Category: Apps an’ Mobiles

Merry XMAS everyone, I just noticed that I had forgotten to implement the original explosion in my clone of the 1979 game Asteroids made by Ed Logg.

I had just made something that split the Asteroids with no effect or removed the spaceships making some faulty debris simulations, but now it does something that imitates the original. A fun thing that also made the code a little more straight forward and simpler to read. All finished in my breaks this XMAS.

Now I am just sitting here feeling quite full from eating all that XMAS food, drinking XMAS beer and Peated Scotch Single Malt, could a man ask for more! 😉

My Asteroids Clone know has a manual I just added to give some instructions during play. In fact it is 3+ years since I touched the code, but it was easy (like in less than an hour) to add. Nothing beats modular code, and of course I made a new class for the manual, making it easy to insert to the Game State machine ;-).

Coding is like therapy for the soul, you think of almost nothing as you sit and implement new features focusing on making it easy to maintain. BTW this clone is a tribute to Ed Logg who made the original!

What can I say! I am a sucker for Retro Games. I have just been playing Diablo I via Windows XP running in Virtual Box, and I found a little cheat action you could some extra gold and experience from. I have reached King Leoric’s Tomb, and by Luring the King forward to the Closed Gates, I can get him to raise more Undead Minions by pacing back and forth in front of the Gates.

This is a great little trick, that allows me to:

• Get more experience points by killing the raised minions
• Get more Gold and Items (that more often than normal are magic) when the minions drop some thing as the are killed
• Have fun ‘cheating’ the King

Great hilarious stuff and probably the next step towards being an Über Geek 😉

And you can get a lot of minions raised by teasing the King:

Be careful when starting to code in the evening, when you get in deep you forget the time. I had an intention of just wrapping up a few loose ends in my attempt to port my take on the 1979 Asteroids arcade game from Type Script to Rust. I just wanted to control a space ship and see some asteroids in the game view, no collision detection and no nothing.

But I ended op implementing all the default collision detection I needed, the destruction of the asteroids when they where hit by space ship bullets, the mass based collision handling of asteroids, the destructive asteroid to space ship collision on screen and finally the animation of space ship and asteroid obliteration. I went to bed around 2 am. My code still panicked when I destroyed to many of the smallest asteroids.

Next morning I found the bug I has made that classic mistake of looping a collection and removing elements from it inside the loop. It just goes to show that if you code when you are tired you start making mistakes, so think of that when you believe you can save the day by putting in extra hours 🙂

As an aside! I now have a functional Rust based Asteroids game with HiScore and all! 😉

Yep, that right!

I have ported the font i made for my typescript Asteriods Clone to Rust. I have also moved all the essential files for making vector games and the font into a library or as the Rusteans call it a crate. This has made the foot print of the triangle collision demo much smaller and easier to prepare for a good template example, if you want a gtk based game loop using Rust.

Also I put both the crate and the triangle demo in git, so that I have control over the changes. And I have added some test code, which is relatively easy in Rust where the test framework comes out of the box, much more seamless than in so many other languages. After this I can recommend trying out the language. I could also not help my self and added functionality for increasing or reducing the number of triangles on screen using the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ keys on the keyboard – Great fun 🙂

Yep That’s Right!

I have read about a new coding language called Rust. I have used a lot of the weekend porting my triangle collision demo to this language. Kind of hard to learn a new language for an old fart like me but I succeeded in porting a decent solution using the gtk library for Rust to display the triangles. I is a language that forces you to code to avoid race conditions in your code, the compiler analysis your work and punished with errors if you have made some code that has potential race conditions embedded into it. Tough to work with and understand to from scratch, but a great help once you get the hang of it.

And the compiler is also very helpful, once you get into trouble. It will deliver help texts along the lines of consider adding this or doing that which often hits the mark or gives you a good idea of what you need to do leading you in a constructive direction. I do not know if this system language as they call it will be as popular as to be used all over the industry, but I’m in on this! Highly recommended and unit testing is also relatively easy to start using to thumbs up!

And it was also great relaxation therapy coding along, porting one of my old projects changing and refactoring it to fit the mindset of Rust and improving it at the same time, highly recommended I say. 🙂

Yep that’s right!

I just added some more life to my OnePlus One Android device.

As of late I have noticed that my phone’s battery performance have dropped significantly. So what to do? I looked for a OnePlus 6 on Ebay and you can easily get one for some $550 since it is last years top model in this range.

But then I tried to see if it was feasible to buy a new battery and replace it myself, low and behold the guys at IFIXIT have a nice guide on how to do this, so I ordered a battery at around $60, included in this package was a kit to do the replacement with 9 free tools as an extra.

I received the package and one afternoon I did the moves to replace the battery. The guide from IFIXIT made it for me. It was easy enough to get the back panel of the phone with the included plastic tool and then loosen the screws.

Then it started to get a little difficult. The battery is glued on the back side so you have apply some controlled force as you loosen it. But of it went and I inserted the new battery, mounted the screws back in and put on the back panel. I turned on the phone to check out the battery status, the phone booted but into a recovery menu, and I had some anxious moments because the #$!??! phone kept returning to this menu. Luckily I noticed that the back panel not was put back on all the way and that this held the volume button down, and surely enough as I clicked the panel in place the phone booted as normal.

I have given my phone some more years spending $60 and some sweat and saved some $500 in the process. I still baffles me in this hysterical climate debate and save the earth alarmist age, that you are unable to buy a new battery and replace it without having to take your phone apart in a difficult way. I am lucky that this phone only requires loosening of the back panel and some screws, other phones you need to heat up to disassemble with a higher risk of ruining your device. Some years ago it was easy take of the back panel and slide the battery out and put in the new battery. A waste of resources, that this causes a lot of people to buy a new phone after 2-3 years, and not very friendly towards the environment, but we don’t talk about that do we?

BTW: To read about the unscientific climate debate I recommend reading Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know by Patrick J. Michaels and Robert Balling Jr. A book on how Climatologist was told to shut up about the truth about the climate because it not fits with the alarmist narrative 🙂

Achtung-Achtung! Nerdy GIT article yet again – You have been warned

Alas I discovered that I had forgot to put my TypeScript Code under wraps in a repository, so away I went to make a new repo, so I after some attempts I made a new repo using this command:

git –bare init –shared TypeScriptCode.git

This created a ready bare repository I intended to use as my central repository.

Next step was to create a place where I could work with my code. So:

cd ~/Work
git clone file:///home/carsten/GitOrigins/TypeScriptCode
cd TypeScriptCode/

Then I copied the code from where I had the original directories from my typescript work on amongst other things the Asteroids Clone, and after that started to add stuff:

echo ‘*/built/*’ > .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git add AsteroidsGame/*.js
git add AsteroidsGame/*.ts
git add AsteroidsGame/*.html
git add AsteroidsGame/*.json
git add AsteroidsGame/resources/
git add AsteroidsGame/sound
git add CommonLib/*.ts
git commit -m “Initial Checkin”
git push

And then I was started, I added the rest and after some testing, now I have a central repository for my typescript code…