NumGame August 2, 2008
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A friend tried to explain the concept of a game he had played somewhere, but couldn’t recall where. And as it’s not that easy to come up with something to google for (“rotating squares game?”), he asked me if I could create something silmilar for him. Sure.
He explained that there were supposed to be nine squares in a 3×3 formation with the numbers one to nine. And you could apparently rotate four 2×2 squares (Those at the corners). The goal was to return a scrambled board to its orginal state where the numbers appeared in order.
So this is what I threw together last night.
I named it NumGame in lack of a better name.
It is still a prototype though, but the basic features are there. Scrambling, rotating and solving. The squares are even animated when moving.
Looks cooler in action though.
I’m thinking of putting some cool plasma effect as backround to make it more interesting (and even more confusing).
Harder than it looks. Heh.
The binary is pretty much ready to be released, I just have to pack it down and upload it. I’ll post a link in the next post.
BlueBPM July 31, 2008
Posted by blueapple in Other, Projects.2 comments
Yet again I’m sorry for the recent lack of updates, but it’s summertime, so I guess it’s okey for this time. I haven’t really had any time to work on either Hydro nor Boteria lately. But that will change when the rain and snow starts falling from the skies.
Even so, I have something to give you at least. It is something I hacked together over a day when being annoyed of not knowing the BPM (beats per minute) of a song when programming my drum machine. And voila, BlueBPM was born.
Not much of a screenshot, heh.
This thing is often found in metronomes and drum machines (not mine though), where you tap a button to the music and it gives you the BPM. Quick and without any hassle. Not that I did a very big search for any existing ones for the computer, but the ones I found required me to install big and ugly applications which is not what I want for a small task like this.
Here’s the download link: BlueBPM-1.0.zip
Small hint: Click the BPM panel and you’ll get to see the about box.
Update July 3, 2008
Posted by blueapple in Hydro, Other.add a comment
Hey again!
I’ve reached 20% mark on Project Euler, or at least I had before they released the 200:th problem. Now I’m back at 19% again with 39 problems solved. And I must say that I have learned a lot about Haskell, but I am now starting to run out of problems which can be solved in ten minutes.
Worth noting is that I have not solved them in order. The most difficult one according to the websites ranking system is 120 and the one with the highest ID being 145.
Also, I am preparing to release a small demo of Hydro. I just need to sort out a few bugs and maybe create a fun map or two. The ones I’ve got now aren’t that fun to play, as they were just made to test things out.
Project Euler June 24, 2008
Posted by blueapple in Other, Programming.3 comments
I’ll have to admit it, Project Euler has got me hooked for the last few weeks. It all started with a friend asking me for help regarding a math problem. It didn’t take long before we had figured it out, but I was interested where he got it from, as it involved writing a program to generate the solution.
Project Euler, he said.
To summarize the whole thing: It is a website which presents various (At the time, 199) math/programming problems. Once you have submitted the correct answer, you’ll be given access to a forum thread where people post their solutions and thoughts about the problem. In some cases, there is even a pdf-file explaining the problem (and how to solve it efficiently). You’ll be amazed how some people solve the problems. Me sitting there, proud of my 100 lines of code and seeing a solution in two lines that generates the solution five times as fast. But one learns a lot.
I saw this as an opportunity to learn Haskell too.
Haskell is a standardized purely functional programming language with non-strict semantics, named after the logician Haskell Curry.
It is quite different from C++ (or any imperative programming language). But not different in a bad way. One of the cool things with it is what is called “lazy evaluation”. It allows one to declare something which is not computed until it is needed. So you can declare a list of all primes, or a list of the whole Fibonacci sequence (which is infinite). And then, the element you want will be computed only when you need it.
Now, I’m still a beginner with Haskell. But I’m learning more each problem I solve. I would recommend using Project Euler either as a tool to learn a new programming language or just to give you exercise with one you know. It’s a fun challenge, can you make it to100%?
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