Category: Programming
Items about code of all sorts, including php, Java, Javascript, Haxe, Perl, and many more.
Quick web project today…
My employer in 2013 also ran a scaffolding company, and one of my first tasks was to redesign and implement a new site atop WordPress. Having never used WordPress for anything other than this blog before it was a little daunting, and parts of it are hacked together rather than done properly but it did work.
Above the fold features the nav, a service guarantee, various accreditations and a short slideshow of sample jobs, and from there we break in to three columns to enumerate the types of work the company will undertake.
That’s all folks, thanks for reading.
Long time no blog! I’ve been so busy at work recently I haven’t had any time to work on other stuff.
But today I have a little php nugget I had to put together recently that I think someone will find useful.
In the past I’ve dabbled with generating images dynamically in php – usually basic stuff, website statistics etc. But recently I had to do something a little more advanced in generating preview images of letters that people would be paying for.
This involved placing a large amount of text within a series of template images – including ones with oddly shaped spaces where the text would have to go, which presents the problem of getting it to fit in the gap. I guess you could brute force it – manually position each line – but that’s frankly ludicrous and not future-friendly at all.
So, let’s make a solution.
Continue reading “Generating previews with imagettftext”Hello everybody.
Long time no blog, so here’s a quick catch up: I got a job at a small start up doing many varied and interesting things. The first project I was given built on my experiences with game development, and somewhat outstandingly I got to start writing a new game in Haxe NME! I can’t go in to details about the title right now, but it’s 99% complete and looking good.
One desired aspect of the game was an online leaderboard of some sort, so we can assign rewards to weekly/monthly winners. I’d never even looked at NMEs web function before, vaguely deciding I’d worry about highscores in Tower Defence “at some point”.
To my relief it’s super simple to use, and with a few php files on a server I’ve got a nice simple highscore system running… Someone’s bound to find this useful since I couldn’t find any complete samples online, so here we go…
Continue reading “Online highscore system for Haxe NME”Hello my lovable minions, today let’s talk about board games.
Well, not really, but let’s briefly discuss that I made one. This was an all-important C++ refresher that I wrote in preparation for a small interview the other day where I knew I’d be queried on some C, so it seemed only practical to do some for the first time in a long time. Nothing particularly complicated, but a good refresher in pointers, memory management and classes/program structure. The one zip file I’ll provide includes both the source and a compiled exe, since C programs are so small anyway, and it’s only command line — download here.
Before the current Nerdshack, and before the previous Nerdshack, there was the original Nerdshack – the same site really, blog, portfolio and random drivel, but in a more designed shell.
I recently found this single screenshot of the old design and figured I’d publish it for posterity. I still like it – those boxy headline backgrounds were based on the window frames from the Watercolour theme in Windows Whistler (XP) builds 2410-2419, and the boxy layout of the sidebar complimented it nicely.
In the final iteration, the lower boxes on the sidebar contained links to recent blog posts, and clicking any link in to the blog triggered a smooth transition to the identically laid out but much darker design of the blog. I’m currently investigating building a similar theme for the current site – the grey is nice but it is a bit depressing after a while!
Well I’ve spent a lot of my downtime the last few days crawling through C++ in the Visual Studio debugger, and gathering crash data via adb from my tablet, all in the name of fixing threading bugs! A few core classes lightly stripped down and occasionally rewritten, a few things jiggled about and we have something that’s stable [on Windows].
I left several copies of this code running the other day as a test — none explicitly crashed, although there are persistent memory leak issues (aka, “gunking up”) over time which eventually lead to what is basically a freeze on the second thread, which does all the work. But in my testing all the sessions ran for at least half an hour at double speed (only a debug option right now, sorry), notching up an impressive health of over -5000. For reference, besides the threading related crashes everything else is basically the same as in the previous demo, so still lots of unfinished/unfixed/placeholder content and code.
So NOW go download this demo of Tower Defence, representing build 44.
Progress with Tower Defence has been slow recently, what with moving and the general disruption that brings, but the other day I did manage to settle in and resolve a few long standing and occasionally nasty bugs which brings the game to a highly playable level. As such, I felt it might be prudent to make a demo available so people can actually try this thing out themselves rather than watching my boring videos.
I’m a long way from guaranteeing it’s crash free, but it’s not far off. There are also bugs galore (see full release notes after the break), and a few things are disabled for being either half implemented or inconsistent in performance or reliability, but it gives a reasonable overview of the project. This release is in the form of a Windows binary, although if there’s any interest in OSX/Linux/mobile builds I’ll happily crank one out and you’re welcome to see if it works.
I regard Pixita as my first “real” programming project, way back around 2006/07. I had been experimenting with Visual Basic since about 14 (although how much I understood what I was doing is questionnable) but trying to make sense of other languages made my head spin; It wasn’t until University started teaching me Java that suddenly everything clicked in to place, and now I can understand most any language thrown at me.
Anyway, Pixita was to be an image hosting service open to the public… If I remember rightly, Shane – my good friend and owner of one of my old forum hangouts Beta-Place (True-Betas and InfoByte later in it’s life) – had just moved us on to an “unlimited everything” server, and we basically wanted to test it out, as well as the obvious benefits of hosting our own images for use on the forum. I was the in-house developer, but I was only familiar with HTML, CSS, and a smidge of Javascript if required, so I didn’t have the chops to take on such a project. Luckily another forum member who I’ve since lost contact with knew php, and so he began building code. Eager not to be left out and sensing that knowing php would be advantageous given the forum software used it too, I started pulling down his code and studying it to figure out how everything worked.
Occasionally I start Googling random collections of words related to video games — more usually, video game jobs, hoping some golden ticket is going to fall right out of Mountain View or something. I often end up reading lots of forum threads and blog posts about the topic and how to make yourself seem attractive to studios etc etc, and it was within one of these little quests that I read an idea that nagged me, “Just make something … Tetris or something, just show you know what you’re doing.”
So a few days later I got up and made Tetris.
All told it was maybe 6-8 hours work split across two days: Mostly production, with the final couple of hours on day two dedicated to bug squashing. Anyway, it’s super simple but I think it’s kinda neat for what it is. As ever, this game is built with Haxe NME (3.5) – to compile the source you will also need the Actuate tween library installed. Download the source here.
Continue reading “Quick project: Tetris”
Hello once again!
Today I’m happy to offer some code from my early prototypes of Tower Defence, build 13 from September/October ’12 if anyone is pedantic enough to want to know. It’s super basic: No maze generating algorithms yet, not much in the way of gameplay. A random maze is created (i.e, each map tile is 50/50 whether its walkable or not), start and end points generated and a route found between them using A*, and an “enemy” (green square) moves along the path. You can create a single weapon type – the gun – which fires very slow moving bullets at the enemy.
This code also contains remnants of my quick and dirty collision system, although Box2D is actually running the show.
Continue reading “Tower Defence prototype code”