-The post what you are working on *programmer edition*-

[Cupz]

My interests and skill in the art of programming is steadily increasing. And since the past 10 things I've working on stayed sketch-like at worst, working prototype at best (making full games is hard!), and since I know a couple of twoismers are into the art, it might be a fun topic to discuss. I work on games exclusively, for fun and mental exercise, but I'm sure there are interesting projects and problems of all shapes and sizes. It might also trigger some people that want to start learning how to program to push themselves over the bump (the beginning is the hardest part, it won't stay that bumpy for long!).

So, right now I'm working on a text-adventure/wilderniss-simulator reminiscent of the game Wilderness: A Survival Adventure from '86, except I aim it to be way more complex. Wilderness needed a manual the size of a text-book, something I really liked about it and games don't do anymore. I've been wanting to create a game like this ever since I played it. Probably try something like a craft-system, despite being a very popular mechanic, it's something I've never tried. Writing it in pure python without libraries. I've started to learn C (for real this time, thank you techboy), and I really like it, but I'm not proficient enough to tackle sizable ideas like this. Soon... This is hopefully gonna be my thid text-only game., which oddly enough, seems more difficult then graphical to me.

[Negamuse]

I have some ongoing tinker projects I pick up again when I get bored. First was an emulator for my first computer the Acorn Electron which I dropped once I got to the point it was booting to the screen but I recently picked up to see if it could go any faster.

Second is a reimplementation an old game that was more about reverse engineering a dead file format in the beginning but again now seems to have turned into something.

Reverse engineering closed file formats is one of my guilty pleasures. When I was at work we had a system for laying out PCB schematics that only worked on one machine that was somebodys work machine and took ages to load once you kicked him off it so I reverse engineered the files it generated and wrote an OpenGL viewer that you could quickly spit out a print from. Its finding decaying mid 90s software to start looking at though.

[vballs]

I recently built my own network hard drive monitoring tool using Coldfusion and invoking Java Objects. With it I can see in real time all of the data statistics for dozens of storage devices on the network in one tidy panel. I can also see trends in data growth over time which is very handy for me. I am working now on improving it so I can drill down on all the drives to see quickly see where storage issues are without having to manually hunt for them on the servers or use third party software. Perhaps this isn't the most difficult of projects but its still enough to make my brains dribble out of my ears.

Other than that I am messing about with Unreal Engine 4.10. I have been following the tutorials and have messed about with C++, all ive managed to do so far is make platforms float around and move up and down etc haha. My idea is eventually to make a very small, simple game for my own gratification, the game will most likely have something to do with aliens. For me it would be a big accomplishment, Coldfusion is one thing, a predominantly tag based web server language, C++, for me is proving to be too much, I think perhaps I dont have the brain power or maybe the concentration for it

You are right Cupz, starting out is the hardest part, arghh!. Your text adventure sounds fun.

[Stavorius]

Making some good ass video's with Processing

[Techboy]

That sounds pretty cool MrMessiah - both the emulator and the the PCB generator.

Cupz: don't thank me all I said was "maybe you could learn C" As for a craft system what about a binary mask kinda thing?

I've got no projects living at the minute but a few things on the TODO list include (in order of priority, maybe):

• Learning Golang
  
  • Some kind of MIDI to audio command line tool, use soundfonts or DLS or something
  • Work related boring tools like log parsers
• tilde.club style server maybe
  
  • maybe even an excuse to use Go again here for a command line driven interface to create your account
  • puppet? ansible? basically sysadmin skills levelup
  • an excuse to try running VMs on a dedicated server I have. Sadly it isnt hypervisor driven. ;(
• 6502 homebrew - think this would be pretty difficult but not entirely out of reach
  
  • maybe make it worthwhile to an extent by building a synthesizer with it, perhaps using a sound generating IC such as YM2612. Homebrew Yamaha DX yeaaaah
  • Although an atari-lite with a screen and keyboard would look much cooler :3
• you can get a magic 200 quid i5 fanless PCs you can get on aliexpress these days
  
  • set-top box, xbmc perhaps, or kodi or whatever its called now
  • or just read an article about someone using one as a router, bit of an excuse just to buy something atm tho

[Cupz]

Wow, some interesting stuff happening. I can't wait for techboys tilde.club thing.

I don't know what a binary mask is, but I've been sketching out the craft system on paper. I think I want it calculated on time and stats instead of available resources. I'd hate to have the user type: build house with 18 planks, 36 nails, 4 windows, etc. or 50 "combine wood and wood with ducktape" commands. I'd rather just use "build wooden house" and have it calculate the time it would take to gather these resources based on location, successrate and quality based on player stats, tools carrying, etc. Spitting out warnings like "Warning: You will probably die building this house naked in this temperature. Continue anyway?" or whatever the case may be. I hope I'm not in over my head here.

[Aerial Boundaries]

A couple of things going on which I come back to now and again:

pan (paste area network) - stupidly simple program which listens on a port and looks for other instances of itself on the LAN, and forms a shared clipboard. It is completely transparent and zeroconf. I'm making some progress on it, but the hardest part is probably trudging through all the lacklustre documentation on avahi. I'll be using Twisted (Python) for it, probably.

tips (finished) - My first project was this CLI tips tracker and displayer for work. It is as well written as I could make it at the time I worked on it, which is basically 'not very.' It uses the global statement instead of classes because I hadn't grokked them yet

There is a folder in my projects called 'sadprogramming'. Not sure what will come of it.

Most of my efforts are focused on learning Python still. Then I'll be doing a bit of C just to get to grips with memory management. Then after that probably a functional language. Most likely Haskell as I have zero professional ambition and it looks cool as shit. I might go through SICP or something before that though.

I've stopped visiting Quora now as it's full of shithead 'entrepreneur' types who suck all the joy out of this intellectual pursuit. Stack Exchange is alright as there is little room for that stuff.

[Cupz]

Perch asked, I'll answer here.





https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/976 ... gtheme.ogg

This one is nicely on its way. Full-ANSI graphical text-adventure open-world RPG with d&d'ish mechanics.
Just about 300 more lines of code to write, then it's all about pumping it full of content.

[Perch]

that looks super cool, Cupz! I'd play that in a heartbeat!

[Cupz]

Thanks Perch! <3

[Aerial Boundaries]

You're a Dwarf Fortress or roguelike fan aren't you Cupz?

[Cupz]

I sure am, Aerial, but except for the code page 437 graphics, this game won't have anything to do with it. No permadeath or random levels. Its going to be content driven.
The graphics are mostly inspired by some ZZT games I used to play, gameplay be a bit like CRPG's from the 80's.
The demo/tutorial continent is almost done, btw. Anyone (that knows how to run python files) want to help me test it?

[Cupz]

Gonna do the 7drl challenge in 20 hours. Wish me luck!

[2020k]

This needs revived.

[Josh]

"Hello, World!" in C.

I've pretty much mastered coding, yeah?

[Waterbagel]

Rust seems like a great language. it seems like it could be another '20-year(+)' language, as C++, C, Java have all proven themselves to be. I hope it continues to mature

that being said, my next little hobby project is to write an IRC client in Rust - that should give me a good excuse to learn some more fundamentals of it...!

hoping that some folks out there have written more packages for emacs for developing Rust since last time I checked a couple of years ago

[TheStatPow]

Rust seems like a great language. it seems like it could be another '20-year(+)' language, as C++, C, Java have all proven themselves to be. I hope it continues to mature

that being said, my next little hobby project is to write an IRC client in Rust - that should give me a good excuse to learn some more fundamentals of it...!

hoping that some folks out there have written more packages for emacs for developing Rust since last time I checked a couple of years ago

I tried Rust last year and the experience was great but it was very reminiscent of me picking C++ as my first language ... it just doesn't work like that and is beyond my skill level.

I merely toyed with it and I'm sure the experience would have been more fun had I been on Linux.

The fun stopped when I tried the Graphic APIs.

[sandrail]

Working on weird PulseAudio programs, which change the speaker output in real time. They make your speaker output sound like a broken, circuit bent VCR.

[Josh]

Working on weird PulseAudio programs, which change the speaker output in real time. They make your speaker output sound like a broken, circuit bent VCR.

Doesn't PulseAudio do that by default?