engineeringenigma

[engineeringenigma]

Starting a petition that Eventful dreams only occur when I don’t have work in the morning.

[engineeringenigma]

No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

Check out my stuff!

✧Read Namesake✧ ✧Read Crow Time✧ ✧Store✧ ✧Patreon✧

[engineeringenigma]

Happy Pride

[engineeringenigma]

Happy Indigenous History Month + Pride Month ❤️

Without Reservations - Ricardo Caté // #StandingRockTwoSpirits // Historical Photo of Two-Spirit Natives // Griffin Germain // Diné Pride (Cayla Nimmo)

[engineeringenigma]

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[engineeringenigma]

🌊🌊

[engineeringenigma]

what i've been up to the past 20 minutes

[engineeringenigma]

Posting faggot and queer like 2am gunshots to keep property values on my blog low and scare away assimilationist LGBTs who want to replace my empty lot full of native wildflowers with a 5-over-1 because they're too traumatized by their upbringing to accept the reality of our diverse marginalized community

[engineeringenigma]

Snoot ✨🐶

[engineeringenigma]

invented a game called “I throw dice at the cat”

[engineeringenigma]

In honor of the new series coming out, more crossover drawings!✍️ Ideas that @elitadream, @istadris, and I brainstorm about on occasion. A couple sketches are from @istadris stories, link them if you're up for it, buddy. Happy show watching y'all, and have an adventurous day

[engineeringenigma]

Pokemon request: Kabuto with a little knife taped to it, please? [Stabby the roomba joke]

[engineeringenigma]

MY FRIEND THE TERRAPIN

[engineeringenigma]

I love yokai so much

[engineeringenigma]

So I work as a programmer, and the languages I use and the manner I use them in get kind of weird:

- I use python, but only to program the one robot that internally runs python. The dev environment is “here’s a box you can put text, see if you get runtime errors”. If you want a proper dev environment, you can copy-paste code from the robot program into an editor of your choice. They do have a top-level graphical interface if you want each line of code to take up 10% of your screen.

- There’s a language that’s not quite C++ that we use for a different control box. That one’s dev environment will tell you if you made an error when you try to download. Specifically it tells you the first error, and you have to fix it and try to download again to get the second error. The download process takes 20 seconds. If you try to compile offline you get separate errors.

- On the more normal side of things, we have an SQL/ajax/javascript/html thing for handling some of our internal processes. As a change of pace my problems for this one are self-inflicted, because I never figured out how to set up a proper dev environment and just edit everything in notepad++. Someone else finally showed me how to do local environment testing so I no longer take our internal website down if I miss a close bracket.

- We do a ton of stuff in .NET framework, because 20 years ago my work was using VB6 and we never bothered to migrate to C#. I actually have a real dev environment for this one with autocomplete and syntax checking, so of course it’s my favorite. My boss wants to switch this all over to javascript so we can do android/linux deployment.

- A different robot has an internal language that’s not quite python. This one also has a graphical interface that I won’t use because I want more information to fit on my screen. This one also only tells you about syntax errors during runtime, but the most noteworthy thing about it is that the command to move the robot in a straight line is bugged. I think they fixed it to the point where you can’t reboot the controller by telling it to move in a straight line, but you can make it slowly drift off into space until it faults.

- The ladder logic we use is actually normal (for AB, not Seimen’s), but I did add basically a secondary control layer built out of function blocks to handle sequencing. It is very well-documented, a fact that no one cares about when they ask what the heck I am doing with so many function blocks.

- The ladder logic was a little too normal (expensive) so they also make us use the budget version. It’s very similar except there are no keyboard shortcuts, everything takes more clicks, and instead of changing code live you have to reboot everything and wait about 30 seconds if you want to change something.

- There’s a language we use for one of our internal products that I created over about three days because I didn’t want to worry about malicious external code or figuring out a compiler. The parser is just squashed into an entirely different program so that program can control stuff in the background. It does not have arrays or loops, and I didn’t give it string handling for about a year. There’s no dev environment because it’s not a real language. Something like a quarter of the stuff we sell now uses it.

- One of the robots requires programming via menus. If you want to add an if statement, the menu shortcut is F1 -> 4 -> 8. The end if is F1 -> 4 -> 0 -> 1. The program to let you type is a paid add-on. Exponents and absolute values are also paid add-ons. You get 200 numerical memory registers and can’t have local variables. There is no else if.

[engineeringenigma]

Poorly drawn Rotom

[engineeringenigma]

Crazy book i read