Right, it doesn't move in this version. This is a mod of the full game, which does move quite a bit. I wasn't going to rewrite the entire core render loop for the original game just for this weekend hack.
Hi, author of the site here. Spelunky was made using GameMaker 8, and I ported it to GameMaker Studio and used its HTML5 exporter to get it working in Chrome, then I modded the core game from there for this tool.
So: the reason it's constantly redrawn is because GameMaker redraws the whole screen.
But also, it's important to note that GameMaker is meant to be general purpose game engine. Dirty rectangles work great if you're building very specific kinds of games where only small portions of the screen are updating at any time. For a game like Spelunky, which is a platformer where the whole screen moves (aka there's fast "camera" motion), it doesn't provide very large performance boosts at all. I don't work on GM so I can only guess but I'm pretty sure it's a combination of a super-legacy engine (GM is 15 years old and hasn't had a complete rewrite ever) as well as a need to be as flexible as possible.
This is a single entry into NaNoGenMo, which is something I started this month as kind of a programmers version of NaNoWriMo. It does not necessarily have to do with fanfiction.net: the Github repository where I'm hosting the event is here:
Nope, I'm using PhantomJS, a headless web browser that's mostly used for test automation. I programmed it to log in to the Amazon account, fill out the various forms, and buy/ship the stuff.
I'm actually not parsing the HTML at all. Not really. I'm using PhantomJS, which is a headless web browser. Each time I load a page, I inject jQuery and just do a simple JS command like
$('#whatevertheIDisfortheform').submit();
It's the equivalent of opening up your console on each page and interacting with it via jQuery rather than a mouse and keyboard.
I actually really appreciate your comment about bureaucracy The main difference on my end is that I believe "working in a vast decentralized computer bureaucracy" is completely analogous to "working in tech" whether you like it or not. Bruno Latour's book Aramis is a case study in this idea. Brief review of that book here:
Any technologist who believes they're not working in a vast bureaucracy (both of the political kind and the technology itself) is not paying enough attention.
Last I checked, science -- not technology -- is about expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. Technology is the reification and application of that knowledge: necessarily a messy thing.