Posts by xexyl@fosstodon.org
(DIR) Post #B4UBdlqjuwJLXUYSjw by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus @ioccc in fact I knew the world so well that if a god/goddess/immortal run quest was run I won. And that included the races round the world. I put in these quest NPCs that teleport to random locations that then announce where they landed. The idea: find it and get a quest token; kill them and get a certain amount. They then teleport again. If they're not in a wait state and time is up they teleport and you have to go get them!
(DIR) Post #B4UBdlyXRwY7vgCgtc by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus @ioccc a couple friends of mine (they also had immortal or god characters: one of each .. but this was with one of their mortals) would go round the world. We rarely if ever could not get there in time. The exceptions is when deep in a zone that is protected by keys and things that take time to get. Even now if I were to go in I would be able to travel a significant amount of the world just not as quickly. There was not a single player who knew it better than me.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdm9AoP3YSfBBTM by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus @ioccc I've said for years that fantasy and MUDs have ruined lives. That's true but in many respects they saved my life. Did you ever play a MUD?
(DIR) Post #B4UBdmNLxgOnAdoVZg by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus @ioccc and keep up the great work! It's great you have a project. That's the way to go about it. Good luck and indeed have a lot of fun!
(DIR) Post #B4UBdmOPtjFXDwJMES by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus ah. Well they're a lot of fun if text games are your type of thing. But there are so many different kinds too. And then some would argue that MMORPGs (like the big graphical ones including Blizzard's World of Warcraft) are just graphical MUDs. We had things they had (and better) long before it was even a game. Obligatory question: have you ever played Colossal Cave Adventure? A funny thing about that one ...
(DIR) Post #B4UBdmmsQmocRnktMG by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany yes I have worked on a lot of interesting things indeed. So has @sirwumpus. I haven't played a computer game (besides one of my own that is) in years and video games even longer. I used to play a lot more. Even then I was into programming in some way or another.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdmnaO9NmU05SSm by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus someone in my past wanted me to fix a bug in their version of it (the version they found). It was segfaulting. So...I decided: what could possibly cause it? I swore at it. It ended up crashing. I was able to fix it even though it was obfuscated. I've got way better at that now and great at obfuscation as well. But last year I was playing with a version and the same thing happened. Saying a variety of rude types of things can be very amusing to see what it does.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdmufxn3OpzP7Vw by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus in high school I with another guy helped a teacher with computers. Well we had a lot of keyboards and mice in the back room so what we sometimes did is one would get a ball out of a mouse and then the other would have the keys facing out as if it was rounders. As you can imagine the ball went flying and keys did too. We always cleaned up after ourselves so she didn't mind.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdnDSpw5BmGC7nc by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus ..and seeing what it does includes crashing. But also other things.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdnH0ckuzxFqxKC by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus and we had to help another computer teacher sometimes. She had us get our tool to remove stuck floppy disks. There was no floppy disk in the drive at all. She at one point did not know how to open the CD-ROM tray. I had to help another person with an (electrical) typewriter that would not turn on. I knew immediately it must be unplugged so I looked at the floor and then pointed down so she would see.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdnY1bUWso1oXqa by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus we had printers that didn't work (what printer does though?) and they would move on their own so we had little races. But there were other things as well. That was about the only real fun I had there. I had to take a C++ class. I loved C but I also loved asm. I was bored to tears in C++ (and I hate it even more now). On the side I was doing low level graphics/sound in asm. It was a pretty rough childhood but I made it through and that's what matters.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdo4HfYKkQ4uJ84 by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus as far as his code goes. If you're still just learning then yes give it some time. You'll get there. I like that he used memcmp() in find_macro(). You'll probably not see that as much but it can be useful if you know there will be NUL bytes in the data as the str*() functions will stop on the first NUL byte. Not that you can't make use of strings with multiple NUL bytes with the usual print routines.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdoFyy3gv0MNeMa by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus the practical version had 134 gotos which is already insane. I updated it to have what it really should have been - 152. And it is so bad that there are even two for loops that act on the same array using the same iterator but the code of each loop is in the body of the OTHER loop. There is very little you can trust about flow control in the code. One more message on this I think coming up.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdoOqR6mRRqWjB2 by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus something I did in https://www.ioccc.org/2024/ferguson1/index.html is use a flat single char * as an array of close to 200 strings. This allowed me to have a lot of fun. Actually a version that did not win encrypted the strings and it had the key encoded in the data itself. I used the key to get the key so I could decrypt the rest of the strings. It was quite amusing but the @ioccc judges told me (which is rare) that they felt it was distracting from the real horrors: gotos being the worst.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdoZTnZHrypVDkm by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2024/ferguson1/gotos.c.txt shows only the lines with goto; whereas https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2024/ferguson1/jumps.txt shows a single run with all the jumps: from top left to right to bottom left to right. That's how many jumps there are. The judges said gotos will not make it past the final rounds any more. Okay more to say now I think on it.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdp2u2Ap5S5GicC by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus that was the second year I ruined a technique. But in the 1980s there was an entry with I think 23 or 24 gotos and they said then that they thought goto had reached their logical conclusion. I made that reality. The other ones I ruined were digraphs and trigraphs even though I only used digraphs mostly for formatting purposes (and messing up beautifiers). They declared them 'dated' at this point.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdpJv0uQyIrEJ8a by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus oh something Landon told me about the gotos in this entry is something like 'one might say the amount of gotos is almost endless'. Well I certainly took it to an absurd amount. That was the point of course, to show how horrible they are. Though I have a special dislike for them which is all the more reason I'm happy I did it.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdpKGzaiYJxOagq by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus in 2018 the judges asked what's special about 2305567963945518424753102147331756070. I answered it and put it in an easter egg. They removed the question from the guidelines the next year. It's back but in a different way and not asking what it is. It's the primorial prime of 99 btw. I would guess that @landonnoll put the question in as he has a long history of primes going back to the 1970s. Has held the record for primes multiple times.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdpZs3bC76Kh30C by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus actually I wrote a program and this is what I discovered: 1.03 gotos per keyword. Then pre-processed it's 1.13. There are 32 case statements but there are 0 'break's. And the switch()s were rather mean in other ways as well.
(DIR) Post #B4UBdpoPBYovpPUeem by xexyl@fosstodon.org
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@duke_of_germany @sirwumpus @landonnoll he also has his famous calc program: https://github.com/lcn2/calc. And now it's time to go.