Roto-Mortar: A 7-Day Lisp Game March 26th, 2010
Patrick Stein

Roto Mortar was written for the 2010 LISP Game Design Challenge. The challenge was to design and implement a game in seven days using some LISP dialect.

The KPs have been beating on your base all week. Your defenses are just about to collapse. In fact, your mortar cannons are both on the fritz. Billy Bob, the ACME Repair Guy, has just gotten one of your mortar cannons back online. Unfortunately, he had to wire things a little wonky. Your cannon is spinning all on its own. You’ve only got one button to control both the elevation of the cannon and when to fire it. And, you better fire it, because the KPs are still coming at you.

Inspiration

A few years ago, I read the book Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games. One of the exercises in the first chapter is to design a game with a “one-button interface”. At the time, I didn’t come up with anything particularly thrilling.

When I started brainstorming what to do for this Game Challenge, I remembered that exercise. I came up with this concept just under (as in 3.5 hours under) seven days ago. The game is nowhere near as polished as I’d like… but it was a 7-day thing. And, it was fun to take a break from Objective C to get back to some Lisp programming.

Obtaining It

You can find out more about the game, including where to get the source and a Mac OS X binary, on the game’s web page.

Burnt Paper plugin for GIMP February 16th, 2010
Patrick Stein

Yesterday, I decided to make the images in my article look like they were on old, burnt paper. I did this manually in the GIMP.

I liked the effect, but I didn’t want the tedium of having to do all n steps manually next time I go to use it. So, I wrote a GIMP plugin script to do it.

Here is an example of the plugin script in action. As you can see, I started with a text layer and a selection that was bigger than the text layer. The plugin uses the selection size as original edge of the paper (original, as in before the paper was burned).

And, here is the resulting image:

Here is the Burnt Paper plugin script. Plop this in a directory that’s in your script search path and refresh GIMP’s scripting and then you’ll find it in the Filters > Decor menu. [You can see the script search path by going to Edit > Preferences and selecting Scripts under Folders in the left sidebar. And, you can refresh the scripts by going to Filters > Script-Fu > Refresh Scripts.]

Submitted small bug-fix to iPhone Spelling Toy February 10th, 2010
Patrick Stein

I just uploaded the first update to my iPhone Spelling Toy. The update includes two minor changes:

  • Corrected spelling of siete (Spanish for seven)
  • Corrected spelling of colores (Spanish for colors)

Today, I am working on adding animal drawings.

Spelling Toy iPhone App Released February 9th, 2010
Patrick Stein

I am pleased to announce, that my Spelling Toy for Kids is now available on the iTunes Store.

The first five respondents to this article will receive a Promotional Code to download the app for free! (Edit: all promo codes dished out… if you really want one and will publicly review my app in your blog, I’ll dig up another promo code for you.)

Features

  • Kid-friendly interface! Just pick the letters you want!
  • Guides your child to the proper spelling of each word.
  • Adapts to your child! Cards that consistently give your child trouble show up more often.
  • Support for English, Spanish, and French! (German and Japanese Kana coming soon)
  • Lots of words to learn (with more coming soon).
  • Three different skill levels to challenge your kid!
  • Exercise some or all of the categories: Numbers, Colors, Foods (with more coming soon).

Lisp Fourier Transform Library Faster Yet (v1.3) October 13th, 2009
Patrick Stein

I released version 1.3 of my Common Lisp Fourier Transform library today. It is significantly faster than yesterday’s version. On my MacBook Pro in SBCL 1.0.30 with a 512 by 512 by 16 array, version 1.3 takes 3.74 seconds where version 1.2 took 9.77 seconds and version 1.0 took 25.31 seconds. For a breakdown of performance on various array sizes with various Lisp implementations, see the performance section of the library page.

Most of the speed improvement in this version came from memory improvements. Version 1.3 doesn’t cons at all in SBCL during the processing of each row. Version 1.2 inadvertently consed three rows worth of complex numbers for every row transformed.

My library is still about 25% slower than Bordeaux FFT for one-dimensional arrays. My library, however, has full support for multi-dimensional arrays where Bordeaux-FFT does not.

I also included some validation test cases using NST to this release. To try them, go to the library directory, hop in your Lisp, and load regression.lisp.

Updates In Email

Email:

RSS Feeds

l