Tcl Alarm

Alright, I have laid the ground work for our helper program, now let's see what Tcl can do:

First, we might have multiple things to wait for, and we want to see how much time is left, not just rely on a single sound to notify us:

set $var $tm
lappend ::dl $var
lappend ::al $var

pack [frame .tMain.f$var] -side top -expand 1 -fill x
pack [label .tMain.lT$var -text $tx] -in .tMain.f$var -side left
pack [label .tMain.l$var] -in .tMain.f$var -side right

This is actually a function (proc addLine {var tm tx}), so I can add lines programmatically.

The "lines" are placed in the window, each one representing a timer counting down.
You have parameters:

• var - the variable which will hold the time, this is displayed elsewhere, so it can be descriptive, and is used inside functions, so it needs the global namespace like "::zombies" or "::arena"
• tm - the time (in seconds) until the event
• tx - the text description for the window
  

al and dl are global lists. dl is used for decrementing the timers, al is all the timers available (for listing the timers to reset)

Now, when we want to decrement all the timers:

proc decList {il} {
  upvar $il l

  # foreach variable in the list
  foreach iu $l {
     upvar $iu i

     # decrement it
     incr i -1

     # update the GUI
     .tMain.l$iu configure -text [tformat $i]

     # check for timer expire
     if {$i == 0} {
        # remove the timer from the list
        set idx [lsearch $l $iu]
        set l [lreplace $l $idx $idx]

        # flash the text
        after 1000 ".tMain.lT$iu configure -fg #008800"
        after 5000 ".tMain.lT$iu configure -fg #000000"

        playSound
     }
  }
}

The upvar may not be needed, I was trying to work around not using globals...

tformat is my "time format". It converts a number of seconds into a nice "35 m 0 s" or "1 h 0 m 50 s" string for pretty display. It is left as an exercise for the reader.

Better Games

(Continuing my treatment of Facebook games)

Given the number of * Wars games there are, there is sadly little content of interest. There is some adventure in exploring new content, but no staying power. They eventually devolve into a treadmill of grinding through new content, and waiting for new content. More jobs with different names dropping equipment with higher numbers and different names.

However, there is one group developing interesting games, and another with one good game (Nitrous Racing, and several boring games: Monster Defense and Fish Life, among others).

The first single-handedly developed five games that I was willing to try. Three of those were pretty good.

The games are Mad Scientist, Robot Builder, Robotico, Star Conquest, and War Machine.

The first three are good enough, that I will break them out separately. Star Conquest was a good try, and worth discussing. War Machine is actually one of the best * Wars games, but, ultimately, is not enough better.

I wanted to give a peak today of a tool I developed to help with the timers (in Tcl of course!).

Let's say you have some zombies cooking in 14 minutes for Mad Scientist, or you need to wait 45 minutes for more energy. You're in the middle of New Stars or NedOS programming, so you might get distracted and forget to look at a clock for an hour or two...

Enter Snack. Snack is a Tcl package for generating sound. It is really easy in wish:

$ package require snack

Now you need to load an alarm sound to notify you that it is time.

$ snack::sound s -load $path_to_file

Then set the alarm:
$ after [expr ($hour*3600 + $min*60 + $sec)*1000] {s play}

That's it. Just set the variables {hour,min,sec} and up-arrow to the after, and hit enter.

PvP

(Continuing my treatment on Facebook games)

I've mentioned PvP a couple times now, and for those who don't know (and haven't googled it yet), it is "Player vs. Player".

Now, some might think the purpose of a game (especially a game on a social network) would be for players to compete. The alternative is PvE (environment), sometimes called AI (which is too generous), or simply computer players. This is how Civilization and a lot of other games work, and work well.

All Facebook games are competitive, in that you can see what your friends and other players have accomplished, and use that to drive you to do more.

In the * Wars games, the PvP aspect is an in-game effect where you improve and the other player is set back (some games lack this PvP aspect, while being similar in most other ways. e.g. Metropolis)

This might seem to be the main focus of the game (it is for some), but in most cases, it is a simply a small annoyance.

In most games, your PvP power is proportional to the number of people in your network (which is usually capped at 500).

Now, no one has 500 friends, much less 500 friends all interested in playing the same game.

This leads to huge "Add Me" threads on the forums, and giant email chains.

If you're not interested in that (and I'm not), there is a simple precaution to avoid serious setback - bank (or spend) your money at the end of a session (and ignore the "defeated" statistic in your profile).

* Wars

(Continuing from last time)

The biggest part of Facebook games is resource management. Usually, the biggest resource is your own time (micro-management). This is because Facebook is looking for ad impressions, so every time you load a new page, they get revenue.

Still, most games place some limit on your activity. This is usually referred to as "Energy" or "Fuel" or some other stat. It recharges at a flat rate (often 1 point per four minutes). Usually there is a recharge benefit which you can send to your friends.

The * Wars games all have the following character attributes: attack, defense, energy, stamina, health. Stamina is energy for PvP.

Advancement is experience point based, with experience given for jobs (which consume energy). Each level you gain 5 points which can be spent into your attributes. Also, when you level up, your ablative attributes (health, energy, stamina) are recharged

There is a virtuous cycle here.

Energy -> jobs -> experience -> level up (energy refilled) -> spend on energy attribute

In Mafia Wars, there were several times I was able to level up multiple times in a row (especially when coupled with the daily free energy recharge). The experience cost per level grows linearly, and there is a bonus for the first time you "complete" a job (do the job a lot).

So where do the spreadsheets come in?
Not all jobs are created equal. Your spreadsheet should include Xp/Energy and $/energy (money is needed for equipment, which is used in PvP and in enabling new jobs, usually it is not a limiting factor). Some jobs also drop special equipment. You will need a spreadsheet to track what equipment you have and need, and which drops are best (some games have wikis, but it is good to have a local copy).

Most games also have a notion of "investment" (current cash goes into giving cash per time). You can make a spreadsheet detailing the various return rates, but I haven't seen a game where it wasn't easier to just get money through jobs (which you are doing for the xp anyway - that is, high xp/energy and $/energy usually go together).

Add Me

A while back, I promised to tell all about Facebook games.

It has been a hard road, full of sacrifice.

I can say there is something new about Facebook games - the "add me" effect.

This is largely by design. Facebook encourages developers to incorporate some social aspect into games.

It's also apparent that this is often done with little or no thought or effort.

The net effect is that "Add Me" games can vary from annoying to unplayable - based on your willingness to add yourself to huge chain lists of email addresses on the forums.

Most games are built on a single dynamic - building. The other distinguishing feature is PvP.

When I say "building", it is basically grinding on your character/empire/whatever. There is little or no danger of loss. It is just a matter of you putting in the time. It can still be fun, especially when there is a wide variety of things to optimize for, and you can build spreadsheets to determine the optimal path (because a good game leads to building spreadsheets! I'm serious!)

The most popular games fall into what I call * Wars (pronounced Star Wars). That is the glob *, meaning "match everything". You have Mafia Wars, Mob Wars, Dragon Wars, Vampire Wars, Fashion Wars. I have played a handful of them, and they all play the same. A lot of other games use the same dynamic, but don't have Wars in the name - Street Racing, War Machine (now called War Metal), Star Conquest, even the RPG Hammerfall is really the same.

More later...

OS Info

I must say that Bochs is really a wonderful tool for OS development. The debugger is great: with breakpoints, single step, and full state inspection. It supports command history, and editing the command line.

That said, some stuff just needs to be printed at run time for inspection (particularly anything with loops).

With that in mind, I have forked the CD boot code into a program to dump the relevant structures for inspection. It keeps the screen in text mode, and is printing from 64 bit mode.

NewStars Status

Turn 2!

Here we can see some problems, although nothing earth shattering.

There is some difference in mining or scrapping (the JOAT miner was scapped on turn 1). But the pop growth looks good, as well as resource calculation, and production. I've also checked the resources going into research, and they match.

The x resources out of y is a known Tcl bug. I just put "x of x", and don't bother to include the research tax...

There should be a WM scout visible, but I need to create the P2 orders to make that happen...

Aqua Screen of Life

Oooh, aahh.

No, I didn't just change the pixel color.

The red screen is now part of the kernel panic function (which is now well tested - remind me to tell the story about the difference between step and next in the debugger, and how I spent an hour trying to figure out why call stopped working in 64 bit mode). If everything goes well, you get the aqua screen, else BOOM! red screen.

Under the covers, the code is now searching memory for the ACPI tables. Find them, you get aqua (actually alternating blue and green pixels, I write two pixels at a time 0x0000FF00_000000FF).

Red Screen of Death

Check it out!

That beautiful red screen is brought to you by the NedOS boot loader, and the NedOS kernel (which is currently just a rep stosq and an infinite loop).

I was able to fit all the boot loader functionality into one 512 B sector.

It has to:

1. Retrieve the memory map from the BIOS
2. Enable A20
3. Get a list of video modes, pick one, and set it
4. Transition the system into 64 bit paged mode

The memory map code is kind of a hog. Together with the logic for picking a video mode, the boot loader is nearly 500 B. That is after a lot of effort to minimize code size.

That is too big for a harddrive boot sector (which has 64 B of partition tables and a 2 B signature). I have a version where I strip out all the error checking, that brings the size of the memory map code down significantly. Still, it is currently 433 B - leaving about 10 B to actually load something. Not enough to walk the partition table and figure out on its own what to load. I will have to load something from a hard coded location.

I'd like to be able to draw a text window, and put some text in it...

New Stars Status

Another day, another bug!

This time, it looks like a bug (or bizarre algorithm) in Stars!

John was kind enough to fix the previous bug.

Now, our Long Range Scout has picked up a ly in the X direction.

The relevant X,Y pairs are:
Finale 78, 80
New Stars 101, 108
Stars 100, 108

The distances are 36.24 ly for New Stars, and 35.61 for Stars. It's really not clear why Stars didn't give up that last ly...

I'm tempted to call "Will Not Fix".

How can our lock step hope to succeed with bizarre bugs like this :(

HTML Canvas

Interesting development. The guys behind FreeCiv have developed a client using the HTML 5 canvas.

I remember looking at a proposal for canvas a while back. It was sorely lacking from the Tcl canvas (if only Tcl had made it as a web standard!).

But, if you can implement FreeCiv in it, maybe it has gotten better (or maybe FreeCiv doesn't use circles...).

Probably worth looking into. A NewStars web client would be nice.

NedOS on CD

Booting from a floppy is a good start. But there's just not much you can do with 1.44MB.

I looked into bootable CDs, and they are really nice!

• You get >600 MB of storage for your OS and app code + read-only data.
• Writable CDs are cheap and portable, potentially allowing you to run on any machine
• You don't risk messing up your hard drive (particularly the boot sector)

Best of all, the boot CD spec (El Torito) allows you to load multiple sectors immediately. That means no messing with BIOS read disk routines in the boot loader.

Of course, switching my boot floppy code to CD ran into multiple problems (all stupid ones).

• The boot code can load into any address. 0 will get you the default (7c00), but just to make sure I could write whatever I want when I need to, I set it to 7c00.
• Of course, it is a segment address, so I got 7c000, which is near 512K, not 32K, so I was executing uninitialized RAM.
• Then, when I fixed the segment, I forgot that my makecd program only writes those sectors for new disks, so I still had the old values.
• The boot floppy code is org 7c3e (to skip the Bios Param Block), but the CD code needs org 7c00.

It took longer than it should of, but I can now boot from CD!

New Stars Status

Hopefully things will pick up...

Here we have our first turn gen, and our first bug!
Our move code has place the destroyer and the probe in the same location, while Stars has them one light year apart. Bizarro. Must be a rounding problem...

I also had to fix the recent file LRU yet again. Hopefully it is correct now.

New Stars Status

Not exactly a blitz, but moving along...

Here is player 2. Note, I have fixed the title bar. I did the Stars turn by hand, but the New Stars turn was generated from Tcl!

$ cat orders_P2_2400.tcl
set owd [pwd]
cd ../../../gui/tcl
load ./nstclgui.so
source nsCli.tcl

set nsGui::playerNum [newStars $::ns_open $owd/tiny_sparse_P2_Y2400.xml]
buildMyPlanetMap
set hwPID $nsGui::myPlanetMap(0)

set fid [findFleetByName "Armed Probe #2443026239740"]
sendFleetToPlanet "Armed Probe #2443026239740" [findPlanetByName Pervo]
sendFleetToPlanet "Armed Probe #2443026239740"
sendFleetToPlanet "Armed Probe #2443026239740"

# get a useful scout
newStars $::ns_design $::ns_loadPre scout "Smaugarian Peeping Tom"
newStars $::ns_design $::ns_save

# build it
newStars $::ns_planet $hwPID $::ns_addAtIndex 0 0 1 $::designMap(3)

# set orders for max growth
for {set i 0} {$i < 100} {incr i} {
newStars $::ns_planet $hwPID $::ns_addAtIndex 1 1 3
newStars $::ns_planet $hwPID $::ns_addAtIndex 2 1 4
}

newStars $::ns_save $owd/tiny_sparse_P2_Y2400.xml

Pasting Tcl code is so much easier than C++, a lot fewer < and >!

I had to override the logic for "sendFleetToPlanet" auto-pick. It picks the closest planet, but I wanted to send the Armed Probe on a one-way trip to cover a specific set of planets. The Smaug will cover closer planets.

I had to adjust the speed of the probe in Stars, but the New Stars auto-pick got the speed I wanted, very nice!

New Stars does not show what will finish, that is a very hard problem. I will have to address it at some point, though...

New Stars Status

Let me start by saying the gcc maintainers are jerks.

I have heard this accusation often on comp.arch, but I was skeptical. Now I know it's true.

If you doubt, read this.

That was back in October, there is still no solution for Cygwin (as far as I can tell). My latest updates pulled down the latest versions, and now I can no longer build NewStars.

I had to back rev to gcc-3 (as mentioned in the post).

Which brings us:


Ahh yeah! Stars versus New Stars, head to head!

Turn 1, player 1 of the test game.

Obvious differences:

1. Stars and New Stars have the origin of their graphics inverted. This creates a "mirror" effect when looking at the universe (not going to fix)
2. Stars puts some useful info in the title bar (will fix ASAP)
3. I am missing the planetary mineral concentrations (will fix, eventually)

More soon!

P.S. Interesting factoids

1. Stars adds 1000 to x and y
2. I used Tcl to verify the structure of the master xml

package require tdom
set doc [dom parse -channel [open tiny_sparse.xml]]
set root [$doc documentElement root]

set univP [$root selectNodes //UNIVERSE_PLANET_LIST/PLANET]
set playP [$root selectNodes //PLANET_LIST/PLANET]
puts "#\tX\tY\tName"
foreach p $univP {
set name [$p selectNodes string(NAME/text())]
set id [$p selectNodes string(OBJECTID/text())]
set x [$p selectNodes string(X_COORD/text())]
set y [$p selectNodes string(Y_COORD/text())]

incr x 1000
incr y 1000
puts "$id\t$x\t$y\t$name"
}

That creates the "Universe Definition File" (Report->Dump To Text File->Universe Definition). I have a longer version which checks the integrity of the player maps against the global map.

We're On Pluto

I have been catching up on the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.science. There was an interesting interchange on Project Pluto.

Now, when some people think of Pluto, they think of the ninth planet (yes! a planet! My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas). More, probably think of Mickey Mouse's dog.

Of course, Pluto is the Greek god of Hades/Death/the Underworld. That is probably the inspiration for this thing:

• 75 foot long; 60,000 pound
• nuclear ramjet, cruise missle bus
• 26 nuclear warheads

The second point needs some explaining.

• ramjet - flies by compressing incoming air, this requires a fair amount of air to work at all - end result - it cannot fly slower than the speed of sound (it would be launched using solid rocket boosters, and could never land)
• nuclear - the incoming air is heated by being directly exposed to an unshielded, operating nuclear plant. This means the exhaust is highly radioactive.
• cruise - designed to fly close to the ground (about 1000 feet)
• missle bus - a missle that carries missles (the 26 warheads)

This thing (designed circa 1960!) would follow terrain using pre-constructed radar maps, shattering glass and damaging walls and roofs as it flew to its target - all the time irradiating everything it flew over. It would then pop out a nuke, which would detonate seconds later (Pluto flies just under one mile per second, so it is already miles away). Once it was out of nukes and losing power, it could be crashed into a secondary target (60,000 pounds at Mach 4, plus highly radioactive).

Magnum 360 said: "Thank you very much thats exactly what I was looking for. Wow thats amazing it had the possiablity of staying up in the air for months, to bad the project was stopped."

To which, Mike Ash says: "Too bad the unshielded and unfiltered airborne nuclear reactor with no ability to land after launch was stopped??!!"

This is pretty incredible work (terrain following using vacuum tubes?). Also, the sheer gall of the thing (spewing out radioactive exhaust). Of course, this was the same age which planned to blast a mountain into space using nuclear bombs!

You have to admire their sense of scale and boldness. Today, we are so safety conscious - we'd never do anything approaching this scale. It seems like there should be some middle ground...

New Stars Status

Well, looky here!



Here is the "Merge Fleets" dialog! (I know the spacing is off) It works! You can merge ships between fleets. I still don't have "Split All" and "Merge All", but they are basically macros that should be easy. All the core functionality is done.

I also fixed the "Goto" button in the "Other Fleets" area. It was really bugging me...

We are now ready to play! (except for fleet to fleet cargo transfer, but who ever does that :)

Git 'er Done

I've finished looking over the "Why Git is Better Than X", and the propaganda pages from Bazaar and Mercurial (propaganda is good, you need to say why you think your system is better).

I think I had previously decided on Bazaar. I was really worried about Git on Windows, and Git's main features "Cheap Local Branches" and "The Staging Area" didn't impress me at the time. Bazaar has some really nice support for implementing different sharing schemes on top of the distributed model.

But now, I think Git is the way to go.

In my day-to-day work, I have at least three "local branches" in svn. They are:

1. the working trunk - attached to the trunk, with all the changes I am thinking about making
2. a clean trunk - this is my "Staging Area" where I copy changes in before commit
3. an old copy of the trunk - for comparing really old revs (because history is not available offline in svn)
4. a personal branch - for long term projects to make major changes
5. a release branch - for when we are doing a public release

Each local repo can take up to 2 GB (if I need to build the executable). Wasting disk space isn't the biggest worry. It takes a long time to set up these repos, and a lot of work to keep them all in sync and up to date.

I really overlooked the Staging Area.

My concern was that I wouldn't be able to use it, because I need to test any changes before pushing anyway. Of course, I realized that I just need to push to my clean area, test there, then push to the "main" repo (as much as any repo is main in a distributed SCM).

Stuff I've read lately

"A is for Alibi" (Sue Grafton)(audio) - This is the first in the "Alphabet Murder" series. It's interesting to see how Grafton has developed as a writer.

And it is good they replaced this narrator.

She is terrible.

She has two tones - monotone and slightly deeper monotone. For an audio book, you need at least two distinct tones, so you can figure out when the speaker changes in a dialogue (basically, to denote the paragraph breaks). Distinct voices for each character and one for actions is a plus, but not absolutely necessary.

A lot of the time, I couldn't figure out who was talking - even if I was paying attention. And if distracted (say, by a crazy MD driver), it was easy to get lost. Sometimes it was hard to tell if someone was speaking or if something was happening.

That said, the story was ok. Grafton drifted some into "romance novel" territory, which she is obviously terrible at. Good to see she has dropped it in the later novels.

New Stars Status

So close now!

It's been a while since we had a Windows screen shot. See, it still looks the same! :)

I had to scp over the turn file from Linux for debugging, because I don't have a split case on Windows, and debugging through VNC can be a pain...

This looks like the normal split case, but look carefully...

The original fleet id is 234806..., now the fleet id is different. I did a split, where all the ships move into the new fleet (and the old fleet gets deleted). That was to test the fleet deletion code, which is needed for merge to be useful.

Now I can do merging.