Well, I wasn't in, but after seeing the rules I was dying to jump into the
competition, so... well, here I am ^_^

I'm going to code my "unofficial" entry, and maybe officialize it if
Arron deems it appropriate. I just couldn't stand not being in the
SpeedHack ;)

This log is beginning rather late (saturday afternoon), sorry. But you're
better off anyway, as you've surely plenty of more interesting things to
do than read my rants :)

For starters, I'm doing a graphic version of the Unix find(1) command (well,
at least it has a few common points). It's just interactive, and you can
walk the filesystem, and apply commands to the files you find there. The
trick is that files and directories replace the original aliens/asteroids,
and commands are applied by either colliding in a file or shooting it :)

Annie had a great idea about defining weapons and bindings in the config
file, and the VM is going to control the movements of the files themselves.

The game is called:
rmstar.

It'll be bloody.
For the filesystem.


saturday, 19:45

A good chunk of the demo code is still there. That's rule 1 catered for.
The VM is running fine, and scripts can be loaded from the config file using
Annie's parser. Hence rule 2 took about 2 hours to get out of the way. I'm
now about to begin coding some scrolling filenames for the stars/files
(ex asteroids, ex aliens), to be able to read them correctly (and at the
same time fulfill rule 3). The stars are rather glowy, so rule 4 should
not be a major hindrance (and if so, there's this quickly done laser I've
just coded). Rule 5 is bugging me, however. I don't really want to go on
doing a flashy webpage, so I'll play the wide audience card, and do a text
webpage, to cater for the vast majority of web users. Hope that'll make it.


saturday 20:27

Seems we're going to be blocked by a nasty bug in Allegro. To be able to
spawn other commands, we called repeatedly allegro_exit and allegro_init,
along with a config file override, and the override fails to succeed after
some time.


saturday 20:44

I'm editing this from the game, using an editor binding ;)


saturday 21:28

It works, after all. Hmm, how should I put this ?
Hmm .... We were actually calling allegro_exit before using a couple of
Unicode routines, which introduced some very subtle memory corruption.
Works well now. Shame, shame, shame ...
I guess I'll have to revert to the straightforward config stuff now, as
I've went through a handful of hoops to override the normal config file
(the aforementionned subtle memory corruption was preventing the config
file from being found a second time).


saturday 21:34

Well, turns out my hoops were necessary after all, for the basic version
wouldn't work across directories anyway.
Good. At least that was not wasted :)


saturday 22:30

The laser now does collision detection, and a couple other minor bugs are
fixed. Time to go to bed, methinks. It's all well advanced, even if I did
not plan to join in the first place.


sunday 8:09

The VM now has relative and absolute conditional jumps. I needed that to
be able to make a script which had an initialization part and a main loop.
Took me a while to see I had inadvertently inverted two of the arguments
and wondering why the trajectories were all going haywire :)
All fixed now. Phew.


sunday 10:07

Star wars scroller is in, for additional scrolling messages, and it's in
the right style of rmstar. I've got the right animated UV to tweak, but
the code is done. After that, I'll move on to improving the config system.
Annie also added a small font, so we can actually see what's written on
the stars. There'll be some outlining to do, however, for black holes.
Black on black is not very readable.


sunday 11:48

In an effort to reduce the amount of data in the datafile, we're now using
a single white star image, which is colored at runtime. The game weighed
more than 300 KB before that, and we had even more stuff to add (mostly
config stuff). It should be much better now, we'll see when I've removed
the old data (which is still being used, but not for very long).
The Star wars scroller is also completely done, with the right speed and UV.


sunday 13:17

Laser is now functional. Long time it should've been, but it now kills
stuff, if you manage to focus it long enough on a single target. That's
going to be hard with moving targets. Speaking of which, I'll have to do
a sample script that has random-ish behavior. I'm thinking that if I add
the ability to peek and poke in the code, I can do some clever stuff
with self modifying code .... :)


sunday 16:12

Well, that was a though afternoon. I've destroyed the source of the main
file (the "arranged" demo.c), and I've been unmounting /home and fiddled
with the filesystem to recover it. I had created a new user/group just for
this game as I thought I might delete something using the game, but I did
not think I would delete it *outside* of the game.
Anyway, I've recovered it.
And tested on DOS too. I've got a handful of fixes to apply here, back on
Linux, so I'm off to do just that. Hopefully, I won't destroy anything
again. I really should've put it all on CVS, as I wanted to do earlier.
Too lazy, I guess...


sunday 16:34

I've just removed the last remnants of the original bitmaps, the new ones
are generated from a template (just colored, actually). The archive is back
in acceptable waters, at less than 200 KB. All DOS fixes are done. It's
pretty much finished, basically.

sunday 23:24

Long time no write. We've been crawling like mad to get this finished.
The web page is done, and the last remaining issues are squashed.
Now, some sleep.

sunday 23:25

Annie has done all that was not described here.


monday 00:27

raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, crash bug fixed ...............
would work only in 16 bpp, the bastaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard ..............
tired ...................


