IF what?
August 6th, 2025
I was in the process of finishing up a Tetris clone when I fell into a rabbithole of text parsing. It was a complete accident: I was there, minding my own business, when I just stumbled on a preposition and fell down the hole. Figuratively. The result? A few figurative bruises and a small article outlining the basics of a simple text adventure game with an equally simple two-element (verb + noun) text parser. It's in the article section. Expect a Tetris clone soon-ish. Bye! BYYYYYYEEE!
More compression stuff
April 10th, 2025
The compression article has been updated again to include the LZ compression scheme, it's an all-purpose algorithm that can be used for text and images, it recognizes patterns and even consecutive runs. It's pretty neat and it's in the article section. I may split the article in the future to make it more digestible, but I'm not sure yet.
And a happy birthday to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)... does it still exist? I don't know. I could look it up and all, but I'm too busy fomenting a puppies-powered intergalactic ship engine or something...
FAX-ME! 3: Fax Me With a Vengeance
March 31st, 2025
Would you like at that? It's April already! Time flies when you're eating flies...
Quick head up to tell you guys I finished another episode of Fax-Me. This time it goes through the joy of burying mines and blowing your legs off as you figure out where you put them. It sounds dark when I put it like that, but actually, it was a fairly popular game in the early nineties. Things were different, ok? Check it out, it's in the article section!
FAX-ME! 2: Fax Me Harder!
November 17th, 2024
I just finished writing another FAX-ME page. This one will walk you through the creation of an Ant Run/Pipe Mania/Pipe Dream kind of game. It's fresh out of the oven. In FAX, it's so hot and fresh I didn't even take the time to proofread it. That's how hot and fresh it is. Check it out, it's in the article section. It features several cool ant facts too. Ta ta!
Almost an update
September 9th, 2024
If anyone's interested, another short listing has been added to the article section: "color space conversions." It contains a handful or routines to convert RGB to HSL, HSV, CMYK and back, as well as a couple of routines to convert hexadecimal notations (in 6, 3, 2, or 1-character notation.) I'm currently writing another FAX-ME to program a Pipe Mania/Pipe Dream/Ant Run kind of game. I swear it'll be up before the end of the year. And I mean "This" year. Probably maybe.
Compressing the compression
February 17th, 2024
I just reformatted the compression article and included a little trick to optimize PCX files. That aside, I've been very busy at work, crafting macros in VBA for Microsoft Excel and I was pondering my orb in regard to VBA and how fun/desperate it would be to write about that. I mean, who would want to learn how to code Minesweeper in a spreadsheet? Or Battleship. Or Picross... Now that I think about it, there's plenty of other games that can fit in a spreadsheet. BRB, gotta work overtime. Oh, and a happy New Year too!