ewmailing

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Star Control 2 (which takes many Starflight influences and also hired Greg Johnson) also used a lot of procedural generation. It has around 500 stars and 4000 worlds with minerals and lifeforms. I recall the SC2 lead programmer Fred Ford saying they used a fixed seed, and they went through many seeds until they found one that looked good. I presume Starflight was of the same mindset.

ewmailing

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

It goes beyond drawing inspiration. Greg Johnson, designer of Starflight, worked directly on Star Control 2.

ewmailing

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

> So instead of finding the NES next to your other PCs at the time, it was near the toy aisle?

> Anyone who maybe was able to witness the revival able to comment with their anecdotes?

That is NOT my recollection. I bought my Atari games from the same isle I bought my NES games from at Toys R Us (obviously in different years).

I think there is truth that game console marketing shifted into its own more toy like thing, distinct from computers, but I think that shift was already underway by the heyday of the 2600. I remember an entire display of just video games (2600, ColecoVision, and others), which was separate from other software, computers, and the consoles.

With the Toys R Us closure, I wrote an article about my memories of Toys R Us and The Great Video Game crash (and recovery) that tries to fill in for people what living through the crash actually felt like.

https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/memories-of-the-g...

ewmailing

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

LuaCocoa author here.

While the objc_msgSend, objc_msgSend_stret, et. al, is an annoying detail, that isn't really the hard part. (And in fact, all the good bridges use libffi to do more direct invocations and avoids a lot of this problem.)

The hard part of bridging is those places where Objective-C introspection is not powerful enough to discover the types of parameters or signatures of functions. Typically, this is all the C stuff.

So for example, Obj-C's runtime introspection cannot tell you the make up of a struct. So it cannot tell you the size of NSRect, NSPoint, NSSize, or the individual data types inside the struct (and the names of each item if you need to access them).

And the Obj-C runtime introspection cannot tell you about what C functions exist and what the parameter types and return types are. So for example, there is no Obj-C runtime way to look up that CGPointMake takes two CGFloat parameters and returns a CGPoint struct.

Also, inline functions (marcos) in C/Obj-C are also problematic for these bridges since they need to call the functions at runtime.

Apple shipped a framework called BridgeSupport in Mac OS X 10.5 which contains XML data for all the things that cannot be determined at runtime. It also contains .dylibs with symbols for inline functions. BridgeSupport is still in macOS today, but it isn't getting much love and Apple keeps (accidentally?) breaking things in BridgeSupport every release.

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Swift on Android already exists.

https://news.realm.io/news/swift-on-android/

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Lua creator Roberto Ierusalimschy just gave a talk about "Functions in Lua" and starts his talk explaining that our (conversational) language has still not evolved a precise way to articulate all these different ideas about functions.

On his first slides, he shows the words, "anonymous functions", "lambdas", "closures", "function values", and "first-class values", and shows how each has subtly different meanings/implications and tends to take us down different lines of thinking which affects the conversation you are trying to have with somebody else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdRGOE1N-FA

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I wrote a little about the QFG1 vs. QFG5 inspirations in my blog entry.

But here is a video of the QFG5 dryad dance which will probably start making it clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2dTxSCGeNE

And this is from QFG1, which is where the concept of dancing and personality of the fairies originate from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYpN8Uii6ng

I don't remember if that clip shows all the dialog, but they talk about how they rule the forest and make rainbows and "fairies just want to have fun". They like to dance and don't know if humans can dance.

This video does show you making them mad by walking into the fairy ring (because the human smell is impossible to get rid of). So they make you dance to your death as punishment.

The last fairy message at the end of the credits is also borrowed straight from the game. When you leave the screen in the game, a fairy will fly to you in the next screen to say a randomized good bye message before flying off.

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Hi, I'm the presenter of the talk. I'm happy to try to answer any questions here.

Thanks to try! Swift Tokyo for making this talk happen, and thanks to Realm for posting it.

For more info, I wrote a few more things about the talk and conference on my blog. http://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/swift-on-android-a...

Thanks for watching.

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Here's a picture of the infamous "Insert Buckazoid" :)

http://www.midimusicadventures.com/queststudios/mt32-resourc...

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

A little more context for those who don't know the history of music in PC gaming, Sierra was the first major company to push hard on PC sound cards. They partnered up with Roland and Adlib to promote and sell their cards so they could take advantage of them for their games.

Wikipedia citation: King's Quest IV was the first commercially released game for PC compatibles to support sound cards instead of only the standard built-in speaker.

Sierra took it seriously and hired professional musicians to kick off their effort.

Hollywood composer William Goldstein (Fame) was hired to compose King's Quest IV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19r6RnReAf4

Supertramp drummer, Bob Siebenberg, composed the Space Quest III soundtrack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxEP05TtOfE

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I remember reading a story about how he picked the name "Roland". He wanted a company name that would be pronounced and spelled the same way in any language and country, and escape translation issues. The irony was not lost on him that the Japanese (his home country) have trouble pronouncing the 'R'.

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I first learned about Roland because of their partnership with Sierra On-Line and the MT-32.

I remember Scott Murphy (Space Quest co-creator) told a story about the first time Roland came to hear how Sierra was using the MT-32. They were blown away by the full musical scores they sequenced (Space Quest 3). He thinks they were expecting Space Invaders like sound effects.

ewmailing

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

And also iOS, Android, and a native web browser backend via Emscripten :)

This was a proposal/prototype/intro video for IUP for iOS & Android for the IUP community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvrEfOg3Nyk

Repos:

https://github.com/ewmailing/IupCocoaTouch

https://github.com/ewmailing/IupAndroid

https://github.com/ewmailing/IupEmscripten

ewmailing

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I was either told or read (during the 2.x time frame) they were likely going to break @_silgen_name. @_cdecl was added to replace this (at least for my usage case), but I think it is still unfinished and not official, hence the leading underscore.

It happens that @_silgen_name didn't break for me in 3.0. But I've been moving to @_cdecl.

ewmailing

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I believe it is the calling convention. When I use it, if you look at the symbols/name mangling, what gets generated looks like a C symbol.

000061b4 T BlurrrSwiftEntry vs. 000061cc T _TF1MySDLMainActivity16BlurrrSwiftEntryFT_T_

ewmailing

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I'm using @_cdecl on Android which doesn't have the the Obj-C runtime.

ewmailing

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I’ll stick my neck out there and praise Lua. While I will admit the stack is tedious to work with, all C binding bridges I’ve worked with are tedious. (With exceptions of languages that use compilers and architecture/platform specific tricks to pull off transparent bridging. LuaJIT and and LuaFFI would be one example. Swift would be another.)

Lua’s design is at least very clean and avoids allowing developers from accidentally creating nasty lifecycle design issues. It is very clear with Lua about ownership and visibility, which propagates cleanly through all aspects of Lua, such as working seamlessly with Lua’s garbage collection system. The design+code is also 100% portable to any processor/platform that has a C compiler (i.e. not requiring platform/arch specific #ifdefs, which is really useful when bringing up on a lesser-used platforms/chips.) And the design has very clear performance implications. In contrast, there was a recent talk at Google I/O about Android Dalvik vs. ARTs with respect to JNI bindings and performance. The results were non-obvious to say the least.

There is a research white paper that compared the C binding design tradeoffs of several different languages. http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/jucs-c-apis.pdf

ewmailing

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

My rule of thumb is the Lua core is about 100kb, and the Lua standard library is about 100kb. Tcl is about 2MB. (All built as dynamic libraries.)

Lua’s source is pretty malleable. There are things you can rip out from Lua if you don’t need them to make it smaller. I once read a claim that a micro-controller use got it under 20kb.

ewmailing

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I made this video in defense of Flappy Bird back when people were piling on the game and the author. There are multiple points, but it starts with my belief that people overstate the similarities to other semi-recent games and simultaneously forget much older games. The video includes clips of video games from the early 80s and even Space War! from 1962.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-W5CWj7Ic

ewmailing

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I didn't look at the demo, but that list of dependencies is not reflective of SDL.

This is what ldd on my build of SDL looks like:

    linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007ffda33d9000)
    libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007ff1e4c51000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007ff1e4a4d000)
    libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007ff1e4830000)
    librt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0x00007ff1e4628000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007ff1e426a000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007ff1e527e000)

SDL on Linux does a lot of dlopen detection at launch because it is so hard to know what kind of Linux environment you are running in at compile time. For example, you may have a X11 server, or you may be running completely on the command line without any window server. (It's really cool being able to develop for Raspberry Pi Raspbian via SDL without X11 since RAM is so limited.)

So that list is not SDL's contribution and that demo was just linking to a lot of things, most of which look unnecessary (and sloppy, though this also makes a case why people want header-only libraries because many people don't want to think about this part). For example, why is a gui demo demo linking to FLAC and all the Ogg Vorbis libraries? SDL doesn't use or depend on these either.

Submissions

Why We Loved Sierra Games (2015) [video]

Memories of the Great Video Game Crash and Toys R Us

An Informal History of Video Game Music

Swift on Android

Swift on Android

Show HN: My RIP Goodbye to my Co-Founder Carlos Icaza

Swift on Android (presentation)

Lua 5.3.3 released

WWDC 2016 (Jun 13-17) registration has begun

Swift Android port now merged into master

Performance look at new Android Emulator 2.0

Swift on Android Demo

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