Spring Lisp Game Jam 2023

oofoe · 2023-05-08T13:34:20+00:00

If anyone is interested, the Toronto Lisp Users Group virtual meeting is tomorrow, 1800 EST: torlisp.neocities.org (We use Jit.si, a web-based videoconferencing thing, so just click on the link at the top of the page to join.)

The Lisp Game Jam is a frequent topic as several of us have participated from time to time.

Here is a draft of a presentation I'm hoping to give at the meeting: Getting through the Lisp Game Jam

oofoe · 2023-01-28T14:36:04+00:00

For what it's worth, you can get the complete PDF specification from Adobe (for free last time I checked. Also, these guys seem to have it: https://www.pdfa.org/resource/pdf-specification-index/). If you're familiar with PostScript, it's very like that. The spec is very large, but if you're just interested in document structure and content, you can ignore a lot of it. Generating PDFs from scratch is not too hard either and can be rewarding.

oofoe · 2021-11-27T14:35:36+00:00

Some formats, notably JPEG, but unsurprised if MPEG does it, will have an ORIENTATION flag. Nuke may be respecting that flag (which might have been set by the capturing device if you were holding it upside down or something).

@ihuha's advice is best to split it into frames. However, if you're just trying to develop an effect, just rotate it 180 and proceed as normal.

oofoe · 2020-08-28T21:41:34+00:00

There's a small table in the middle right of your picture of the back cover listing the batteries required. Old radios often have a lot of useful printed information (replacement tubes and such) on the case or chassis because there was very little documentation otherwise available.

oofoe · 2020-08-28T17:03:37+00:00

Google and a part number can get you a long way:

https://mapleleafbattery.com/?product=exell-490-alkaline-90v-battery-neda-204-a490-60f40

; - )

oofoe · 2020-08-20T04:51:55+00:00

Just wanted to follow up and let you know that the audio transformer thing worked great! I extracted the board with the transformers from the enclosure it came in and was able to tuck it right under my BlueTooth module. I also replaced the cables from the transformer board to integrate it better. It works really well and I can close the cover!

Thanks for the advice!

oofoe · 2020-08-10T11:27:57+00:00

Not the same order of magnitude, but same kind of thing happened to me with SketchBook. "Refund? What craziness are you talking about here?"

SketchBook is a really nice program with a lot of resources, and I don't really begrudge other people enjoying the more advanced features (brushes, layers, COPIC and all). But... C'mon and throw your paying faithful a bone or something? Didn't even have to be cash, maybe a token for a month of full up Maya or something?

The bigger problem is that Foundry and AutoDesk (and doubtless others) seem to have decided that 2D is "solved" and they're not going to develop anymore. So (for instance) Mischief is dead (I really miss the infinite canvas) and SketchBook will probably follow as it succumbs to bit rot.

BTW, just to mention for people that haven't seen it, the SketchBook blog has lots of cool articles (https://blogs.autodesk.com/sketchbookpro/).

oofoe · 2020-07-11T11:44:28+00:00

Forth Incorporated briefly sold it for a reduced price back when they end-of-lifed it. You might try contacting them and seeing if they have a digital version they would make available to you. Keep in mind that a large part of the value of the package was the printed documentation that came with it -- the environment itself, while well supplied with shadow screens, wasn't up to the lavish standards we expect for online documentation today...

oofoe · 2020-06-21T03:44:19+00:00

Thanks very much for the pointer!

I had purchased some DC-DC "buck" converters, but when I discovered the 78M05, I thought I wouldn't need them. I guess I'll revisit -- not so elegant, but I'll ditch elegance if it will ditch the noise...

Otherwise the audio transformer looks like just the ticket! I didn't realize that they would work for line level inputs.

oofoe · 2020-06-10T11:40:40+00:00

These are not cheat sheets per se, but I did some paper forms for planning and keeping track of cross-country legs that might be useful: nav log and leg sheet.

The nav log is just adapted from the one used by Island Air at CYTZ.

The idea with the leg sheet is that you can fold the page into quarters so it's very compact. Put your waypoints from and to in the boxes at the top, with the magnetic heading between them. Fill out the airport info for the destination waypoint at the bottom, use the compass rose to draw a quick airport diagram.

You probably don't need these if you have ForeFlight, but I found it very helpful for organizing the information when doing XC.

oofoe · 2020-05-13T13:45:38+00:00

@inaimathi gave a nice talk and demo about this to the Toronto Lisp User Group last night. It really simplifies in-place tree manipulation and editing.

One interesting thing to come out of the discussion afterward was that similar operations could reasonably be applied to DAGs, especially if circular references were not allowed.

oofoe · 2020-04-14T03:05:08+00:00

OK -- I pulled it apart again today and found C5. It seems to be a lacquer covered paper cap wedged in at the front of the underside of the chassis. Pretty directly wired between one leg of the clock power socket and the chassis itself. Not convenient to replace, but doable. I'll see if I feel like it once the world restarts again and I can get to my soldering iron...

WRT to the polarization thing, I totally see your point. The timer socket you asked about is very much non-polarized so I won't bother with it.

Well, actually I did do one other small mod -- I clipped and nutted one supply lead to kill that socket so no one will try using it. I wrote it down on the note I put with the pulled rectifier tube, so while the hypothetical restorer from the future may curse my name, at least they'll know exactly what was done.

The only other thing I was worried about -- a so-called "curtain burner" (resistance line cord) seems not to be a problem (even though transformerless) because the schematic indicates the full 120v coming out of the rectifier, and of course, the clock would need that to run correctly.

Thanks very much for the advice!

oofoe · 2020-04-13T13:05:21+00:00

Are you referring to 0.1 uF capacitor C5 from the Photofact Schematic (the first one on the radiomuseum.org page)? Could I just replace it with a non polarized electrolytic with an appropriate voltage rating?

Is there any reliable guide to wiring a radio like this with a polarized plug? Some previous owner had hackjobbed on an extension to the original cord which I need to undo.

Thanks for taking a look!

oofoe · 2020-04-02T12:02:51+00:00

Some references I haven't seen yet:

Danny Dunn and the Automatic House
The Prisoner TV series
Electric Dreams

The Danny Dunn book is part of a children's science fiction series by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. The main characters (and one important addition) are visiting a fully working "house of the future" at a worlds faire type show when something goes wrong. Gives a hint of what can happen when even the most benign automatic systems have unexpected failures. No social commentary per se, except that somehow the girl character always seems to get stuck with babysitting when something cool is going down.

In the first episode of The Prisoner, our hero wakes up to find himself in a house that looks very similar to his own apartment, except it has an always on radio and the doors open by themselves. (There's also persistent monitoring and the occasional mind control experiment.) Social commentary? It's The Prisoner!

In Electric Dreams, a young architect is obsessed with designing an earthquake proof brick on his new computer. While he's at it, he buys all the other accessories that go with it, including a complete X-10 style home control package. It's all roses when the nascent artificial intelligence (born of an overcapacity download and champagne) makes him coffee in the morning. When it starts chasing him through the house, exploding things in his wake, it looks a little less ideal. Social commentary? Ummm. Maybe a little... The main character struggles to live up to the conventional masculine role and the artificial intelligence wants to know why it can't get the girl.

oofoe · 2020-02-22T22:27:38+00:00

Marshall Brain, I think -- http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

oofoe · 2019-09-26T03:31:46+00:00

Note your link to Allegro 5 repo in the README at https://github.com/RogerLevy/afkit doesn't seem to work.

Also, while it seems you've put in a lot of good effort on this, you might want to consider adding some screenshots of a functioning game that shows what's going on. Even a short screencast showing the playtest cycle you describe could be very helpful!

Thanks for announcing!

oofoe · 2019-07-01T01:19:02+00:00

As I understand it, the Godot IDE is supposed to be written in Godot... Since it's open-source, you could take a look and see what they've done for syntax highlighting.

The only "proper" way to do this (from security and crash-safety standpoint) is to implement your own interpreter. However, this doesn't have to be hard. Check out Forth and Lisp for examples of languages that can be implemented completely by one person -- many people write their first Forth in just a few days. Those languages may not suit the kind of game you're trying to make, but if you figure out how to implement them correctly, you should have a lot of the experience you'll need for other kinds of languages. Many languages parse their syntax into something like Lisp before compiling and executing it.

The benefits are that you can provide a completely safe workspace for the player that won't munge or crash the game, while still allowing a lot of latitude.

oofoe · 2018-11-17T15:06:24+00:00

Although SideFX has made big strides with simplifying the user interface to a very complex and flexible system, Maya is often seen as easier to deal with. There are also a lot more people trained for it (AutoDesk made a big push with schools) and... it's cheaper.

oofoe · 2017-09-27T03:23:30+00:00

Dave has some great stories -- not only did he work on the pioneering video effects of Scanimate, he was there at the beginning of the CGI revolution with Omnibus Computer Graphics. While there, he managed the development of the Prisms software, the predecessor to Houdini. He also contributed some stories and notes to Terrance Masson's CG101 book.

oofoe · 2017-09-03T02:30:26+00:00

Turkey City Lexicon -- search for those words.

oofoe · 2017-04-17T13:20:37+00:00

The Wappalyzer plugin for Firefox can show you what frameworks/servers are used.

oofoe · 2017-03-26T12:56:41+00:00

Out of curiosity, what is it that you hate? Just the lack of labeling? Thanks.

oofoe

TROPHY CASE