Twoville Inching Along
Thanks to a snow day yesterday, I can now export animated GIFs from Twoville, my 2D drawing language. Gif.js made this possible. However, Jeremy, I think naming your project with .js suffix was a big mistake. When one clones the project, one ends up with a directory with a .js extension, which messes everything up. […]
Introducing Twoville
Some students and I are building a programming language for generating animated SVG images. Rather, each of us is building our own language, because each of us wanted 100% of the learning experience. By the end of the semester, we’ll have four different takes on how to build such a language. My take is called […]
Fourlords Paddle
I said I was going to build a co-op game alongside the students in my gamedev class, but I haven’t touched Fourlords (a clone of Warlords) since before the semester started. Not until today, that is. I am in Baltimore for a conference, with a reprieve from lecture preparation. When not developing humans, I get […]
Wolf Hollow Virus
My children and I just finished reading Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk. As I closed the book, 9-year-old Lewis said that books that win awards are always sad. This book won an award. I won’t go into any of the book’s merits. Rather, I will focus on one non-essential part of it that has been […]
Another Integer Triangle Wave
I’ve across another way to generate a triangular wave. So exciting! Recall from last time that I want to generate a pattern that looks like this: In this example, the period is 10. As before, we can generate a sawtooth wave with some help from modulus: $$y = \textrm{mod}(x, \textrm{period})$$ We can also generate a […]
Playing Telephone with Google Translate
A friend was playing with the Google Translate API and wrote a game of Telephone. He started with a message in English, translated it to language X, translated it to language Y, and so on, and finally translated it back to English. Sometimes the end result was incredibly faithful to the original message, but not […]
Flat Braid
When all you know of trees is that they have bark and leaves, you view the woods as a background to the more interesting foreground activity of a jog, or a campout, or a proposal. But when one knows the trees, it’s hard to not stop every few feet and shake hands with some old […]
Integer Triangle Wave
I encounter many of the same problems over and over again. But sometimes enough time elapses between one encounter with a problem and the next that I’ve forgotten how to solve it. I start to doubt my qualifications as a teacher. “That guy can’t even learn. How could we trust him to teach?” I think […]
Fourlords Field
In a couple of weeks, I start teaching a brand new elective on game development. Students will team up and build a single game throughout the semester. I’ve taught several such courses in the past, but this one has a couple of twists: The games must be locally cooperative. These games are intended to be […]
Two MPU-6050s
Ugh. After learning how to talk to one accelerometer, I needed to talk to two of them. The MPU-6050 is, for reasons I do not understand, bound to I2C addresses 0x68 or 0x69. In order to put two of them on the same I2C bus, one will have to take on 0x68 and the other […]