Continuing with our Game of Life, we work out the code to calculate the number of neighbors for each cell and then rebuild the cell grid for each turn. Also improved the randomness of the initial grid layout. There’s a bug somewhere that’s throwing off the rebuild, so debugging that will be the first task for next time.
I’ve uploaded a couple new Stardew Valley podcasts. I’m trying out “playcasting” as a word for them. Not sure I like it yet, but it’s shorter than “playing and podcasting.” Still looking for a better title. These are both more playing than podcasting, but the second one does have some talk about spam and chicken dressing and other topics.
I capture screencasts with OBS and then process them with ffmpeg before uploading. Surprisingly, OBS doesn’t have a pause button, so if I have to stop for anything, I stop it and restart when I come back, and then I have to concatenate multiple videos into a single one later. The ffmpeg docs say you can concatenate like this: ffmpeg -i "concat:video1.mp4|video2.mp4|video3.mp4" [other arguments] That doesn’t always work, though. I don’t know exactly why, but it has something to do with mismatched aspects of the files.
I started coding Conway’s Game of Life in 6502 assembly. This video covers the initial setup, laying out the game grid, filling in random (“random”?) cells, and thinking about how to process neighboring cells. I expect the full game to take a few more videos, as I have some ideas to add after getting the basic game working.
I’m going to start podcasting while playing games. Basically like everyone is doing with streaming, except I’ll record them and upload later since I don’t have the bandwidth for streaming live. I plan to do at least three a week, to try to kickstart podcasting again. So here are the first two from earlier this week, playing Stardew Valley in the new FreeBSD-native install. The first one is pretty dull, since I couldn’t think of much to talk about except the game itself, so I don’t recommend it unless you need help getting to sleep.
I finally finished the next entry in my 6502 Assembly Language series yesterday, and it took overnight to process and publish. In this one I debug the print-a-number code from #6, and then talk a bit about what to do next. I think I’m going to write a version of Conway’s Game of Life, as a way to develop an operating system kernel along the way. A game will need basic functions like “print a character at coordinates x,y”, so I think that’ll be an interesting way to do it.
It’s snowing again this morning. The last snow just melted off a few days ago, and now things are white again. Seems like we’ve already had more snowy days than the last couple years. Don’t know if this one will be enough to sled on. There’s a pretty good long hill out back, but I didn’t get around to trying it last time. A Dollar General just sprouted in Payson. That’s how it seems, anyway.
Guy found a prize a few days ago. Someone must have dressed out a deer not far away, so he showed up with part of a leg and a lot of dirt on his nose. Now every time we go outside, he has to go check on it and chase away any cats. A few nights ago, he tried to bring it inside. When I told him no, he stayed out on the porch guarding it for a couple hours until he got cold enough to come in without it.
Continuing on from the last video, we start working on code to print a number on the screen, one digit at a time. Debugging to come in the next installment.
For something different, I thought I’d do this garden update in the snow. We got about three inches from the “blizzard” the other night, and it looks like it’ll melt in a couple days, but it looks nice for now. There are a few cauliflower heads, one small branch of broccoli, and maybe a couple cabbages waiting under the snow to be harvested as soon as they thaw enough to cut with a knife.