Category Archives: Uncategorized

Minecraft: Sometime, modding

I was playing Minecraft often in past days, and once again have came to thoughts that start from phrase "I wish there was...".
As result, I've got to 'playing around' with source of Zombe's ModPack.
This mod already adds some nice additions for single-player and survival multi-player, and most of my edits turned out to be experimental, or something that only I might see use of.
So, these are...

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Time is Ticking (gadget for windows vista/7)


Looks of gadget on desktop, in according pane, and on it's settings screen.

So I've randomly found out that Windows 7 (and Vista too) gadgets are written in HTML+JS+CSS.
Next thing I did was writing my own gadget. So this comes.

'Time is Ticking' is a minimalistic stopwatch. As such, it's purpose is to allow measuring for how long you were doing (or not doing) specific thing. Can be motivating.
Gadget can be considered optimized (does operation and a redraw once per second when on, is entirely idle when off), features customizable backgrounds with ability to specify your own (navigate to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\TimeIsTicking.gadget\image and add 160x32 PNG images to be able to chose them by-name in settings), and is pretty nice-looking overall.
For best experience it is recommended that you have font Dejavu Sans Mono installed, so digits would display appropriately.
To avoid accidental triggering, pause\restart buttons require double-clicking them to react.

Download

CPP – [busy] sleep() function via time.h

As you may know, there are multiple ways to create a sleep\delay function in C++.
These may appeal more or less to you depending on system and libraries available.
The following short function uses functionality of time.h header, which makes it useful for cases when dos.h is missing and you do not want to include windows.h just for a single function.

void sleep(int ms) {
	clock_t target = clock() + ms;
	while (clock() < target) { }
}

AS3: MinimalFramework


Trivia: Compiled SWF seen on this image takes less space than an image of it.

I made this tiny "framework" some time ago and successfully used it for a handful of jam games, including those with size restrictions (such as Pipe10).

Structurally it is inspired by FlashPunk, and includes a 04b03 lookalike font compressed into 1.3KB worth of data.

See code (Gist)

Minecraft: Automating creation with WorldEdit


Possible future candidate for an adventure map

From my point of view, creating a tool, that would perform your desired action efficiently, is often better than just doing mentioned thing.
In last few days I've developed a small tool that translates given commands into series of WorldEdit plugin commands, and provides simple interface for writing dynamic scripts that modify world contents, even without having access to server to be able to import JS scripts.
Since game handles input nicely, a single message can be sent every 200..300ms, meaning that subset of commands needed to change selection bounds and perform desired operation over it often takes less than a second to perform, in comparison to minute-measured time needed to do same manually.
This opens rather interesting perspectives of automating creation of typical structures, as well as making it possible to push procedurally generated content into game easily.
Yesterday I've spent some time to port part of RPG05's dungeon generator for use with this, and this is the result.

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Inserting video into Tululoo game (HTML5 Canvas)


Video credit: 'asdfmovie song by LilBruceWayne'

As you may know, HTML5 standard includes <video> tag support.
This adds some crazy interesting possibilities that can be used in games as well.

A common wish is to have a video playing as part of game or as its background overall.
Here I'm going to explain methods of doing this in Tululoo.
(implementations in languages and frameworks that allow 'low-level' access to javascript would be pretty similar too)

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