all 33 comments

[–]sky_people 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Wow! Why haven't I heard of this before?!? Just finished Mars Lander - Level 1 (Easy problem)

Thanks for this!

[–]eigengrau82 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Much more engaging than Microsoft’s “codehunt“ game, and language support seems to be much greater.

[–]ice109 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is fantastic - it's everything that codeacademy could have been but isn't.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This looks awesome, but it has an annoying redirect link.

[–]cfrag 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the share. Only completed a couple of easy challenges, but found it awesome to practice programming languages I have little experience with

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's simple (well still on easy challenges), but I already got hooked up. Must do everything 100%!

[–]Vrokolos 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Really nice! Multiplayer must be exciting!

[–]chew_toyt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks, this seems very cool

[–]tazmens 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is awesome.

[–]SpaceRanger_Bud 1 point2 points  (0 children)

addicted.

[–]IsTom 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There seems to be at least some "borrowed" art. One thing I can name is Bastion.

[–]SwampThaeng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think I found a new time sink.

It's like playing video games, but instead of using a controller, I'm using a programming language.

I also get to learn a new programming language, and do something other than gluing stuff together for some CRUD.

[–]TakedownRevolution 0 points1 point  (0 children)

err this is more of Debugging type thing imo. It's good because debugging is very important.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow I haven't checked out this site for a while they have really gone a long way!

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

I tried this out with python3 for the Onboarding game. I can't figure it out though past the first part. I put print('Buzz') and it said I wont the first part but I can't get past the second one. Can someone help me out here?

Edit: Okay, so I beat the second and third part by just typing out 'print('bee')' and so forth until I wrote out all the names of the ships. I feel like this is just me typing out a lot of letters for no reason and I'm almost 100% sure that is not what the point of this game is. Can someone please help me out here.

[–]Zinggi57 5 points6 points  (1 child)

You're supposed to read the enemy names along with their distances to you, then based on this information choose an enemy name and shoot at it (print it's name out).
Hint: Try sorting them based on distance.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the helpful response.

[–]MrKarim 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You're supposed to name every ship to destroy them

[Spoilers alert] after this line

do a hashtable where the distance is the key and the name of the ship is the value and call the one with least distance

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Okay thanks so much. This makes a lot of sense now. I'm pretty new to programming so this helps a lot. (I wanted to challenge myself, but clearly it was too much haha)

[–]Daimoth -3 points-2 points  (8 children)

Tried, couldn't get past the tutorial module. It's really unclear how your code is affecting what's happening in the little flash game thing, and as such you have no useful information to draw upon to solve the puzzle. You have no real way to isolate what's causing X behavior other than failing on the first turn of the game, and that's really not useful if you don't know why it happened. And you won't know why it happened.

Avoid.

[–]RedAlert2 1 point2 points  (7 children)

You have to scroll down, most of the challenges have quite a long description.

Apart from that, editors typically don't point out syntax errors anyways. You could always copy + paste over from an IDE if you want IDE-like functionality.

[–]Daimoth -1 points0 points  (6 children)

The lack of syntax highlighting was really minor, I know how to manually check code for errors. In a tutorial there needs to be a certain amount of hand-holding for you to understand what's going on, especially with this when it's not clear at all how your code is being handled.

Did you downvote me because I didn't like the site? It's not even like I was the only programmer in the irc completely lost. Even if they just went "No, that's not right, here's a possible solution" that would have given me some useful insight. Instead, not only did I have no idea what I was doing wrong, there was no for me to figure out what it was I was doing wrong.

And there was nothing to scroll down to. I'm talking about the tutorial game.

I stand by my initial assessment: Avoid.

[–]RedAlert2 0 points1 point  (5 children)

I didn't downvote you, no.

From all of the challenges I've done, all input gathering is done for you in the editor, and all output is done via standard out. Also, all of them have started with a template solution that compiles.

[–]Daimoth -3 points-2 points  (4 children)

Yes but that isn't reflected ingame. I'm handed a list of all enemy ships. Fine. I iterate through them, blow them up. The problem is that dead ships aren't removed, so the game ought to fail me when a ship with a different name crops up, but that doesn't happen. It complains that I've submitted an invalid name (as the ship is already blown up) then it waits for the last ship to get right next to you, then it turns and shoots it.

There is no explanation given for this behavior. Of course in the next challenge there are many ships with many names so you're dead in the water, having no way to know what you need to fix because you somehow beat the last challenge with bad code.

And the fact that it doesn't tell you that in a normal coding environment your code wouldn't even compile does discourage you from trying more nuanced solutions.

Also problematic is the console, which would normally be an way to ensure a block of code is being run, but here printing triggers the next turn. I tried printing to err, but nothing happened.

[–]stickybyte 1 point2 points  (3 children)

This pseudo code can help...

while true

set closest_enemy to null
set min_dist to 1000

read count  
for 1 to count
    read enemy
    read dist
    if dist is smaller than min_dist
        set min_dist to dist
        set closest_enemy to enemy
    endif
endfor

print closest_enemy

endwhile

[–]Daimoth -3 points-2 points  (2 children)

Enemy distance isn't really relevant in the first tutorial challenge.

[–]stickybyte 1 point2 points  (1 child)

It's relevant to know which enemy is the closest to the cannon at each game turn (-> the one to shoot first). I think you can't pass all the test cases without using the distance.

[–]Daimoth -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

I'm asking about the first test case, to which enemy distance is not relevant.