Tonight, I reached a good point with my coding of Tetris: I managed to get falling pieces that I could move horizontally. Some big things are missing: boundary detection, the creation of the "mound" (the pieces that collect at the bottom of the playing field), and the randomization of the pieces themselves.
I've been noodling with a Win32 version of Tetris, the ubiquitous "shape placing" game. I'm working in C++ using the Simple Directmedia Layer for my graphics. One of the interesting things in working out the game is the "shape" data. Below is the code for one my shapes, and the methods to "rotate" and "draw" it.
When you work as a computer professional, you will inevitably hear your share of corporate phrases and workplace lingo. You know what I'm talking about. Things like "let's take that off-line", and "let's drill down", and the infamous "we have to think out of the box." It's so easy to mock these phrases, yet I find myself tossing them into my own regular speech.
Kernighan and Ritchie made things look so easy with their innocent "Hello, World" program. Yes, it's just a few lines, and the command to invoke the compiler is so easy ("cc hello.c"). But don't go underestimating "Hello, World."
In the beginning of December (last year), I wrote another small game. It's even simpler than the Concentrate game, but instead of JavaScript, it's in Flex. You can play the small game here:
http://rgu.freeshell.org/PickNumber.html
Or better yet, get a school-aged child to play it. This will be yet another piece of computer code I hope to break down in these pages.
I finished that concentration game. You can play it at:
http://rgu.freeshell.org/concentrate
There's a bunch to BLOG about this game. I'll get to it soon, I hope.
A few days ago our portable DVD player (a Panasonic DVD-LS 82) began producing an "Error H03" message to the screen whenever we gave it a known working DVD. Normally, a malfunction like this is a chance for me to dip into the savings for an upgrade, but the error had a hardware fix that I wanted to try out.
I'm writing a small JavaScript program to implement the simple game of "Concentrate". A few weeks ago, I borrowed JavaScript: The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford. It's a terrific little book on what's good about JavaScript. I admit freely that my JavaScript programming skills are mostly at the "cut and paste" level, but writing a small game will force me to get beyond this level, and to penetrate some of the patterns in Crockford's book. I'm hopeful to be blogging about this soon!
In the previous post, I showed how WWW::Mechanize and HTML::TokeParser can grab content from a website, and parse that content to produce the information required for an RSS feed. So how do I make a feed with all that?
In the previous part, I showed the main loop to grab the "interesting bits" from the HTML of my Sporting News' BLOG. Let me dig into this a little more.
