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46
website/2016-04-11-doki-doki-densha-sekai.md
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website/2016-04-11-doki-doki-densha-sekai.md
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# Doki Doki Densha Sekai
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**Nordic Game Jam 2016 People's Choice Awards finalist**
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A relaxing exploration of a metro system. Put on a pair of headphones
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and immerse yourself in a world of trains and cube people.
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Made in cooperation with _[Sketchwhale](http://takunomi.space)_
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and _[Astrid Sonne](https://soundcloud.com/a_sonne)_
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Download on [itch.io](https://jmaa.itch.io/doki-doki-densha-sekai).
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Original description:
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> **Doki Doki Densha Sekai** is a first step to see when a world begins to
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> form in the mind of the player. Try and visit all the unique stations
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> such as complex __Inu-shibuya__, the religious center
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> __O-biiru-no-mizu__ and curiously circular __Manko-mae__. If you miss
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> either your ride or stop, don't worry about it. Relax and listen to
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> the easy-going music while you wait. It might be a while.
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>
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> Was made for **Nordic Game Jam 2016**, by the following people:
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>
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> - [Sketchwhale](http://takunomi.space) made the design and the art.
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> - [Astrid Sonne](https://soundcloud.com/a_sonne) created the music you'll hear throughout.
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> - [JMAA](/) was stressed out coupling everything together.
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## March 2019 Update
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The game have been updated to fix several issues, and some minor
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features have been implemented.
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## September 2019 Update
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The game has been updated once again, with following patch notes:
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- The fonts have been reworked, removing some visual artifacts.
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- An introductory main menu have been added.
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- Xbox controller support has been added. Other controllers may
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work, but as I only possess a Xbox controller, I am unable to
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confirm.
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91
website/2017-12-05-tigersay.md
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website/2017-12-05-tigersay.md
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# Tigersay
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## The dOvs Course ##
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This last semester I've been following my university's course on
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writing a compiler from scratch. The course uses the classic
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[Modern Compiler Implementation in
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ML](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/%7Eappel/modern/ml/), and thus our
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input language is something called **Tiger**, a toy language designed
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specifically for the book. The joke goes that Tiger is one of the
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least used programming languages, but one of the most supported. It is
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also weird. It's like if **C** and [Standard
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ML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML) had a deformed baby:
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Mutually inductive data types and functions? Sure! Primitives for both
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functional and imperative coding styles? Great idea! Type inference
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for variables, but not for functions. Perfect! A way to determine the
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size of arrays at runtime? No, absolutely not!
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The reason for these weird idiosyncrasies is obvious: nobody is
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supposed to write actual programs in Tiger. The features of
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Tiger are designed to illustrate how to implement them, not
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necessarily to form a coherent whole.
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That said, some of the features work together to allow a strange
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elegance in the way some programs can be written. Recursive functions
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and structure types allow one to express linked lists and maps using
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relatively little code. See [the example
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code](https://gitfub.space/Jmaa/tigersay/src/branch/master/tiger-linked-list.tig)
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above, for an implementation of a linked list, and a function for finding the sum of
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the list, using a recursive helper function. I could just as easily
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have implemented it using an imperative style.
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<!-- TODO: Include link to tests. -->
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While following the course, my group used a testing framework,
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containing many programs similar in style to the above code sniplet,
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ensuring our compiler's compliance with the language. These
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tests were small, and rarely tested more than a few features at once.
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The question "Is our compiler actually capable of translating a _real_
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program?" arose, and this lead me down the road of actually writing a
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"real" program in Tiger, using its weird feature set.
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## Tigersay ##
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<!--start-->
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**Tigersay** is an implementation of the classic Perl program
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[Cowsay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay), written in the Tiger
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programming language, a toy language originating from the [Modern
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Compiler Implementation in
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ML/C/Java](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/%7Eappel/modern/ml/) series of
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books.
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It does not come compiled, nor does it come with a **Tiger** compiler.
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The only way to experience the wonder that is **Tigersay** is to use
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your own **Tiger** compiler. (Or find one on the internet, but that's
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cheating.)
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<!--end-->
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The standard version of Tiger is limited in its ability to interact
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with the command-line, and as a result, so is Tigersay. The only way
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to interact with Tigersay is to pipe the desired text into Tigersay:
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```bash
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echo "Hello World" | tigersay
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```
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Unfortunately this also means Tigersay only supports a single face,
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the default tiger one, due to having no support for command-line
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arguments.
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Tigersay responds to certain strings in silly ways, the most useful
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ones being _help_ and _version_. Additionally it interfaces nicely
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with [fortune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix\)).
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If you'd like to play around with Tigersay yourself, you can find the source
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code in the [Gitfub repository](https://gitfub.space/Jmaa/tigersay)
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105
website/2018-02-06-infernal-interpreter.md
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website/2018-02-06-infernal-interpreter.md
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# Infernal Interpreter
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## The dComArk Course ##
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My first semester of University (summer 2015) I had a course named
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**Computer Architecture** commonly shorted to **dComArk**. It was a
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standard course about the low level construction of modern computers.
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It followed [Tanenbaum](http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/)'s classic
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[Structured Computer
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Organization](http://www.mypearsonstore.com/bookstore/structured-computer-organization-9780132916523).
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The course itself was known for its [idiosyncratic
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lecturer](https://twitter.com/nielsolofbouvin), and for being hard as
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hell. Topics included registers, the stack, assembly code,
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micro-code, and the architecture of processors in general.
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Jumping directly from just having learnt Java, as a first programming
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language, to suddenly having to understand and write low-level
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programming languages such as
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[IJVM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJVM) and [X86-64
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assembly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64), was tough, and many
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of my fellow students dropped out because of it.
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My favorite assignment was the one where we extended IJVM
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with a new op-code. You see, some processors are programmable, in
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their own [highly restricted programming
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language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIC-1). Changing something you
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think is set in stone - like the set of op-codes a processor has -
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changes the way you see the world.
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But this article is neither about IJVM, nor about micro-code. It's
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about the course's fifth and final assignment. For this assignment we
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were to write a recursive [fibonnaci
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function](https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Fibonacci_sequence) in x86-64,
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and then describe how it worked, with visualizations of the registers
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and stack at every instruction.
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[A friend of mine](https://christoffer.space/) spent an entire evening
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on this assignment carefully drawing the [registers and stack into
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Excel](/website/images/infernal-interpreter_christoffer-stack.pdf).
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I decided I'd rather spend an evening programming, than messing about
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with Excel, so I began writing a program that could generate code for
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embedding into LaTeX. The program needed to emulate just enough
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X86-64 to run the function, and no more.
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## The Infernal Interpreter ##
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<!--start-->
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**Infernal Interpreter** is an emulator and visualizer of a subset of
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the AMD x86-64 ABI, using the GAS syntax. You give it a bunch of
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symbolic machine code, after which it produces a visualization of the
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running code, either to the terminal, or as a LaTeX file with Tikz.
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It's old, written in Python 2, and for an incredibly specific purpose,
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but I enjoy going back and looking at the output.
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<!--end-->
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There is something at once uncomfortable and fascinating about looking
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at old code. Thoughts of "How could I ever write code this bad?" and
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"Damned, I've gotten a lot better since then". While writing this
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article I wanted some images that fits the style of my website, so I
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added a `ascii` painting mode, that shows the trace in the terminal.
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This was non-trivial, given the existing structures, which were
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clearly designed to be as obscure as possible. Along the way the
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frontend was updated to be more UNIX-like. The backend is a nightmare,
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and has been kept without major changes.
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If you'd like to take at look at it as well, you can find an [an
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example of the tikz output
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here](/website/images/infernal-interpreter_tikz-example.pdf).
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Alternatively you can [download the program
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itself](/website/images/infernal-interpreter_source-1.0.0.zip), or
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[view the official Git
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repository](https://gitfub.space/Jmaa/infernal-interpreter).
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**Infernal Interpreter** requires **Python 2**, and will crash on
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anything remotely complicated. Notably: it does not model the heap.
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The source-code is available under the BEERWARE license, so you are
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free to modify it as you like.
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The program includes two example files in the `examples` folder, both
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of which were part of my assignment, and has been included unaltered.
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You can run them with a command like this:
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./infernal
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-i=examples/fibonnaci_recursive.S
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--rdi=3
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The `--rdi=3` argument is important, because it sets the `%rdi`
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register to `3`, and thus tells the program to compute the 3rd
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Fibonacci number. This writes ascii directly to the terminal. To
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produce Tikz, simply change the painter: `--painter tikz`. The full
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options can be found by running `./infernal --help`
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175
website/2018-04-21-nijousatsujikenriron.md
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website/2018-04-21-nijousatsujikenriron.md
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# Nijousatsujikenriron (AKA "The Elevator Game")
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**Nijousatsujikenriron** is a murder-mystery dating-sim set in an
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elevator. As Detective Monaghan, you just had the worst, and probably
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last, day of your career. As you enter the elevator, you feel things
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are not going to get better. Can you solve the mystery? Can you find
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yourself? Can you move on?
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Made in cooperation with _[Sketchwhale](http://takunomi.space)_
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and _[Mikko "Mishicu" Aaltio](https://twitter.com/mishicumusic)_
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Download on [itch.io](https://jmaa.itch.io/nijousatsujikenriron).
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## Introduction ##
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Last weekend, 13-15th April 2018, I participated in [Nordic Game
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Jam](https://nordicgamejam.org/), a yearly gamejam set in Copenhagen.
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I did not enjoy the trip at all, but was very satisfied with the
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resulting game.
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Most of this post is a rant about trains, the jam, implementation
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details, etc.
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## Transport Purgatory ##
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I had planned to see [Robert Yang](https://twitter.com/radiatoryang)'s
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presentation on sex in video games, and had planned my train journey to
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Copenhagen with time to spare. When stopped at some random small-town
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station, we're informed that a tree fell on the tracks, and thrown out
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of the train. Together with hundreds of other confused people, I
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waited 3 hours for a [train-replacement
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bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_replacement_bus_service) that
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never came. The tracks were cleared, and trains were running again
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before a bus towards Copenhagen came. Good job [DSB](https://www.dsb.dk/).
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The remaining journey to Copenhagen was spent in a stuffed train,
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where even first-class passengers were standing. After arriving in
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Copenhagen, I still had to walk an hour to get to TAP1, the game jam location.
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## Friday ##
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Similar to in [2016](/website/doki-doki-densha-sekai), my friend
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[Sketchwhale](http://takunomi.space) and I had already talked about
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some game ideas before the jam, and just like last time, we ignored
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the theme completely.
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The idea we settled on was _murder-mystery dating-sim, set in an
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elevator_, which Sketchwhale had called _"This- This is awful- It's not
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even a real mystery"_. We would focus on the dialog between the main
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character, detective _Dave Monaghan_, and the other characters. The joke was
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that the murderer was obvious, but the real game lie in becoming
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friends with the characters. We used a pretty awful custom built 3d engine,
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I'd made earlier in the year (2018).
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The jam started late, somewhere around `21:30`, and so the progress
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after day one was pretty rough, as can be seen above. We had a
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sprite for one character, _Miko_ and some very colorful
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walls. The dialog options on-screen was baked in, and there was no
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interaction beyond rotating between different clones of Miko.
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## Saturday ##
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Since 2017 _Nordic Game Jam_ has been a vegetarian event. I have no
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issue with vegetarian food, I can live fine without meat. What I don't
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care for, is being served [skyr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyr)
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natural for breakfast, when a bowl of cornflakes or havregryn would
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have done just fine. Why go for extreme variety, when something so
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normal and cheap is already vegetarian?
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Most of the game was implemented on the second day, Saturday.
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Sketchwhale drew the remaining characters, and wrote the dialog for
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_Miko_ and the dog. I implemented the dialog system, including all of
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the _Miko_ dialog.
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The 3d engine is, as previously asserted, a bit rough. It calculates
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texture coordinates wrong, so the act of looking around will change
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how a texture is draw, when the texture fills a large amount of the
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screen.
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This is obviously incorrect, but I couldn't be bothered
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with fixing it before the jam, and didn't have time under the jam.
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Above is an example of the stretching bug. Compare it with [original
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image](/website/images/sweat-guy.jpg). Notice how large his head is on
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the projected surface, compared to how large it is on the original.
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One way to avoid extreme stretching of the texture, is to split one
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triangle into several. The distortion is limited, as each triangle
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fills less of the screen. Unfortunately the entire engine is such a
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mess, that all my attempts failed with weird warping textures.
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Sketchwhale had drawn a great wall texture, but due to the stretching
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bug, we could not get it to work properly. Instead we made the walls
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randomly colored triangles, which looks alright.
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Sketchwhale knew a musician at the jam, [Mikko "Mishicu"
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Aaltio](https://twitter.com/mishicumusic). Although Mishicu were
|
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already working with another team, he was convinced to make some music
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for us, based on [that one scene from
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Drive](https://youtu.be/Kq2a7MWbmJU?t=1m28s). Mishicu did a great job,
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and I encourage you to play the game through, if only to listen to the music.
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## Sunday ##
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The third day started with incredible pressure to get the game
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finished. We started work around `10:00`, with a deadline of `13:00`.
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Sketchwhale mainly worked on a bit of promotional material, like a
|
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video, while I implemented the dog dialog, and implemented an
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introductory scene. A fun change was to shorten the dialog options
|
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when not selected. This was to accommodate some long dialog options
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pushing other options off of the screen.
|
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|
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|
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|
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We didn't have time to finish the following, during the jam:
|
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|
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- The timer mechanic never went anywhere, as we forgot to add an
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ending.
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- The score mechanic was incomplete, due to a bug in the dialog
|
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system, where some points weren't given correctly.
|
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- One of the characters has no dialog.
|
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- The player was supposed to have a gun, and be able to shoot
|
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characters.
|
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- A wireframe minimap was supposed to help the player when they
|
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felt lost.
|
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|
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## The presentations ##
|
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|
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After the jam, every group had to present their game, in front of 30 other groups,
|
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before voting on everybody's favorite. My favorite games from our
|
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presentation scene was:
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|
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- [Rage Against the Cuisine](https://d-lo.itch.io/rage-against-the-cuisine)
|
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- [Puppet Improv Theatre](https://saracecilia.itch.io/puppet-improv-theatre)
|
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- [On-line](https://mrjwolf.itch.io/on-line)
|
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|
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All three groups were great at presenting, and displayed the charm of
|
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their games very well.
|
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|
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I didn't get to see the final presentation, or know who won, as I left
|
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early. I was incredibly tired, and just wanted to get home.
|
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|
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## Post-jam ##
|
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|
||||
After the jam, I decided to fix some of the bugs and missing features. I
|
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added an ending, and fixed the score bugs. Furthermore a proper title
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screen was added.
|
||||
|
||||
The introduction sequence was heavily modified, to make it more
|
||||
intuitive. The doors were made actual 3d objects, and the light
|
||||
flickers in a more realistic manner. A fun change was for each
|
||||
character's name to only appear once the player has spoken with them.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Please do try the game; it is entirely free, and can be
|
||||
[downloaded above](#download).
|
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86
website/2020-07-06-suggest-require.md
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website/2020-07-06-suggest-require.md
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# Suggest-require
|
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|
||||
**Suggest-require** is a tiny Lua library, for discovering importable
|
||||
modules for Lua's `require` function. The intended purpose is
|
||||
as a part of an auto-complete system for Lua written in Lua. The
|
||||
script can, when run as a standalone program, list all of the
|
||||
available modules in the current environment.
|
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|
||||
The library has been tested with LuaJIT and Lua 5.1 under Linux.
|
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Compatibility with Windows, MacOS and other Lua versions is possible,
|
||||
but not assured.
|
||||
|
||||
Source code on [Gitfub](https://gitfub.space/Jmaa/suggest-require). Usage and examples are available in the source file itself. License is Beerware.
|
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|
||||
## Why suggest-require? ##
|
||||
|
||||
I have been writing a debugging shell in LÖVE for a while now. The
|
||||
shell itself, called Xenoterm, is pretty powerful at this point, with complex
|
||||
interactions and autocompletions, inspired by [Fish shell](https://fishshell.com/).
|
||||
One of Xenoterm most powerful features is argument auto-completion,
|
||||
where the shell detects which function is being tab-completed on, and
|
||||
suggests several possible arguments. This is similar to when Fish
|
||||
provides suggestions for command-line options, listing files in the
|
||||
local directory, or password files for
|
||||
[pass](https://www.passwordstore.org/). This allows the user to
|
||||
offload the need to remember specific names or files, and allows them
|
||||
to focus on more important things, like writing code.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Argument completion <abbr title="reason for being" lang="fr">raison d'être</abbr>
|
||||
was to make life easier for me and
|
||||
[Sketchwhale](http://takunomi.space) while working on our games, as we
|
||||
had a habit of forgetting the ids of items and enemies.
|
||||
|
||||
For obvious reasons, argument autocompletion makes most sense for
|
||||
functions with a single string argument, and a limited number of
|
||||
inputs. Giving autocompletions for `string.lower` would not make any
|
||||
sense. A prime candidate from Lua's standard library was `require`,
|
||||
Lua's module importing functionality, which is why I wrote the
|
||||
suggest-require library written back in 2017.
|
||||
|
||||
## How is suggest-require implemented? ##
|
||||
|
||||
A curious thing about Lua is that it aims to be [POSIX
|
||||
compatible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX) in order to be as
|
||||
portable as possible. This means pretty much no built-in knowledge of
|
||||
filesystems. Instead, Lua stores any information about the file system
|
||||
configuration in the `package` global: Directory separators, library
|
||||
locations, and so on. Depending upon which platform your Lua is
|
||||
compiled for the proper values are fitted in, but all of this can be
|
||||
inspected and modified at runtime. `require` will update its behaviour
|
||||
based upon the values in the table. So if you wanted to figure out the
|
||||
importable modules, you have all the information you want.
|
||||
|
||||
Unfortunately, Lua is __very__ filesystem agnostic, to the point of
|
||||
having no API for looking up files in a directory. The
|
||||
[Lua Filesystem Module](https://keplerproject.github.io/luafilesystem/)
|
||||
exists for filesystem lookup, but I don't like dependencies for a
|
||||
simple script. Lua does have the `io.popen` function for
|
||||
interacting with the system's shell, and this can be used to query the
|
||||
filesystem. On Unixes, we use the `find` program to find files, and
|
||||
its builtin pattern matching allowed a bit of a speedup.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
So the entire process is roughly:
|
||||
|
||||
1. Produce glob patterns, based on information in the global `package` table.
|
||||
2. Use `find` to execute those globs, retrieving a list of possible
|
||||
libraries.
|
||||
3. The library paths in the `package` table may contain multiple
|
||||
wildcards (marked as `?` in the path), which, when using `require`
|
||||
is replaced with the requested module. Thus our glob approach finds
|
||||
too many files, and we need to prune some of them, (so `./?/?.lua`
|
||||
matches `./a/a.lua`, but not `./a/b/.lua`.)
|
||||
4. Add the names of the already loaded libraries into the mix; these
|
||||
are easily found by looking in the global `package.loaded` table.
|
||||
|
||||
Sugggest-require will thus most likely only work on desktop computers,
|
||||
and other full featured environments. These are also the environments
|
||||
where I could see the script being used; a script deep in a game
|
||||
engine or on an embedded device will probably know exactly which
|
||||
modules to import.
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue
Block a user