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1st August 2024
The word of the day for the first day of August is "Smeg off with the Word of the Day stuff, and get back to coding normally again."

Gosh, that's a long word, isn't it?

-=-=-

We're heading back to some sort of normality, now.
Normality in that I haven't done the ALChoon I should've posted yesterday, haven't got a plan for this week's AGameAWeek, and am already far behind where I should be in terms of getting things done.

It's been a bit of a busy month for me. I mean, sure, the "toy" thing took up a ton of time, but also, I've been learning to play the piano over the past Twenty Five days


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And even bought a Mug to go with my learning.


(Mug was purchased via RedBubble as a private artwork. They won't let me open a "store" until I've uploaded 4 more pieces of artwork. I'm currently unsure what that artwork might be, but am definitely working on it.)

Each morning's coffee is now a subtle reminder to myself to do my 15 minutes of practice, and I've been capturing a small bit of melody each day to upload to YouTube.

Alarmingly, these are some of the most popular videos I've posted to YouTube in quite some time, so.. Not sure what that says about my GameDev of late.

Meanwhile...



As far as JSE goes, I think I'm abandoning the planned Transpiler until I can work out those bloomin' Gotos.
I can totally understand, now, why Monkey-X never had a Goto command!
Of course, I could always say "No more Goto", but at the end of the day, JSE's supposed to be as close to BASIC as it can be, so I'm not quite ready to abandon the Goto command, just yet.

I am, however, considering .. instead of Transpiling.. What if I rewrite the interpreter for other systems..?
How fast can I get THAT to run..?
Hmmm.

Meanwhile, Meanwhile..



The JSE Todo list has grown leaps and bounds during the past month, and I've been experimenting with all manner of optimisation methods.

A common thing seems to be going "Hey, ChatGPT/Claude/Etc, how can I optimise this drawing function?
And Claude/etc coming back with a version of "DrawImg()" that ends up using tons of trigonometry and division to achieve the goal, and then me going "Um, all that trigonometry and division is going to make it go slower, isn't it..?", and then the chatbot going "Oh yeah, you're right. Here's a more optimised version."
...
And then it feeding me back what I gave it in the first place.

Suffice to say, not a whole lot of optimising's been done, lately.

I also tried looking into Syntax Highlighting, but everything I found that "just does it!" ends up bogging down the browser on the whole. Anything I've tried seems to replace a simple barebones rather-static text area with an insanely complicated set of layered areas, each of which causes a teensy bit more slowdown than the last. This then impacts the speed of JSE on the whole, so. To say that hasn't gone well is an understatement.

*sigh*

The Help File is about 95% updated, though. I need to write up how the new Collide function works (that's been in there for bloomin' ages!!!) as well as how the drawing commands relate to it.
That'll end up requiring a bunch of rewriting, I image.. Or maybe I'll just chuck it in there and see if anyone notices

Meanwhile, Meanwhile, Meanwhile...



Maybe it's just that I've now got almost 400 projects struggling to breathe in JSE's localStorage, but things sure are starting to get a bit sluggish when I load it, lately!!
I've started to try and find a safe way to transfer all the code from plain LocalStorage cookies, over to a slightly better managed IndexedDB, without the possibility of having lost data along the way.
Once that's done, I'll upload a test version and let people run that, to ensure it DOES work properly, before daring to delete all those localStorage cookies.
Might get a bit quirky for a while, but I think it'll be better in the long run.

Might also be a good idea to keep the old methodology as a backup, too, though!!

... Is that everything?
Oh, no, it's not.. Hang on..

Meanwhile, Meanwhile, Meanwhile, Meanwhile...



The thought of doing all of this "Daily Games" stuff during December has made me rethink what I'm doing during December!

Rather than a standard game, then, what would you think about that Typing Tutor that I've been half-promising for over a year?
I'm thinking Day One could be Home Keys, learning basic typing skills, and then increase things daily until we reach Day Twenty Four (maybe 25) where we end up in some kind of crazy game-inspired typing frenzy.

Does that sound like a good idea?
The "game" will be called "Greenie's Typing Tutorium", and will be hosted Here
If you want to give that a run on all possible devices, please do let me know how well it runs.
Predictive Text doesn't work on it, and it's not exactly Mobile friendly, but it does at least work well enough on my iPad.
I'd love to hear if it works on whatever you're running, so please do give it a try and leave your thoughts in the comments.

There's no gameplay, yet. That's a far far away thing. But let me know if it seems to run smoothly for you, on whatever devices you can try it on.
Type, see text, press enter, job done.
Delete should also work!

You can Try out Greenie's Typing Tutorium here.

..
And... I think that's everything!
We're all caught up, now!
Time for a nap!

Nanite!
Sweet dreams.
Don't let Udio give you nightmares.
: Download | Nightmare fuel

A.I. Corner



: Download | Suno Link

Alternative version
: Download | Suno Link
Sung by Suno


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