussard), and tonight I’m working on extending the protocol to go beyond simply evaluating code into game-specific things like keeping you updated on nearby planets, ships, stations, etc, and interacting with the ship’s onboard filesystem.
The plan is that once you get to a certain point in the game, you’ll be able to operate it entirely from Emacs or another editor of your choosing. You’ll have to implement autopilot routines since the external interfaces are unlikely to provide quick enough feedback to support piloting your ship manually, but by then the point of the game has moved beyond the spaceflight bits into the juicy story-driven and programming-centric parts.
Trailer for the previous beta here: https://p.hagelb.org/bussard-1.3.webm
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I just watched the trailer, and will give the gameplay a try when I have some time. Job hunt, family coming in a couple of days (with the requisite “honey-do” list) and some freelancing type work have all got me fairly busy. The trailer reminded me of Rodina (Mostly the font/fadeout at the end). Intentional?
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Cool; would love to hear what you think. The story/missions so far only really last 20 minutes or so; I have a lot of plans for more but haven’t gotten a chance to work it in yet.
The font choice comes from http://typesetinthefuture.com/fontspots-eurostile/; Jura Demibold is just the closest thing in Debian to Eurostile Extended. I hadn’t seen the Rodina trailer, but it looks cool. The fading text is really just because I’ve never done any video editing before and had to just do the simplest thing that could work. The music is taken from the soundtrack to Singularity: https://github.com/singularity/singularity-music/tree/master/music (Through Space) which is CC-licensed.
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I tried your game a bit. As someone who liked to play Escape Velocity as a teenager, I’m really excited by the concept, except that the control aren’t so nice - I couldn’t manage to get closed enough to a target to connect to it, so I had to use the ‘cheat’ keys in ‘ship’ to get where I wanted. But I guess it’s on purpose since you’re making the game programmable…
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Thanks. I still haven’t done enough playtesting with new players to make sure the learning experience is smooth, so it’s good to get feedback like that. The
ship.cheattable is really just there for debugging and probably going away once the game gets more playable. (Though there will be ways to escape the sandbox later on, they just won’t be so obvious.)But the comparison with Escape Velocity can only really go so far–piloting in EV is challenging because of combat; it’s drastically simplified by the removal of gravitation, but it’s still fun because there are ships trying to blow you up. For my game I didn’t want to make another murder/capitalism simulator, so some of the challenge comes from learning to pilot a ship in a gravity well.
Were you able to get the two blue trajectory projections and see that matching course requires firing the engines in such a way as to get the two trajectories to line up, rather than firing the engine so that you accelerate in the direction of the current position of the target? If there are glitches in the controls then I would love to get a bug report, but if it’s more “I don’t understand how to match orbit with a target” then a different approach is needed.
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Were you able to get the two blue trajectory projections and see that matching course requires firing the engines in such a way as to get the two trajectories to line up, rather than firing the engine so that you accelerate in the direction of the current position of the target? If there are glitches in the controls then I would love to get a bug report, but if it’s more “I don’t understand how to match orbit with a target” then a different approach is needed.
Yes, I was able to do that, but not always… if I’m far from the target it’s hard to change direction as well, and can be frustrating (hence my use of the cheat).
I humbly suggest that you should explain your API a bit more, like “try to change your speed by entering this command…” in the help of the game, in order to guide the players a bit more. I haven’t managed to track my target programmatically (well I didn’t put too much effort) and I’m a seasoned programmer, so someone with no programming experience will have a hard time.
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Thanks for the feedback.
I think I was a little unclear; I want to make auto-piloting functionality one of the mid-game programming challenges; at the outset of the game it will rely on manual piloting, and I need to find a better way to explain how that works. I want to make it so that by the time you figure out how to write the auto-pilot, it feels like a huge achievement because it allows for much smoother travel. (I think you’ll have access to a device that speeds time up by that point too.)
I am thinking of increasing the mass of the targets in the initial systems in order to make them a bit easier to match orbits with, but I’d be happy to hear other suggestions too. There are little things like “always fly around the star in the same rotation as the orbits of the planets” that help a lot, but I’m not sure the best way to explain.
I definitely plan on a more gradual introduction to the kind of coding that would allow auto-piloting, but it’s still a ways off at this point. I’ve written basic auto-piloting, and it’s no joke; it’s tricky and easy to get wrong.
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This week the job hunt continues: 12 years of Linux/cPanel hosting experience. I’m also going to look into doing some freelancing work and try to pick up a couple of System Administration jobs. I like helping out folks who have their own servers but don’t really know how to run them. I’ve also been making noise about wanting to re-learn web development, and will be starting on RoR this week, mostly because of https://www.railstutorial.org’s approach to teaching all the prerequisites along the way. In that vein I have to get RoR setup on one of my VM’s. Then there’s some yard work and a honey-do list to take care of.
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Emacs is a nice OS but it lacks a good editor.
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I am gearing up for a job search. $currentjob is laying off remote workers and $newjob backed out at the last minute due to internal issues of their own. Have been doing Customer Service, Linux Admin and Support in the Web Hosting industry for many years, and am looking to work remotely. I’ll be working on some personal projects, and also getting more familiar with RoR, Ansible, and some other technologies that I have been wanting to explore but haven’t had the time for. If anyone is looking for such a person, my username at gmail.com.
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Why is the theme for this obfuscated?
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To save some kbs and avoid ruining the script readability, the html code contain some minimized css code which has some really long lines
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I’d like to see the those elements in a separate file in that case, I think it would be more useful. I am too paranoid to run it :)
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I like the idea of this and the output looks interesting, but I can’t justify running obfuscated code.
“Please Rewind”
http://www.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2014630/rs_560x415-140730093056-bekindrewind560.jpg