Recent Posts

2926

Developer's Corner / How to bundle a game's source file and its interpreter into a single EXE

« Last post by kyrathaba on May 23, 2007, 11:40 AM »

I'm writing an Interactive Fiction compiler, and then will write the corresponding interpreter (long term project, yes I know).  The compiler will take a game source file (plain text file) and convert it into a binary game file that the interpreter can interpret.

Okay, all fine and dandy.

But I've noticed that some interactive fiction authors, notably Adam Cadre, offer Windows executables of their games.  I'm wondering how one would bundle both the source file AND its interpreter into one EXE file.

2927

Developer's Corner / Re: Looking for a very specific programming language ide

« Last post by kyrathaba on May 20, 2007, 01:22 PM »

Thanks, Veign, but I meant "standalone EXE" in the sense that there are no dependencies.  VB is dependent now upon the .NET framework.

2928

Developer's Corner / Looking for a very specific programming language ide

« Last post by kyrathaba on May 17, 2007, 04:52 PM »

Does anyone know of a completely freeware version of BASIC that produces standalone EXE files AND is object-oriented.  I figure no such beastie exists, but figured this is the place to ask.

2929

Developer's Corner / Re: SkyIDE - Latest Release Information

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 29, 2007, 07:56 AM »

Wow, I am extremely impressed!  I may wind up having to switch to SkyIDE from Visual C# Express...

2930

Living Room / Re: Are Optical Computers as PCs on the horizon?

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 26, 2007, 01:30 PM »

No, although I can see where I may have given that impression.  Although electrons in chips can flow approximately half the speed that electrons in a vacuum can flow, there is also the matter of resistance in the material of which the circuits are composed (no resistance in a vacuum, on the other hand), and the distance they must flow inside a PC which, though small, do take time.  What I meant by the part that you quoted above is that the research at NASA's Marshall SFC has shown optical logic gates that can switch (on/off) 1000 faster than the current ones in silicon based chip technology.

2931

Living Room / Re: Are Optical Computers as PCs on the horizon?

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 26, 2007, 10:34 AM »

Well, there is a physical limit on how small they can get.  The smaller, the thinner.  Get the electron pathway too thin and it won't stand up to the heat generated by the electron flow.  It would melt.  So there must be a lower bound on size due to this factor, if nothing else.

2932

Living Room / Re: Are Optical Computers as PCs on the horizon?

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 26, 2007, 08:56 AM »

There has been a several thousand-fold increase in the power of the PC since the first ones came out with 64 Kb RAM and no hard drive.  In the book by David Levy (referenced in my original post) that I'm reading, the author posits that by 2020 the PC will have the computing power of a human brain, and by 2030 it will have the computing power of an entire village of human minds. 

Do you think such estimates are wildly optimistic or not?  There are some very intelligent people, such as Ray Kurzweil, who believe we're approaching a technological singularity, a point at which our technological know-how reaches a critical mass, so to speak, and all sorts of things that now seem like science fiction will become realities.  For example, David Levy thinks that within the next few decades computing power and the sophistication of A.I. will advance so far that robots will be on a par with human beings in terms of intelligence.  He even thinks (and here I begin to arch an eyebrow) that there will come a point where robots will intermarry with humans, reproduce, have legal rights, etc.  My kneejerk reaction to such predictions is "yeah, right", but who knows?

2933

Living Room / Are Optical Computers as PCs on the horizon?

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 25, 2007, 06:25 PM »

Today's silicon-based computers are limited in their speed by the speed with which they can transfer data and the speed with which that data can be processed via logic gates.  That being the case, it stands to reason that a primary factor limiting the speed of current computers is the speed with which electrons move around inside the silicon chips, which is roughly half the speed of light in a vacuum.¹  David Levy says that computing technology of the future will be impossible without a change in the way computers are made (materials, size, etc.)²  New conducting materials developed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center can act as computer logic gates that perform 1,000 times faster than today's fastest silicon chips, and are smaller.  And researchers at the University of Rochester believe that their work could lead to a computer more than a billion times faster than the fastest supercomputer was at the beginning of the 21st century.  Now that, friends and neighbors, is fast

Leonard Adelman, who coauthored the RSA encryption algorithm, introduced the idea of using DNA to solve complex mathematical problems.  And in 1997, researchers at the University of Rochester actually developed DNA logic gates.  I won't even get into a discussion of quantum computing. 

Here's my question: I want to know how powerful (memory capacity, processing speed) you guys think that PCs will be in 2050, and in 3000 A.D.  And, secondly, what everyday applications will such powerful computers, using A.I., be put to in those two years, respectively?



1. I.e., electron speed in our CPUs is approximately 93,000 miles per second.
2. Robots Unlimited: Life In A Virtual Age, copyright 2005

2934

Developer's Corner / Re: Introductory C# web-based tutorials

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 24, 2007, 09:29 AM »

This morning I discovered that the HTML file for Tutorial #1 was missing.  Not sure when or how that happened, but it's fixed now.

Work continues slowly but steadily on "Last Match Loses!"  It's a game where you begin with four separate piles of matches.  The piles begin with 1, 3, 5, and 7 matches, respectively.  Play alternates between you and the PC.  On each turn, you must remove at least one match from any pile of your choice.  You can remove more than one match from the selected pile (up to, and including, the entire pile).  Whichever player is forced to draw the last match loses.

There will also be a Player vs. Player mode.

I'm getting ready to begin work on the "C# for the Somewhat Initiated" series.  If any of you plan to follow along, I'd welcome any suggestions or requests on example programs you'd like to see, or other features you'd like to have included in the tutorials.

2935

Developer's Corner / Re: Setup program for apps created with Visual C# Express

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 23, 2007, 02:15 PM »

Thanks, hollowlife.

Setup projects in Visual Studio .NET 2003 can be used to install the .NET Framework with your application, but only if you have installed the optional Visual Studio .NET Framework Bootstrapper Plug-in on your development computer.  This plug-in apparently does not work with the Express edition IDEs, however, so again one would need to investigate the ability to script such detection/installation of .NET Framework, using a tool like Inno or NSIS.

2936

Developer's Corner / Re: Setup program for apps created with Visual C# Express

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 23, 2007, 10:48 AM »

I would very much appreciate that, hollowlife1987.

I've read that ClickOnce application deployment automatically checks if the client machine needs the Framework.  Anyone familiar with ClickOnce?  I think the Express edition IDEs offer it, but I'm not at home so I can't check at the moment.  But doesn't that sort of deployment have to be hosted on a server?

While reading about this topic, I continue to get the impression that as time progresses, it will become less and less likely that a setup will need to install the Framework on a target machine.  Vista ships with the framework installed, and I imagine future versions of Windows will as well.

2937

Developer's Corner / Re: Setup program for apps created with Visual C# Express

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 23, 2007, 10:28 AM »

I found this article which relates directly to the discussion on this thread:

http://www.installsh...ticles/installer.asp

2938

Developer's Corner / Re: Introductory C# web-based tutorials

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 22, 2007, 03:52 PM »

Tutorial #9, the final tutorial in the "C# for the Completely Uninitiated" series, is online here:

http://kyrathaba.dcm...ed/kyrathaba_cs9.htm


The next series, "C# for the Somewhat Initiated", will introduce WinForms programming with C#. 

2939

Developer's Corner / Re: C# -- Help Needed -- Where is CRC.EXE - .NET SDK Installed

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 22, 2007, 01:44 PM »

Good point f0dder.  Yes, best to make doubly sure with the environment variable %windir%. 

By the way, I really like the way C# looks. It makes me wonna learn it.

Yes, it has a concise, elegant syntax (in my eyes, anyway)

2940

Developer's Corner / Re: C# -- Help Needed -- Where is CRC.EXE - .NET SDK Installed

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 21, 2007, 11:34 PM »

On a WindowsXP machine, the command line "csc.exe" compiler should be located in this directory:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\

On a WinNT machine it should be here:

C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\

2941

Developer's Corner / Re: The Best Introductory Language

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 20, 2007, 09:36 PM »

If you're set on jumping right into C++, and don't have a strong C background, check www.mindview.net for Bruce Eckel's excellent (downloadable) "Thinking in C".

I don't claim to be unbiased, but I have dipped my feet in several languages over the last few years (QBasic, C, Vb6, Vb.NET, Java, Pascal, and now C#), and C# has given me what I'm looking for.  C# was built from the ground up to take some of the best features from both C++ and Java, incorporating  them into one language.  And, C# was also planned, from the drawing board, to leverage the .NET Framework, which means a whole LOT of your coding has already been done for you.  I find C# more concise than Visual Basic, yet not as complicated as C++.  It shares a lot of similarities with C/C++, and you can get a free, very good programming IDE from Microsoft, and access to a tremendous amount of language feature documentation on MSDN. 

I agree with Lashiec that Pascal is a good starter language.  It contains pretty much all the programming structures you'll run into in other languages and has a clear syntax.  When I was in college, it was the language used in Introduction to Programming.  I also somewhat agree with Lashiec's thumbs-down to Visual Basic.  In particular, Visual Basic.NET is inelegant in comparison with C#.  It has some awkward stuff in it supposedly to make it backward compatible with VB6. 

Just my 2 cents.

2942

Developer's Corner / Re: Some questions abt coders

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 19, 2007, 10:11 PM »

If you decide to try compressing your executables, I recommend PECompact for C# applications.  UPX doesn't care for .NET too well 

2943

Developer's Corner / Re: Some questions abt coders

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 19, 2007, 08:47 PM »

I'm not sure where you're coming from with this, but I'll give it a shot:

The overheard added to an application by wrapping it in an installation has grown smaller in recent years.  In one recent article somewhere here on the site, someone was talking about a freeware installer that claimed, if I recall correctly, to add less than 100 Kb.  I'm not sure what sort of utility programs you're referring to, but there are many, many useful programs well under 1 Mb in size even counting the installer.

2944

Developer's Corner / Re: C# Palindrom Recursive Program

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 19, 2007, 08:43 PM »

A few months ago I started a project that uses recursion to search for all files in a directory, and all files in each subdirectories, and any files in subdirectories of those subdirectories ... ad nauseum.  I haven't finished it, but what's there, works.  Might help, because shows an example of C# code for recursion.

http://www1.webng.co...cursiveDirSearch.zip

2945

Developer's Corner / Re: Setup program for apps created with Visual C# Express

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 17, 2007, 11:48 AM »

Mouser, the Framework also includes the following namespace, which might be worth investigating:

System.Configuration.Install

2946

Developer's Corner / Re: Setup program for apps created with Visual C# Express

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 17, 2007, 11:37 AM »

Interesting.  I'll have to do some testing with SharpDevelop.  And, hamradio, I agree with you about offering two versions for download, one for user who already have .NET 2.0 installed, one for if they don't.  I'll also check out the www.codeproject.com link.  Thanks for the links, hamradio and Ruffnekk.

2947

Developer's Corner / Setup program for apps created with Visual C# Express

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 16, 2007, 12:51 PM »

Does anyone know of a setup utility that can create deployment packages for applications created using Visual C# 2005 Express Edition?  The express editions of Microsoft's programming IDEs are nice, and feature-packed (especially considering the cost), but they don't (at least, VC# doesn't) contain a Setup and Deployment project type.  I'm looking for a freeware tool that can detect whether a target computer has .NET 2.0 installed and can, with permission, install it if it is found to be absent.  I have used Inno Setup Builder successfully in the past for simple projects, but as far as I know, it doesn't include this functionality to detect whether or not .NET 2.0 is already installed. 

2948

Developer's Corner / Re: Introductory C# web-based tutorials

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 14, 2007, 11:26 AM »

Thanks, I appreciate it.  I enjoy writing them.  #8 was hard for me to get into.  Strings can be sort of a dry topic.  I try to sprinkle the tutorials with occasional humor, but one man's humor is another man's "duh!"

2949

Developer's Corner / Re: Introductory C# web-based tutorials

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 13, 2007, 01:25 PM »

Update:

I haven't abandoned the C# tutorials project.  I'm just taking a few days off, working on a freeware game called "Last Match Loses!"  I'll make it available for download and feedback ASAP.

I'll soon be putting up Tutorial #9, the final tutorial in the "C# for the Completely Uninitiated" series, which covers input/output and persisting data.  Then, I'll be embarking on a new tutorial series:  "C# for the Somewhat Initiated"    That series will introduce Windows programming (using Forms, as opposed to purely console-based), and will, over the course of the series, develop a complete single-player CRPG.

I'll also soon be extending the functionality of my QuizMaker application, so that after receiving your quiz grade, you get the benefit of an explanation of the correct answer for any items you missed: http://kyrathaba.dcm...rs.com/downloads.htm

 

2950

Developer's Corner / Re: Introductory C# web-based tutorials

« Last post by kyrathaba on April 05, 2007, 06:13 PM »

http://kyrathaba.dcmembers.com

I've completed and uploaded Tutorial #8: Simple, Rectangular, Mixed, and Jagged Arrays, Foreach Loops and Nested For Loops

I'ts available online and for download.  I welcome any feedback.  If anyone finds any bugs in the sample programs, please let me know.