How many of you here have personally witnessed a total eclipse of the sun? To stand, one day, in the shadow of the moon is one of my humble goals in life.
(Spoiler warning for The Witness)
Most of the people reading this blog probably know that I am fond of a video game called The Witness. "Fond" may not be a strong enough word -- it's my favourite game I've ever played, and I've been speedrunning it for over three years at this point. If you don't know what it is, it's a puzzle game set in a 3D environment, where you solve grid puzzles on screens scattered across a deserted island. It's all about epiphany-driven gameplay; the game doesn't tell you anything about how the puzzles work. You have to figure it out yourself, and when you do it's usually a really satisfying moment.
Now, I've been playing this game for a long time, and I've memorised the solutions to every single puzzle. Most of the time, speedruns of this game are pretty straightforward. You have to solve certain sets of puzzles in order to get to a specific goal, be it the main end of the game, or the secret end, or the post-game level, etc. And in order to be fast at that, you have to 1) know the solutions to the puzzles, and 2) be skilled at inputting them. Both of these requirements allow for you to get gradual improvement the more you play, while allowing for a high skill ceiling. And that's it!
TLDR: Going forward, I will be hosting most of my code on code.fourisland.com instead of Github.
At some point in the last decade, Github took over the world of open source development.
I can't really remember when it happened. Before then, I would maintain my source repositories on my own server. I used CVS at first, before switching to Subversion, then Git, and then Mercurial. I stuck with Mercurial through most of high school, if I recall correctly, although now that I've become an avid Git user (perhaps something forced onto me in college?), I'm not sure what it was that I liked about Mercurial over Git. The point is that throughout that time, I just had source repos on my server, and I'd clone them on whatever computer I was doing development on. It was fine.
One of the earliest times I can remember using Github was to host the code for Rawr eBooks. It was adapted from a class assignment in my second year of college, so that timeline seems to fit the narrative that school got me into using Git. It was around that time that I also moved away from maintaining my own infrastructure as much. I was no longer using my personal website, Four Island (yes, the one you're on right now! it's complicated). I also was not working on the kind of projects I had worked on in high school anymore.
I've been talking on Twitter a good amount about the fact that I'm making a Mother 3 fangame. I get a lot of questions about it, so I figured it was time to make an FAQ!
if flint doesn't have anything nice to say, he shouldn't say anything at all. i implemented yes/no prompts in my game. #mother3pic.twitter.com/1FAqCsem6K
I've made some changes to my Twitter bots recently regarding how they choose the words that they post. This was in response to a situation wherein a follower notified me that @blessthisdoobie posted a tweet containing the n word. In this post, I'd like to discuss 1) how this happened, and 2) what I've done to prevent it from happening again. However, I first and foremost want to apologize to the followers of the bot. I take it very seriously when my bots post offensive content, and I want to do what I can to ensure that my bots remain safe and fun for all.
Now, I'd like to explain how this happened in the first place. A large number of my bots use a library I created called verbly for natural language processing. This includes @blessthisdoobie, which uses verbly to find nouns and verbs that rhyme. verbly is a complex library, and the reason behind this issue requires some knowledge of how verbly works. I will provide a brief description of the relevant parts of the library, and if it sounds interesting, I wrote a motivating example for the data model that you can read later.
I love top 10 lists, and I love Super Mario Sunshine, so I've been watching a lot of people's top 10 hardest Shine Sprite videos recently. While they were enjoyable, I found myself disagreeing with some of their choices. So, I decided to do my own! This is really just a top 5 list, though, because while I could find 5 other Shines that I found difficult to do, I didn't have as much to say about them as these 5. So, without further ado, here are the five Shine Sprites that I considered to be the hardest to get in my playthrough:
5. The Runaway Ferris Wheel
There's some difficult platforming to be done here, but you won't be seeing much of it.
I don't usually get angry at video games, but this level made me angry. Not because the platforming was too difficult -- it wasn't easy, but had I been unencumbered I'm sure I would have found it a welcome challenge. No, the problem is that the camera refuses to allow you to play this level. No matter what you do, no matter how high up the back of the Ferris wheel you get, the camera will be fighting you the entire time, trying to rotate around to the front of the structure. The problem with this is that you are then completely blocked from view. This can happen at any moment, and falling all the way back down to the beginning of the section just because the camera randomly swiveled away is completely infuriating. Regardless of how difficult or easy the actual level is ignoring the camera, the camera is part of gameplay and here is treating itself as a game mechanic.
I recently spent some time coming up with and then executing an overly convoluted plan for catching Raikou in Pokémon FireRed. It was a lot of fun, and I wanted to see what I could come up with next. However, I've already caught all three of the legendary birds, and to catch Entei and Suicune I can use the same method I used to catch Raikou. So what's left? Only the "final boss" (so to say) of the Kanto based games: Mewtwo.
A challenge it is! Mewtwo is one of the hardest Pokémon to catch in FireRed (depending on how you feel about the roaming legendaries), and since I don't want to use my Master Ball, I tried to figure out what I could do to make the encounter easier. To formalize things a bit, I came up with some rules reminiscent of what I did last time:
Don't use a Master Ball. No exceptions!
Avoid trading with a Hoenn game; that is, if possible, only use Pokémon and items obtainable in Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen. This rule is breakable on the condition that there doesn't end up being a satisfying solution that doesn't require a Hoenn game. However, in the event that I had to break this rule, I also came up with another cute little twist to make the challenge more interesting, which I'll talk about at another time.
Avoid using a Smeargle (which is only obtainable in Pokémon Emerald anyway). The reason for this is that it's often not difficult to configure a Smeargle to have whatever moveset you want, and that can make the challenge less fun. It's not a hard and fast rule, but if there's a way I can get a Pokémon other than Smeargle to know the moves I need, I'd rather do that.
I ended up coming up with 4 different strategies, of which there were two standouts. Unfortunately, all of these strategies involved trading with a Hoenn game, and one of the standouts even involved a Smeargle. I was almost resigned to breaking the Hoenn rule, but I'm happy I didn't give up, because I eventually figured out a way to modify the Smeargle method such that it no longer required Smeargle or even Hoenn! This plan is possibly (probably) even more complicated than the method I used to catch Raikou, and I had a lot of fun with it. I present to you: The Imprison Method.
I'm currently working on completing my generation III Pokédex, which is fun but also rather challenging. One of the reasons for this is the existence of roaming legendaries. The game I'm currently playing is FireRed, and my starter Pokémon was Squirtle, so the roaming legendary I'm dealing with is Raikou, but the strategy I'll be describing works no differently in LeafGreen, and should work well catching Entei as well. Suicune, for reasons detailed later, is actually a lot easier to catch, and doesn't require such a convoluted plan. Well, nothing requires a convoluted plan like this, but it's a lot more fun this way.
I maintain that the only Pokémon I could justify using a Master Ball on would be Arceus, and since the Azure Flute was never distributed and it's impossible to legitimately access the Hall of Origin, it seems like there's going to be a lot of unused Master Balls lying around in my bags. No matter, though, because not using a Master Ball means I can come up with a more interesting strategy for catching the hard-to-catch Pokémon. Another limitation that I imposed on myself here was that I decided only to use Pokémon catchable (or obtainable through trading with an NPC) in FireRed (although all the Pokémon I use are also obtainable in LeafGreen). If you allow yourself to use Pokémon from Emerald or Colosseum/XD, you may be able to come up with a different strategy, but I chose not to, and not just because I do not currently have any of those games in my possession.
Recently, I came into possession of an original Macintosh 128K; you know, the January 1984 Macintosh that was previewed to the world by a confusing but extremely memorable SuperBowl ad involving a sledgehammer entering Bill Gates's face. The moment I laid my eyes on this beautifully old piece of hardware, there was but one thought in my mind: I have to write a retro platformer for this thing.
This statement doesn't require too much elaboration, but I will remind the world about my still-in-progress game "Aromatherapy", which was supposed to be an exploration platformer that twanged at one's retro heartstrings by presenting itself as the screen of a CRT monitor. An idea I was particularly proud of in the conception of Aromatherapy was that the monitor was supposed to start glitching and breaking more and more as you advanced in the game. A lot of the idea was based around how much nostalgia I have for a time period of computing I did not even live through. While I haven't worked on Aromatherapy in some months now (since March), I am interested in continuing work on it again when inspiration strikes me again. Until then, I've decided to occupy myself with a perhaps even more inane venture.
So, there's the goal: write a platformer for the Macintosh 128K. Whether or not this platformer runs on the Mac OS or is just 68k assembly inside a beautiful Macintosh box is yet to be decided. However, for this post, I have decided to focus on a slightly smaller goal: getting the Macintosh to boot. Therein lies the first problem of this post:
Problem 1: I do not have a Macintosh 128K system disk.
During my leave from school, I've been funneling my creativity and recuperative free time into making a autobiographical game. I've tweeted about it quite a bit in the last month. Progress has been slow, due to the illness that I'm recovering from, but the progress made so far has been both fun and illuminating. I'm using C++ for this project, of course not for the first time, but still, using C++ always results in you learning something strange about the language that you probably didn't want to know.
One of the things I've been implementing for my game engine has been an entity-component system. In short, such a system consists of two fundamental objects: entities, and components. Entities are perfectly generic objects that have no properties besides being able to contain components. Components are specialized objects that provide specific functionality to their parent entities. Such a system allows one to decouple a lot of the inner workings of a game engine as well as provide a simple way to mix and match functionality.
So, to start implementing this system, I created an Entity class and a Component class. I wanted Entity to be able to contain Components, but I didn't want to have to go through the trouble of writing my own linked list implementation, so I used one of the STL containers, list, which provides the exact functionality I am expecting. Well, almost the exact functionality, but we'll get to that later. Component was implemented as a class with several virtual methods that could be overridden by subclasses to provide their specialized funtionalities.
Working on rawr-ebooks recently has allowed me to tinker with the writhing mass of horror and love that is C++. You may not be able to tell from this that I am a massive fan of C++. The nitty gritty, say what you mean and EVERTHING you mean fifty times methodology of C++ is actually a great amount of fun for me, and what would be better than implementing a fun algorithm in a really fun, rigorious programming language?
One of the incredibly fun parts about C++ is that it's practically a well of undefined behavior. If you aren't doing things exactly right, there's really no telling what will happen. And how do we define "exactly right"? Well, we're not always completely sure about that. Here's an instance of that.
As you may know, there are two real ways to allocate memory for a struct in C++. One is to use malloc or calloc, pass it the sizeof your struct, and then cast the resulting pointer to a pointer of your struct. The other, fancier and C++-exclusive method is the use the new operator. While this is all fine and dandy, it turns out that these methods are not exactly equivalent. I'd like you to examine the following two blocks of code and tell me what they output, okay? Let's have some fun.
