Casino: Revision 3

My silly text-based adventure game hits revision 3. The new updated (and across multiple source files now) source code is viewable here.

Revision 2 of the Text Based Game!

I’ve been fooling around with this quite a bit today. Everything is a bit more modular now and the project has grown to multiple source files as well! I don’t really have any end goals in mind for this game but that’s one reason why it’s fun to work on. Right now I’m just adding whatever I see fit and just building from the ground up. I’m thinking that there will be a story element eventually but I need to work on NPCs or something before that will be possible in a decent way.

Text-Based Casino Adventure?

So far, I’ve just been working on mostly generic things needed to write a text-based game. Ever since my game-playing days of youth in DOS and Windows 3.1 I’ve always had an attraction to text games. This is what I’ve been fooling around with today (in Python.) I probably should work on a project I have for school, but I find this to be more entertaining! My blog does look rather droll though with all these ‘white text on black background’ style images cropping up. I personally find the aesthetics of text based games interesting. You only have a limited character set but mixed in a certain way, it can incite the creativity in our minds.

Current source code is viewable here. I retain all rights to it, but I like to show my progress online.

Hangman in NASM Assembly

This is just a simple implemention of hangman in NASM. It currently only has one word to guess, however. Once we learn about file input I will probably add a word list to the game. The code can be viewed here.

Dice Rolling Program in Python

 

A friend had an assignment in his intro-CS classes to write a program that could roll X number of die and print an asterisk for each time the die lands on a certain result. I decided to try my hand at this in Python since I am still learning how to best use the language. However, I decided to spruce it up a bit with a legend to allow higher amounts of dice counts to be displayed more neatly, and to total the throws. The code can be found here. Writing code in Python feels so much lighter and agile than writing code like this in Java. I wrote a simpler implementation in Java that only met the requirements of this project just to compare the two syntactically (bearing in mind the usage of Unicurses library calls in the python implementation.) The code for that is here. For someone who started out learning language like C/Java/.NET python is a breath of fresh air.

My Review of ValhallaRoom

I recently purchased a copy of ValhallaRoom. This is actually the very first VST I’ve ever purchased. It only made sense after my foray into commercial music production software began with the purchase of Reaper about 6 months ago. I still would like to get around to writing a review of that at some point (hint: I love it.) Anyways, my initial impressions of ValhallaRoom were great. I demo’d the software for about 3-4 weeks and during that time I found that I could use this plugin on most sounds (at varying levels) to add a much more lively quality to the instruments. Most reverbs have this airy wall of white noise feel that occurs on long delays, but in ValhallaRoom it is surprisingly absent. Instead, very sweet tones can be heard even after long decays. On the other side of the spectrum, there are quite nice “Ambiance” presets that allow you to have very little decay but they widen the sound and give it that extra flavor feel of a chorus without the distortional qualities that usually entails. On top of this, the VST supports 32 or 64 bit. This is wonderful for us that use 64 bit native hosts. I would definitely recommend this VST to anyone looking to widen their horizons with commerical VSTs as a good first choice. I know it will provide me with hours upon hours of use in my home concoctions.

Tic-Tac-Toe in Python!

 

I was pretty bored waiting for my night-shift tonight, so I decided to write up a quick tic-tac-toe game in Python. The source can be found here. While tic-tac-toe is quite trivial to program in most languages, Python makes it even easier. I’m currently looking into finding a good curses-like library for Windows so I can start making text based games with Python in my spare time.

I found a nice pdcurses wrapper called Unicurses for Python thanks to this kind user on Reddit. I’ve since updated the code with a more user friendly interface for inputting move selection and without drawing many newlines between new “screens.” That updated code can be found here.

My Cognitive Dissonance

What is the point to life? Such a broad question no doubt warrants a yawn from many. However, it is a question we all ask ourselves time and time again. Perhaps it changes constantly. Perhaps it’s never fully realized. Perhaps it cannot ever be fully realized. However, this is getting too broad. To think, we have to weed out wonderfully interesting prospects. Otherwise, what do we accomplish besides yearning for acknowledgment of those concepts we only faintly grasp.  We can’t start at the beginning either, however. To give up all the knowledge we’ve accumulated in a lifetime is dooming ourselves to genericism and disinterest. No, we have to start exactly where we do start when our minds let us know that things are coming online. Where is this in the overall balance between nothing and everything? Whose to say. Very paradoxical that one can ramble on and on about coherent thinking when ones’ own thoughts are so dissonant.

My Modding Misadventures in Minecraft

I’ve made a few simple mods for Minecraft that I find enhance the enjoyment of the game for me. You can find them all here.

It’s Been Awhile

Well, it’s been quite some time since I’ve posted here. The main reason for that is the things I have accomplished have primarily been offline things (I lived with my Grandparents for a few months in New York and worked at a restaurant washing dishes.) Now that I’m back (actually for a couple of months now) I am back in school working towards my CS degree. Lately I’ve been a bit depressed since I haven’t found a job yet since returning and my classes are all online this semester so I haven’t had much social interaction. I’ve worked on writing some new tracks (here and here) but I feel I’m not committed enough to music since learning newer things is hard and it takes a lot of time to write songs without any return (besides the enjoyment of listening to them, which is good.) I pretty much feel “in the moment” all the time, but it’s a miserable place to be. Sometimes I wish I could afford to talk to a therapist, but at the same time, I feel like it wouldn’t be too much help and they would probably just put me on medication regardless of what I said. Other than that, I’ve made a few mods for Minecraft and although they are simple, I can’t imagine playing without them anymore (kind of spoiled by all the resources.)