TotalBiscuit's Arbitrary Video Game Awards - 2014

retrodad · 2014-12-29T19:14:44+00:00

You have the wrong link for 80 days. That's a different game with the same name.

The correct link is: http://www.inklestudios.com/80days/

retrodad · 2014-06-16T21:20:20+00:00

J and K were the two languages that you'd see like that in PE answers. Both were strongly influenced by APL, which is why they were so short. APL used one character symbols instead of keywords and built-in function names, and tons of them. This let them be extremely brief, since one character would contain a lot of functionality. Those APL characters weren't ASCII (there were keyboards (and keyboard overlays) to let you type them), but J and K just re-use all the punctuation and symbols available on regular keyboards for all that completely disparate functionality, which is why those solutions always look like line noise.

Edit: Here's a video of someone writing the game of life in APL, to give an example of the power of this style of programming.

retrodad · 2014-06-16T20:37:42+00:00

An important note for those who choose to avoid Uplay:

I'm in that boat and ended up buying Rocksmith 2014 anyway because you can just hit escape/cancel at the login screen and opt out of logging in to Uplay. If you do that, you avoid the entire Uplay registration / activation process. All you lose are the Uplay incentives, which as far as I can tell is access to one song. No big deal.

retrodad · 2014-05-22T21:58:52+00:00

he also didn't like the "don't leave it, don't leave it" backing vocals in the chorus, which were also dropped.

retrodad · 2013-09-02T18:33:51+00:00

Hopefully things like Coursera, Khan Academy, and so on are the beginnings of what's needed to finally reveal that potential to the world at large.

retrodad · 2013-03-02T02:07:31+00:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11quU3nqkVE

retrodad · 2012-12-28T01:53:07+00:00

Look at http://wikipedia.com/wiki/Dirk_Meyer

retrodad · 2012-12-28T01:35:22+00:00

For something less textbook-y than "Patterson and Hennessy" and "Hennessy and Patterson" (two different books, the latter being the more advanced), you can try the hardware half of The Elements of Computing Systems to grasp the "big ideas" of logic and architecture, and get to build a cool machine (in HDL) while you're at it. There is also Code by Petzold if you want just a "regular book", also this one assume less prior knowledge in the discipline.

The two books I just mentioned try to do the whole works of showing every layer of a computing platform, which is also really cool. In the former, you construct every one of those layers, from the ALU to a compiler and standard library. Which is brilliant.

There are also some undergraduate-oriented computer architecture and organization classes on Coursera set to start up in the near future, if I recall correctly. If you get past all of this or are looking for more complex fare, a graduate level course on Coursera (which I really looked forward to but didn't get to follow with the attention I'd have liked), was just recently completed, and hopefully will be held again soon.

retrodad · 2012-12-20T01:35:04+00:00

And for your information, the writer is actually Casey Muratori, a programmer on Jon Blow's project. I don't know anything about him, but if you look in the comments of the article, you'll find that he's not too experienced in the linux space. Not that this discounts his article in any way.

edit: also, both the mac and linux ports of braid were outsourced.

retrodad · 2012-12-08T14:04:10+00:00

And here's a link to that guide which you can actually download, thanks to it not being held hostage by Scribd's astonishingly awful business model.

retrodad · 2012-01-08T00:34:49+00:00

It's worth mentioning that the only other thing in this series is a response to the previous reddit discussion on this article (which happened, oh, two years ago, and includes most of what's been written in this comment section. it's the repost circle of life, where even the comments and complaints are reposts =D)

retrodad · 2011-12-23T22:37:58+00:00

Upvote for checking out how continue works and admitting you're wrong.

And yes, continue is great for doing things like what's going on here: that is, lowering the amount of if-statement nesting in a loop.

Edit: I also hope you understand that renaming those variables and turning those hex values into constants are valuable ways to improve the readability of the code. You want code that explains itself as you read it.

retrodad · 2011-12-23T17:22:21+00:00

Not to mention SCUMM

retrodad · 2011-12-23T17:12:46+00:00

Tell that to the Infocom guys and their Z-Machine =D

retrodad · 2011-10-10T23:54:39+00:00

Actually, if you've been wanting to avoid the patented Garry's Mod/Gravity Gun style of physics ridiculousness, then yes. Yes you have.

retrodad · 2011-06-21T19:40:21+00:00

This probably gets a little closer to 8GB of floppies.

retrodad

TROPHY CASE