zedr

I'm writing a multiplayer card game based on an idea I had during COVID. It's been in the back of my mind ever since.

It's being written entirely in Python: Kivy for the desktop and mobile game UI, and aiohttp for the server.

I've written very detailed specification documents for every technical and game-design aspect of the game, and I've implemented the core game engine myself. I'm letting an agent do the rest, incrementally and under supervision, tweaking the specs as we go along. So far, a very pleasant experience.

My goal is to reach beta by the end of the year, and publish the game on Steam by mid-2027.

Perhaps we could host it jointly in Milan and Rome?

Great news! Thimbleweed Park is a lovely game. I played it with my children and manage to recreate the atmosphere of those evenings in 1990, spent in front of a Commodore Amiga 500 running Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion.

Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today:

1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes

2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)

3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties

I'm sure they are 3d models and are rendered using the CPU. You can check by entering the secret Options Mode and selecting the Polygon Test, which will allow you to freely rotate your ship and the enemies, including the end of level bosses (except the final one). Screenshot: https://www.vizzed.com/vizzedboard/retro/user_screenshots/sa...

Fabien seems to be unaware of this, by the way.

This is also why the game play is so bland. The number of 3d objects and their complexity was severely constrained and did not allow for varied or more sophisticated game elements.

I think there is realtime 3D used for the player and enemy "sprites" (really 3D objects), including the end of stage bosses. They are small and extremely simple, as this was the maximum the Genesis/Megadrive's 68k CPU could handle. The final boss fight is the exception.

Silpheed was amazing back in the day. It was one of the first titles that really showcased what CD drives could add to games in terms of cinematic experience. The live orchestral music gave it an epic feel and the mecha-design of the SA-77 is beautiful and modern even by today's standards.

Another: Thunderforce 4. IMHO the finest horizontal shoot 'em up ever made on any system.

> think I could come up with a python example that maps 1:1

My take on it:

    class Stuff:
        def __init__(self):
            self._list = [1, 2, 3, 4]
        
        @property
        def each(self):
            for el in self._list:
                yield el
    
    for item in Stuff().each:
        print(item)

It's even less verbose than the Ruby equivalent in the original article, thanks to the indentation-defined blocks.

Archive.org copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20211021141127/https://www.calver...

My favourite brutalist building is in Belgrade: the Western City Gate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_City_Gate

I had this for years a my default ring tone.

He could also donate it to the Internet Archive's collection of documents.

I agree with your preference. I too lean towards a pragmatic approach to REST, which I've seen referred to as "RESTful", as in the popular book "RESTful Web APIs" by Richardson.

> Easily discoverable data, e.g. user ID 3 would be at /users/3. All of the CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) operations below can be applied to this path

Strictly speaking, that's not what REST considers "easily discoverable data". That endpoint would need to have been discovered by navigating the resource tree, starting from the root resource.

Roy Fielding (author of the original REST dissertation): "A REST API must not define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). (...) Instead, allow servers to instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs, such as is done in HTML forms and URI templates, by defining those instructions within media types and link relations. [Failure here implies that clients are assuming a resource structure due to out-of band information, such as a domain-specific standard, which is the data-oriented equivalent to RPC’s functional coupling].

A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API). "[1]

1. https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert...

Bill Booth's rule #2: "The safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant".

Cython has a similar feature: https://cython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/src/tutorial/pure.ht...

> how would this work at scale?

Homeopathy

Do you have an impacted wisdom tooth? Consider getting it extracted, even if it doesn't appear to be causing any problems. It can be the root cause of chronic migraines.

Kivy: https://kivy.org

Write your app in pure Python. Deploy on desktops and mobile devices.

The main disadvantage is that it does not use the native widget toolkit, although there are projects like KivyMD that attempt to replicate the native look and feel by theming the UI.

I made a email dispatcher for web forms hosted on shared hosting providers, like Namecheap. I originally did it for a site my wife did, and then decided to open source it. It's here: https://github.com/zedr/simple-mailer

I also wrote a blog post on how to install it: https://medium.com/@zedr/how-to-send-mail-on-namecheap-share...

I created a Dockerfile to run Unreal Tournament 1 in Linux using Docker. It works quite well.

https://github.com/zedr/docker-unreal-tournament-99

Do you believe one cannot appreciate Michelangelo, Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky without believing in a supernatural being?

> "God" may not be a "he" sitting "on a cloud", but may indeed just be the New Question beyond every Old Answer.

Excuse my frankness. That's not a fact. That's unfalsifiable woo-woo.

Great book! What's science's modern verdict on this theory?

I appreciate your opinion. I think the book gives a very convincing explanation on how evolution works and how it shaped what we call "life". I do not remember Dawkins degrading human achievements in that book, so you might be referring to talks and lectures after the book was written. On the contrary, consider the following quote from the book:

> “If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature. ”

Let me quote another favourite author of mine on the same topic:

> "There’s Nature, and she’s going to come out the way She is.", Feynman.

The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. It describes what science believes life to be, and it can be very upsetting. Understanding it, however, made me a more confident and happier person than I was before.

GET can also be cached by intermediate proxies. This can cause failures that are very hard to troubleshoot. POST cannot be cached and therefore is more suited to this type of action.

Is there a marketplace for ideas for fighting COVID-19 or mitigating its effect on people?

Fascinating... What are the odds against finding this particular type of antagonist protein?

Do you think research on 2019-nCoV would benefit from having available a platform for distributed computing, e.g. a dedicated Folding@Home?

Padding?