Author: Carsten Schwartz

Yes that’s rigth My TF700T Tablet Lives Once Again!

Recently my beloved tablet has gotten slow again even though I have rooted it and installed a custom rom that made it speedy. You cannot just install any App once you have installed a custom rom. I learned this the hard way. After installing som different browsers because I was tired of waiting on the slow Chrome experience, the tablet started rebooting at random and claiming that the start screen had stopped – Very Annoying!

I started thinking it was time to boot into recovery and reinstall the custom rom from the zips on the tablet. But I needed a good fast browser that had some kind of add/tracker blocking to give me a fast and seamless user experience. I fell over the Brave browser and away I went; wiped the tablet, installed the custom room from recovery and installed Brave as an experiment.

It is by far the best browsing experience I have had for a long time. Many sites pester you with commercials popups and all sort of time wasting crap, this browser simply ignores that and shows you the content instead of the waste. I highly recommend this product, I am not payed to write this, It is simply a quality product 🙂

As an aside to all this glorification of a newly reborn tablet, I had to do it all over again because:

You must remember to:

– Select Do not auto update Apps in the settings of Google Play.
– Disable all location reporting
– Disable all usage and feedback reporting

I forgot it in the first run but quicly discovered that the tablet got slower, because it updated the installed optimized Apps. And wasted time using the GPS and the internet for wasteful purposes.

I have added a class to show a High Score List and the last stuff that was missing in my take on the classic Asteroids Game from 1979. Now the Saucers also smash up the Asteroids and the Spaceship continues from the state it ended when moving to the next wave of Asteroids. It seems to be kind of finished. Try it out HERE!

I also had a strange issue with the custom font I made, when you draw vertical and horizontal lines on the Type Script canvas you have add 0.5 to a x or y coordinate, if it is a true integer like 1.0, 5.0 etc. So now the font stands more thin and solid – Strange…

Recently some chaps got me interested in Conway’s Game of Life. This is a fun simulation of cellular birth, life and death in a grid based universe. So I could not help myself, of I went to try and make something that could simulate this in TypeScript. It has been a quite fun and learning experience.

I started out doing a basic simulation of the Cell AI depicted on the official Wiki page and after that I simply had to make my take on a graphical version. Also to learn a little about the performance of Browser based games using TypeScript.

As it turns out you can make a Singleton class where you store the graphics and use double buffering when you render it to gain an IMHO impressive performance. And it was also fun to design some graphics for the thing.

You can try the simulations I made here:

Simple Game of Life

Graphical Version

the controls are as follows:

[SPACE]: Clear the grid and introduce random live cells.
[A-L]: Inserts cells in some of the known patterns mentioned on the official Wiki.

Have fun…

Windows Versions!

To recap on some C++ coding I also made a Windows version on the Simple Game of Life. I used Virtual Box running Windows with the Visual Studio Community Edition to develop the C++ version.

I also found an old related program that can make the Mandelbrot fractal this I made ages ago but it is quite fun. Every time it renders it dumps a Fractal.png file on its current location. By holding the left mouse button down, dragging the mouse and releasing you can zoom in the fractal imagery.

And that old Exe runs fine under Wine too 🙂

You can download the exe files here:

GameOfLifeDemo.exe

FractalForm.exe

Have fun…

Yep that’s right while learning to code TypeScript to keep me sharp I have made my first version of an Asteroids Clone that you can try out HERE.

Instructions:

[SPACE]: Fire
[Left Arrow]: Turn Left
[Right Arrow]: Turn Right
[Up Arrow]: Thrust, be careful!
[Down Arrow]: Reverse Thrust, be even more careful!
[H] Hyper Space, don’t try this at home!

[S]: Start new game

I have learned a lot about TypeScript and had a lot of fun recapping Vector math and reading about the mechanics of the classic game. There is a lot of sites on the web that talks about this old Classic.

Still need to do a lot yet, I will up date the game as I go along. Buttons are also needed to make the game playable on a mobile device and there is some of the game mechanics that crashes the ship to often and I miss some safe zone security when the ship reappears on the screen after a crash, but OK for a first demo 🙂

Yep that’s right, I have been using Microsofts Visual Studio code on my Linux Box to play around with TypeScript, which is a really nice game development platform for the WEB. You can see a Demo of Triangle Collision I made Here.

It was a guy on the WEB that had made some nice starting points for working with TypeScript, who got me interested. And funny Enough Microsoft has made an IDE that can be used for developing TypeScript Apps. It looks a lot like Visual Studio, but has reduced functionality. And the great stuff is that they have made a version for Linux.

TypeScript is an extension of JavaScript and compiles to .js files. You can make classes, interfaces and I don’t know what, If you’re into OO development it is fairly easy to start using. I have inspired by the tutorials at Tyler Green and Typescript Games started making my own clone of the notorious Atari Asteroids Game from way back to learn the stuff, and then it is also a nice recap on Vector Calculus.

After a good start I had some problems being able to have one file per class I made. It turned out I had to use a reference tag with a path attribute (/// <reference path=”../Commonlib/Vector.ts” />) to include other ‘.ts‘ TypeScript files and then add their paths in a file list in the files section of the ‘tsconfig.json‘ file which defines the build of a typescript project.

And BTW! – I like the concept of using json for configurations instead of the dreaded non human readable XML 😉

There are other ways to include/import classes in TypeScript and I went to great lengths to try them. I even installed a Virtual Windows using Virtual Box to try and see if the Visual Studio Community edition was better at this. Strangely enough Windows almost runs at normal speed inside Virtual Box. So with a more powerful laptop than my old i5 2 core clunker, you might as well stick to Linux and the run any Windows Development in a Virtual Box instance.

I am currently in
between jobs and have some time on my hands. So I am rummaging around
in my game on google play and noticed that the fake perspective my
isometric kind of tile game was not faking it well enough, so of I
went to fix it!

As you can see from the original walls that seemed to look like a
column that was wider at the bottom than the top. Of course I wanted
the opposite effect, so that it looked like the column was thinner at
the bottom which is further away when you look at the dungeon from
above.

So I edited the graphics and tried them out in the editor I have to create levels for the game, and it looks better, even though it is difficult to create an illusion of perspective…

BTW! I can recommend the program InkScape for graphical work, it has a lot of great features that allows you to make Icons and the like.

Yep that’s right there will always be bugs. Even though my retro pixel RPG ‘A Dungeon Horror Deed’ have been play tested again and again I found a bug the other day. It goes to show that even relatively simple games, are complex. But it was easy to fix fortunately, because I have focused on maintenance when designing the game engine.

When you create software, you create a huge amount of paths and combinations of paths through the code that even the most intensive automated and manual testing never will ensure to be a 100% error free.

So what seems to be robust and good code can come back and bite you in the ass. But I fixed it and that feels good

After using Windows 10 in the work place for almost a year now, here’s my take on the experience. To begin with I thought that the promises from Microsoft, on this being a good fast new system, might be right this time. So I was considering using this instead of Ubuntu if it proved to be as good as it was hyped to be. But I was to be disappointed.

So the answer is stick to Ubuntu, I have to say my Windows 10 experience have gone through some classical phases:

– Great! It starts up fast and seems to be fast in the day-to-day work
– Great! It shuts down fast
– Oh no! I wast just forced to do an update, and have to wait…
– Oh no! Now it starts booting slow again…
– Oh no! Performance and user experience degrades continuously over time
– Aaand! the fonts look like crap due to bad anti aliasing on some screens!

The system is not better and the tile interface, does not help to give a better experience either, so I have to repeat that I am not looking back!

The shift to Ubuntu on the home front has proven to be the right decision for me.

In fact the more I learn to use Linux the better I like it, recently
I got Android Studio running and tried out Flutter/Dart for
cross platform development as easy as if it had been on any other
platform…