topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Tuesday March 19, 2024, 6:52 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - TaoPhoenix [ switch to compact view ]

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 ... 175next
1
N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« on: December 19, 2020, 06:27 AM »

Before I forget, this site looks pretty good:

I think it's run by a Swedish company - I wasn't aware of those folks at the top of hacker lists [I know, exceptions].
Multiple versions with checksum hashes - I presume a better tech than me can hunt down and verify those if they're legit - it would be a bold move to checksum a corrupted version!

Here is one of the pages. I went with both of the newest versions, [usually a good starting policy], and they seem to work for two copies of Windows 10.

https://www.dll-file...com/msvcr71.dll.html


2
N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
« on: November 24, 2020, 09:30 AM »
And after some irritating losses in games, I'm back to my Nany!
We've learned by now after all the Windows versions, a few background files have come and gone on people's computers.
Depending on people's setups, I think it's the following two DLL's that tend to cause trouble if missing:

Msvcp71.dll And Msvcr71.dll
[though I'm never sure if these things are case sensitive]

For some other day, Chess.com in particular, haven't yet checked Lichess in detail, produces timestamps that mess the program up.
That might call for a coding snack to nuke the time stamps, since they are surrounded by double brackets - sorta {{    }}
At heart this is a Poor Man's tool, when you don't want to spend five hours learning and/or buying bigger software.
Chess Mentor seems to do a really good job of the Fremium model - there are some two hundred thousand games, and they offer for sale their own lightweight analysis program, yet the game files are real, do with them as you like.
More in a bit ...

Chess.com also seems to double number moves -
1. e4 1...e5
So those would have to go too. Maybe the coding snack works in layers. Delete the time stamps, then look for 3 dots and the numeral adjacent to it on the left until it hits a space.
Though something is still off ...



3
N.A.N.Y. 2020 / Re: Polyglot Zobrist Key Generator
« on: February 08, 2020, 03:24 PM »

Wow, this is beyond my level to use, but I'm psyched to see a Chess Nany Entry!

I did a PGN processor and got mouser's permission because it was custom commissioned and not shared elsewhere.

Some notes for the DC Crowd:

- FEN stands for "Forsyth Edwards Notation", which is a text way to describe a position in chess. The basic idea is line by line, it contains data like "Rook, 2 spaces Queen 2 spaces King / Next Line" and some notes like whose move it is and whether things like castling or en passant are legal.

- An "Opening book" means a chess program first looks for known positions in its "book" or library, to see what might be a good move to try, rather than trying to figure it out from scratch. The basic idea is that for a set position, "there's a severe risk the computer won't understand to do x or y as good choices, but instead plays move Q which leads to a bad or even losing position".  So I think I understand this Nany to add misc positions themselves into the book. So I think the Caro Kann opening has some famous endgame, and you could put that in there, so even if it didn't have twenty hours of work with the full move set to get there, suddenly if the computer spots that the specific position showed up, "oh, I should do this here".

Neat!

4

Also, it seems to have some of its own adblockers native, possibly even before the Adblock extensions kick in, and I'm already up to over a thousand items blocked!

Thousands of trackers per day! Cyberpunk 2020 is here!

 :'(

5
Heh mini bug, I installed so many extensions they crowded my address bar, then when I resized it, they vanished! :)
But it's working okay now, so bye bye bye Chrome unless something "insists".

8)

6
More fun!
This time it's an In Browser Mini Mindmap!
So when you mind is spinning, and maybe even before you can create a zillion text notes per idea, you can capture enough of the brainstorm that you can annotate it later!

https://chrome.googl...aenklhejcbmlkonbakjj


7
So I turned a bunch of stuff off, and presuming they "do basic" privacy control, I'm having fun just loading it with extensions, and the first thing I did was add extra menus. One of them "isn't quite" horozontal, but it mimics the horozontal type stuff. The other is kind of an Alphabetical God Mode, that you can apparently move stuff up into your most used session.

And it's Not Quite Google! :)

So we'll see!

8
Oh, IDEA!



Besides dealing with that unique identifier, the Precise Date in Filename automatically tells you how OLD the note is, so for example I haven't read that Brave thread for 2-3 weeks, so this is my chance to see what changed on that side apart from my opinions!

The idea is "implicit metadata", the other one being just now "this survived the Wasteland, do I want to work on this today?"  :)


9
I think it fits fine. The Temp folder is intended purely as a waystation. Possibly i should have called it Pending. If there needs to be another stage, then I would stick in another folder - Pending2 say. That's what you're doing. You start with something, think about it and record what you have done.

The Temp folder really does have to work as temporary storage thought. Can't afford to clog up. So you would probably need to set up a Not Very Interesting Archive folder for your Rose Garden Presidential strategy. And you could tag it with a No Entry sign.

Hm.
For years, "All things are temp equal, until they get promoted!" :)

But this is also interesting to fast and dirty trim DOWN "not very interesting", which might be close to that problem I've wrestled with and explored in this thread, where things like my sound editing knowledge needs to be refined and always on tap, medium things sit there *by definition* they survived the "Not Interesting Culling", *so there had to be a reason why*, THEN when something like today kicks an item into high gear, THEN it gets promoted!

Fascinating! Because as simple as Drag into the Wasteland, you can cull some 30 items out of 50 out of the bimonthly batches, and then very erratically, that serves the purpose of that "you forgot it was there" part of the zettel that I struggled with.


10
Bleh - Humorously relevant!
I just did my big Windows update and not all browsers retain the tabs from session when "closed improperly"!

And for other reasons, I forgot to save a "temp note" about the web browser Deozaan was talking about for several years in another thread, with a Chrome-like backbone but some privacy features!

Update:
Google Advanced, in my particular instance, has for years been irritating in that "include all these words" ... arbitrarily drops words and then spins back useless results!

So I did something even fancier and got it - Brave browser.
Perfect example of a former Temp note, (mostly in my head) into Annotated, because now I have to reread the thread and figure out again why I didn't wholly like it the first time. But today now I believe I needed it, so sometimes notes need to be reviewed if your opinion of the thought might have changed!

https://www.donation...x.php?topic=42239.25

Update 2: Brave Ads, Tor, and more.
I don't need any of that. I just need a new browser close to Chrome, that ISN'T Chrome!
In fact, it's going to make me nearly deprecate Chrome locally, until I am dragged into using it!

11

Hi Dormouse!

I'm glad you like a few of my ideas!
And see the speed I'm drilling out replies to the thread, when today was right to "Fire Up!"

MOAR IDEAS! :)

12
The need to read selectively is emphasised repeatedly.
I can't help thinking that it's an attempt to make a virtue of a necessity because there's no way this process can be followed with very fast extensive reading.

I'm sure it will get quicker and easier with practice!???

This feels like my fundamental conceptual clash!
A chunk of time can be spent either deep refining existing notes, or you can ... read new things, which automatically create new ideas! How do you decide NOT to read something?!


13
I also have a Temp folder - this is for notes I haven't processed yet - for instance they might be named, but not had the unique identifier added. Often they will be what Ahrens describes as 'fleeting notes' (ie temporary) - highlights or clips with very short comments from me. The next stage is to go through those and give them more thought; at that point my methodology is simply to add the deeper reflection on to the note and put them into the Annotated folder.

When I go through the Annotated folder, I will try to develop my ideas based on the combination of all the annotations. One idea, one note. At that point, I move the lot into the zettel/Notes folder, add the tags, and add the links (have to do it this way round or the links will be broken before I have even started).

This is starting to get close to what I have tried to explore in this thread. Items like a Rose Garden Presidential strategy have no particular importance for me, so they'll sit in Tempo for the better side of forever.

Then other things like nice new music groups START in the tempo folder, but then the undeclared idea is that some day with six hours to spare, they'll get more fleshed out into their own folder, which tends to be closer to your Annotated level if they get out of the monthly "temp" batches.

New question - I have a nice time making quick mods of music files. So if I start with a song in mp3, sometimes I fiddle with the pitch and tempo or both. So the file name itself has some of the adjustment settings compared to the original, to indicate how it was created. It's not a text tag, it's instructions. How does that fit into your system?

14
That notes have to sustain repeated iterative processing, potentially with new notes for new thoughts. If information/thoughts/notes aren't worth this degree of processing, then they don't deserve to be in the zettel.

This bothers me. Maybe I haven't worked out the implications here but scattered as they are, when I get creative sometimes the notes don't stop, so I feel I have to just slam them into a folder or something as fast as I can. Otherwise, I'll rarely create that pathway again without a starting point.

In some sense, with a starting point or three, (because the temporally related things are in the folder), I can often find new versions of what I was thinking at that time, but it needs the sand in the mussel to create the pearl again. Misc examples:

- 'Orphan Drug' - A medicine that needs agency or special finding to develop because the free market factors don't favor it being commercially viable. Typically it's for rare conditions. 

- 'Rose Garden' Presidential campaign strategies.  Instead of Kissing Babies, the incumbent President of the US instead performs more Presidential duties themselves, such as an extra visit to meet foreign leaders. Pseudo dialog: "Instead of Kissing Babies, I'm trying to negotiate relief funding for bad weather damage in the Netherlands".


15
For virtually all purposes I much prefer rtf to plain text.

Colours, fonts, tables, bullets etc all make a difference to my speed of apprehension. I will switch colour, or background colour, as part of my editing. It makes rtf much more practical for me than plain text. The ability to insert images is very helpful too.

An interesting (clash?) here is how much you intend to use any text processing tools. I agree with color layers visually - in a newer version of my paper book note system, I now use pencil and blue pen. (And when two types of page fold downs were not enough, I even ripped the sides of pages dog ear 2-3 times for crucial info!)

I just got a bit of clarity for me on accessibility (often with speed) vs "wonderful discovery" - when the field of knowledge starts to become too vast for you to retain natively in your mind, and certain things (could be many certain things!) need to be recalled quickly, especially in the "social context" where people who like to feel efficient want to "move on".

So if you want visual tools of RTF, certain text processing tools have trouble doing it with anything but pure text. A long time ago, I've commissioned various little widgets I think on oDesk as well as here, just because I sadly don't program. One project I tried was to build a "Super text processor" that had all these custom things it could do. So for example if your "main copy" is in RTF, the Super Processor could have native built in "create pure text shadow copy" which you could then parse, get something out of it, and then you paste it back into your RTF copy. Then instead of saving entire files as text, because you only need it for 10 minutes, it's still in the main Super Processor, then it goes away. My text file chess example is right down this alley, though there's gaming examples from my Ludum Dare adventures too.

 


16
General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive
« on: October 26, 2019, 06:23 PM »
Complex topic!

I'm rather tired, but here are a few early ideas to play with, because I've been low-level for much of my life, and as my health broke down too much to work for quite a while, I spend my good days doing my own unfocused private research on topics that interest me - some enduring, some Weekly Specials.

I've also fiddled with text processing, with partial tools, though never with any reliability requirements.

Glancing at this "Big German Word" ...

- It seems your mind needs some level of innate talent to make it work, or it could collapse entirely! I don't think you can both be "surprised at what's in your notes" and at the same time have a comprehensive command of the material.

- Tags: I think I put mine right into the file names, so the tags travel along. I think I've grokked the thread we don't like native Windows search. But something I've done in the past was use file directory readers, and then crank the output text file into something else for a refined search. No scripting needed. If you think you've changed more than a trivial bunch files, both new and revised, just re-run the directory. "Can't find the file" - that will guarantee it's FOUND, it just may have a name you weren't expecting if you don't have that talent for consistency!

- More fun things to do with file reader output : if you put a special character (not above the number key but like zz), after the "regular" part of the file name and before all your tag-y things, then you can import that directory output into Excel, and chop it up into sections and then your notes can reference the fragment of the file name.

- In reverse, if you want to share stuff on the web, and you added new tags to your file names, because now it references Cher Banb Bang for "I was Five" and Harlan Ellison's story Jefty is Five, re-run the directory reader, then (I did one in Excel) it concatenates back the cels, slaps some shell code on either side to make it a legible web page, and off you go, and your text files drove the outbound web copy.

- False Negatives: If you think your Tags are 4 leaf clovers, they might obscure some nice creativity because only so many tags can be sanely added to something. The more complex the partial thought is, it might slip away in tags. So if I got to daydreaming, "hey, what was that book about the MMA fighter, where his raw identity was based on that area code, I forget which one, it's in that midwest somewhere"... how do you tag that? At the time you might have tagged fighter, boy, and a couple other things, and it's competing wiht JAckie Chan movies and Mortal Kombat.

So maybe You just write periodic summaries of what you were up to, and then you might get clever recalling what phase of your life it was in. There's a risk, it seems to me, of system decay.

- DonationCoder! That's us! If you find you need some really strange processing of text files, it might NOT exist! So commission it! In the days before certain modern computing chess trends, and even now it's a hobby so I'm old school, I had a problem. In chess, the "text" version of the moves is called a PGN, which is a straight text file, just with headers in brackets in known sequence for the computers to know who played and when. But those headers were a pain, taking up half the page, and some sources had certain hardcoded line breaks and stuff. And I wanted very basic filtering so if I am looking at Tal's games, no games under say 15 moves (tended to be last rounds etc), and no draws. I didn't want a huge database program - same situation as you. (Chessbase used to be the gold standard.) I just wanted to take my little text file I produced in ten minutes to a restaurant.

So I commissioned it elsewhere, (got Mouser's approval it's not for resale and I own the end to end work for hire rights etc) and it's here.

NANY 2012 Release: Chess PGN File Processor
https://www.donation....msg272545#msg272545

(I think there's 1 file that needs to be accounted for on some systems, but I got it back working a few months ago).

So instead of complex scripting, let's say the academic world has these quirks to its materials, they're not conceptually hard, but annoying, maybe get a Coding Snack!
So someone was talking about parallel files, the snack scans the material, reverse sorts by noun and like my program truncates somewhere, then cranks out a parallel "super tags" file, so if you're trying to remember that program with the miners you spent a week analyzing, and remembered the dev changed DBA names, you crank the utility, it skips over Twitch presenter David Miner, and comes up with Ludum Dare Undermined.

So I hope some of that helps!

17
How does it do with tab reloads?

Vivaldi has started to slip for me in a few edge cases I don't have organized right now, but in general and it's becoming noticeable with Ludum Dare reviews, my machine isn't all that high end, (my brother may upgrade a chip or something for me next year), so just having stuff in diff browsers minimizes the damage.

My third is currently Chrome, which I am certainly no fan of, it just happens to be a thing. So I'm not interested right noew in all these payment widgets, but a (another?) Chome-esque engine with ... decent attempts at ad protection, is worth a look.

Bonus if there's an extension for a horozontal menu! (PRob is for Chrome but it's only third).
And then ... Tab reload. Firefox does a passable job with it. I haven't found the setting for it in Vivaldi yet. (Anyone know if there is one?) So besides my mediocre comp, LD games can sometimes have some coding errors, most of them innocent, that can just stall out the browser. Then I'd lose 20+ tabs!

18
DC Gamer Club / Re: Ludum Dare 45 Reviews
« on: October 26, 2019, 03:05 PM »

With the funny name Lucky Legal Llama, is a sailing demo of a game mechanic.
But even if there isn't very much gameplay, it has a nifty Scotch-Irish Opening song!

https://ldjam.com/ev...45/lucky-legal-llama
https://cole.klssn.com/ludum-dare-45/


19
DC Gamer Club / Re: Ludum Dare 45 Reviews - Epoch
« on: October 26, 2019, 03:12 AM »
I found another really fun one!

Epoch
https://ldjam.com/ev...udum-dare/45/epoch-1
https://riodsh.itch.io/epoch

Cute little animation up top, but the main game is combining things, starting from just a stick and Philosopher's Stone, and trying to build yourself into a stone age civilization.

Apparently I got decently far, more than some of the LD players who posted notes.

Epoch 25 of 30.PNG

I beat it!

So ... rating ... when there's no kill or timeout, that's notable. And methodical work does pay off. IT just takes a while, and tip - there's one or two transactions that have to be done in a certain order! That might stump a lot of people because most of them are simple matches. So it's still a pretty good screen shot. After I rest up, I'll think if I want to make this a spoiler enhanced walk-through. Possibly another post, so people can play this straight from this post and there's still work to do after my screen shot.

This is my first favorite one so far.

20
DC Gamer Club / Re: Ludum Dare 45 Reviews - More Quick links
« on: October 26, 2019, 01:10 AM »

Just because there's only so much one can handle per post, I'll be splitting the quick links.

First up is one I def want to eventually do as a full post.

Fruit Mamba
https://ldjam.com/ev...-dare/45/fruit-mamba
https://bobvanderlin...thub.io/fruit-mamba/

Charming little puzzle game with a snake that grows as it eats fruit. Simple crisp graphics - there's some counting involved, so I'm glad it's not using a 3d renderer.

Level 2 is JUST at a sweet spot I didn't flash right through it, but you feel it has to be doable with a good calculated snap. I don't know about level 3 yet. Ratings are in the perspective of the player, but I'll call this Phoenix Easy-Plus, because you can let it sit there - no enemies, no decaying game elements, no timers, etc. So you can dawdle, attend to life, and so on. I hear there aren't many levels, but it's got an interesting gravity mechanic that's tricky to master. Isaac Newton Plays Centipede!
:)

Update: Level 2 is way harder than you'd think, and the devs were saying they were torn between two details in the mechanics, so the next few are far easier!


 

21
DC Gamer Club / Re: Ludum Dare 45 Reviews
« on: October 25, 2019, 10:26 AM »
Quick links post for games that I've played, with varying results, so that they don't get lost on my hard drive or forgotten altogether.

https://ldjam.com/ev...dum-dare/45/catsaway
Runner with fun hand drawn art and rather offputting music! What happens to the experience if you play this sound off?

Poop Sim - funny little Pico 8 platformer
https://markuslindgren.itch.io/spoop
Rating - Prob Phoenix Easy-plus - the difficulty seems curved generously to at least get a few levels; I just haven't taken a lot of time on it so it's here.
https://markuslindgren.itch.io/spoop

Witches Beware
http://mabl.dk/Unity/witchesbeware/
"Slow move" collect objects unlocks game state. Very dark! Lots of people went with a Halloween theme along with the compo one.
Someone said it's Don't Starve style art. I may hold onto this one for a full review when I want to knuckle down to play it right. You can mis-decide to do an action that probably blocks the win without directly knowing it.

Tower of Minos
https://schellingb.g...hub.io/TowerOfMinos/
Half Tetris Half Platformer. Clever!

Harder than it looks because even if you're good at tetris, you can't move the blocks, so on the platform side either the long horizontal one flattens you or you can get boxed in and have to hard restart. Well into Phoenix Medium but fun!
- ---------------
Random Non-game findings section

Wolfram Tones
http://tones.wolfram...0zdUOkIxrVxePCNaA5WU

22
DC Gamer Club / Re: Ludum Dare 45 Reviews
« on: October 07, 2019, 10:16 PM »
Thanks for doing this thread. I'm following it with interest, and may include my own "review" or two at some point.

Or at least play some of the ones you linked.

But for now I just want to point out that you didn't include a link to the emoji TD game.

Good catch.
I posted the links.
And I'm a bit tired now" :)

23
DC Gamer Club / Vaahtera - a Tree Simulator
« on: October 07, 2019, 04:16 PM »


Pleasant little mini Sim where you grow (hopefullly!) a large tree.

The control are pretty simple as long as you get off the ground (pun!) by rememebering SPACE BAR grows the branch segment. It's easy to try to click the mouse or random keys.

Very simple ecology, though with a couple of fancy formulas. It's pretty balanced, but it gets a rating of Phoenix Easy-Plus because of a couple of traps.

You start off with a fixed supply of energy, and growing branches costs 50 energy. You can make leaves for free per se, though it seems it does take extra water. So at the base level, grow a bunch of branches, make leaves, so that it replenishes energy, and you need a threshold of 200 to make it rain.

There are only 2 pathways per branch and making leaves finishes off a branch, so some kind of wide base is recommended. Depending on how wide you start off, optimal seems to be about 7-9 nodes or so.

Tips -

- The Water counter is not steady paced! So especially later on, when you think you're cruising, it can race down and you have to hurry to make rain! This has destroyed two big trees so far! Then it slows down. Not sure if this is a feature! Also, a few times it really looked like my water was above zero but then it became game over.

- It's pretty easy to hit steady state, a little care in the beginning should do it. But I am beginning to think the final goal is to really make a fleshed out nice tree! I aesthetically went for a trunk in the beginning, thugh it's not required, but a V-shaped tree just looked ugly.

- The second thing earning the Plus is the branch design. Some variant of a binary splitting pattern is going on, with some unclear formula of when it widens branches (after making leaves!) so although the camera can move, I am trying for a single screen pic.

- It's a sim game, so it DOES take a couple hours if you are really going for a large tree. Turns out it can multi task the branches, so at first you can't see through the delay box, but then once you hit cruise zone you can build multiple branches at once, but I recommend surveying for a minute every few branches because of the quick water counter, and also to see your design after the boxes go away.

- There is no pause, I think, not counting things like shifting OS focus out.

- As is, the graphics are pretty nice once you start to get going. There is no gravity, so I have experimented with growing my branches partly upside down to work on fleshing out the tree.

I'll try to post a screen shot if I can get a really nice one!

LD Page:
https://ldjam.com/ev...dum-dare/45/vaahtera

Game Page:
https://wiekafe1.itch.io/vaahtera

For a screenshot, disclaimer - it's not completely right out of the game. I built half the tree, then mirrored and cropped it. The program doesn't really reward trunks, and I was getting fatigued from all the restarts!

But since I can't draw at all, it's still rather neat! I am a loose player - so I just considered my editing like an artist trimming the canvas or paper.




24
DC Gamer Club / Quick Links
« on: October 07, 2019, 01:40 PM »

The Howler

An interactive version of Edvard Munch's The Scream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream

LD Page
https://ldjam.com/ev...m-dare/45/the-howler

Game Link:
https://blackthornpr...s.itch.io/the-howler

- ----------------------------


25
DC Gamer Club / Emoji Overflow
« on: October 07, 2019, 12:53 PM »
Tower Defense!

I have a soft spot for the LD versions of Tower Defense.


This time the theme is hysterical, since we had an Emoji movie. The emoji's want to take over your phone!

Rated Phoenix Easy. One of my house rules for radomized Tower Defense is I'm quite fine restarting the game to get the important elements. So clearly the Dragon is sky high the best item in the game. It's a solid (and only) shooter.

It's harder to know what the others do. The Castle just seems like a blocker, then a lot of waves can get around it but the Turtle is supposed to slow the things down.

Presumably the FireBreather should singe and weaken them but there's no hp bars so you can't tell. There's also a Teddy bear, equally obscure.

Tips:

- The emoji animation is smooth, but the placement is modular, so place the first dragon either 6 or 8 spaces from your home base. They have quite a range. Otherwise you might get jammed up getting formations.

- The other assistants make good re-routers, so you can position them off center in various ways to force the emoji armies to herd back around into the dragon fire. Apparently they are in fact slow shooters and not inert, but still the Dragon is the most powerful.

- The big boss at the end really does take a lot of beating! But it's quite bulky and slow, so boxing it in completely near the front works quite well.

Great simple sprites and you do have to take a bit of care not to get sloppy. Also, it might nudge up a difficulty level if you don't get a dragon first pick and want to play it hardstyle.

Also, it's one of those games that after you win, you can try one more round to try to make art with the sprite patterns in pretty formations. :)

LD Page:
https://ldjam.com/ev...re/45/emoji-overflow

Game page:
https://olegludens.i...ch.io/emoji-overflow


Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 ... 175next