Shadowdarke's BYOND website

I love blogging, can't you tell?

I'm looking for opinions on improving the tutorial in Darke Dungeon. I welcome your discussion at http://shadowdarke.byondhome.com/forum/ forum.cgi?action=message_read&id=3288&forum=4. :)

The time has come. Darke Dungeon is due tomorrow. People following the DD news page already know that I had some delays this month because my Mom had a heart attack. Now I have a choice to make. Do I release what I have, or let the deadline slip. I'm not real happy with either choice. Releasing now means that people will be playing it when it's less than its best. Even if I make it better in the future, most people will judge it by their first impression. On the other hand, I consider the deadline to be a promise to the fans and I take my promises seriously.

This release is for the fans, and I would like to have their opinions on the matter. I'll leave the comments open for non-members and members alike. Tomorrow at 10:00pm Eastern, I'll tally the votes. Should I release it tomorrow, in a week, or take another month or more?

Anyone who works on a project on more than one computer has run into a situation where they accidently modified an old obsolete version of their code.

I did that this morning with Darke Dungeon, doing a couple hours work and then remembering that I hadn't extracted the zip file containing my latest updates. With over 30,000 lines of code in 88 files across multiple subfolders, I didn't look forward to checking the modification dates and doing a line by line comparison of the touched files. I wished I had a CVS repository for the thing.

Thank the higher power(s) of your choice for Google. After a page or so of mediocre crippleware I found a real gem in Compare and Merge. It will examine your folders to find which text files have differences. Then you can examine the files side by side with synchronized scroll windows and a color coded bar showing you where the differences are and copy/delete/edit the content of each file. A single drag and drop (or select and click) will transfer changes from one file to the other. It is a truly marvelous piece of shareware with a generous 50 comparisons before you have to register. Frankly if you need to use it more than 50 times, I think you'll find it well worth the price. (I used 10 of my 50 freebies on the Darke Dungeon problem this morning.)

For those of you who don't believe anything is worth the price unless it's free, I also found DiffDaff. This freeware does all the comparisons and difference highlighting with side by side comparisons that Compare and Merge does, but you can't edit the files from within DiffDaff and it doesn't have that oh-so-handy color bar showing you where the diffs are. It's great for freeware (and far better than most of the crippleware I went through before finding it) but those two missing features make Compare and Merge my personal preference.

I welcome reviews of similar packages. I'd love to see if there is anything better than Compare and Merge before I buy the package.

I've just updated sd_procs with a handful of procs for converting between text, hexidecimal text and base 64 encoded text. Base 64 encoding is the format that BYOND uses when writing a binary file as text with the ExportText() proc.

I first became interested in base 64 encoding for decrypting dmi files in BYOND. (That project is still on a back burner.) Thanks to wikipedia's documentation of the format, I made a base 64 to hex converter in DM.

Today I was working with Mike H's RC5 library and wondering how to minimize the bloating of the encoded string. Once I realized that his library was returning a hex string, it all clicked into place. I can cut the string length by 1/3 if I convert it to base 64. It's still 25% larger than the original string, but it is quite an improvement and URL safe. Well... I thought it was significant! :)

The nybble colors have been in sd_procs for a while, but I didn't give them a proper introduction when I made the update back in April. These procs convert between a 3 or 6 character RGB hexidecimal code and a 4 bit (aka nybble) color code. Obviously there is quite a bit of detail lost in the conversion, but it's great if you have to store a lot of approximated color info in as small a space as possible. I use it for the colored text maps in Darke Dungeon.

I've been playing with AbyssDragon's (A.K.A. nick.cash) SET library the past couple days. I've optimized it a little and made it easier to expand. Check it out at http://developer.byond.com/hub/Shadowdarke/SET_Mod :)

Thanks Nick! Without SET, I would probably never have had the time or patience to work on an expression evaluation library.