spectere.net
The Chatterbox => Random Chat => Topic started by: Alice on December 08, 2010, 08:40:27 PM
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Hey, at least this forum gets more posts than DMZX. Where I don't think I've seen somebody who isn't a spambot register for months.
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More posts that DMZX? Yikes...what happened there? That place used to be hella active (well, more active than this place, at least).
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Lots happened there, really. I think mainly what's happening is everybody who's been there for years is getting a life but little new blood is showing up to replace them. zzo38computer and smilymzx are back, and we have somebody named Giel who posts occasionally, but most of our other new people disappear after a while or leave in a big huff. AJS hasn't released a new version of MZX in over a year now. Also, Scorch3000 is banned, Why-Fi "left forever", Paulguy stopped posting after he got banned from #mzx, and Maxim hasn't been around too much, which I think has helped the forum's demise. I'm hosting a Christmas Avatar Wars at the moment, though, and we have plans (but no host D: ) for the Winter 2011 DsDoZ, if you feel like coming back.
tl;dr off topic bullshit
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Also, Scorch3000 is banned, Why-Fi "left forever", Paulguy stopped posting after he got banned from #mzx
Why are you complaining LOL!
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I'm not, just citing possible reasons why activity might have died down
Scorch sure posted a lot
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zzo38computer and smilymzx are back
Oh god.
I'm hosting a Christmas Avatar Wars at the moment, though, and we have plans (but no host D: ) for the Winter 2011 DsDoZ, if you feel like coming back.
Eh, my main reason for silently leaving was just that I fell way behind on Robotic and haven't been able to catch up, plus I was never really that great on the graphics side of it. Robotic is kind of a kludge right now because nobody took the effort to push toward a new generation (not that I blame them, that would be a huge undertaking) and I have enough programming to do in my day job to want to dissect it. :p
One of these days, maybe.
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zzo38 forked MZX to add new features... but most of them are pretty much useless unless you're zzo38. He also added Forth support x.x
As for the main line, Exophase made a pretty detailed roadmap to progress Robotic, and there's a development fork for Robotic Debytecode, which has a few syntax changes. Unfortunately, AJS and Terryn seem to be the only people doing major MZX work at the moment, and they haven't done much recently (AJS promised a new version before the next DoZ though). Lancer-X has actually stepped up and began optimizing and cleaning the code, but I don't know when/if his changes will be applied to trunk :/
edit: Maybe this thread should be split :F
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Forth? Really?
Then again, it's zzo38. I really shouldn't be surprised. Do his posts still read like they were translated from English to Russian, then back to English?
I remember seeing something about Robotic and the Debytecode release last time I lurked there. It's good that things are finally starting to progress in that direction. Maybe Robotic will be come more betterer now. :o That's really my main issue with it. It is at the point where it's about as functional as an actual programming language but it still feels like the old Robotic. It drives me a little nutty.
Also, if whoever ends up hosting the DsDoZ needs web space, have them e-mail me or something. I know that always seems to be an issue with those. :3
edit: Maybe this thread should be split :F
Bah, fine.
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Yeah, Forth. Zzo38's quite literate now, if a little hard to follow sometimes. His spelling's pretty much perfect but he still has aspie grammar.
If you want to try debytecode, http://mzx.devzero.co.uk/snapshots/ get the latest one, especially if you're installing on Ubuntu from .deb since ajs had to manually fix the latest one or something. The colors are a bit wacky and I've already complained about them, but quote marks are almost gone, for the most part, and everything is context sensitive and sexy. It still has a few bugs though, one of my latest games makes it go boom :(
I think ajs already plans to host the DsDoZ FTP, but thanks for offering! I'll run it by Terryn & co. in #mzx (we moved to SlashNET btw)
edit: TBH it's really scary that the DoZ is less than a month away and nobody's even stepped up to hosting, though. Lancer basically said last time that he's never going to host a DoZ again, and I don't think Terryn's too keen on hosting another one either. We'll see, though. I'm trying to get them to make GIT Debytecode the official version for this DoZ.
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Quote marks being gone is a major win in my book. Writing expressions in 2.8x was about as fun as putting your head through a brick wall (slight exaggeration). Debytecode was definitely something that needed to happen for MegaZeux to evolve beyond what it was, so it's kind of exciting to see that sort of progress.
I'm kind of curious as to whether the whole Exotic thing is ever going to happen. It's an awesome idea and would definitely make a lot of things easier, but it sort of feels like vaporware at this point.
And yeah, if you guys need a mirror for the DsDoZ stuff, give me a shout. I have plenty of disk space and bandwidth that I'm not using, and this server seems like it's pretty speedy.
Speaking of hosting, do you still use your subdomain at all? I remember that the server I was on before this one wound up kinda breaking everything. If you're having any issues, let me know. I've had quite a bit more free time lately now that I'm not working 12+ hours a day. :x
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Did you try out Debytecode? It's pretty great, but I'm not switching over to it for serious use for a while. Looks like we're going to DoZ with the normal MZX but I'm trying to organize a half/quarter DoZ in February that's debytecode-only.
Yeah, I still use my subdomain quite a bit. I got a free belsambar space specifically for MegaZeux related stuff but Insidious has proved to be a flake in multiple ways and my space disappeared at some point, followed by his host fucking him over and some other stuff that nearly lost us !zaphbash and some other historical stuff. Terryn had to recover it from his logs.
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Haven't tried Debytecode yet. I downloaded it a while ago, but didn't play around with it at all. And yeah, try to push that shit, mang. We needs us some progress! I suppose their biggest concern would be stability at the moment, but I imagine that'll be a non-issue by February.
And Insidious still has to compete with me for the biggest flake award (at least I'm self-aware, amirite?), though at least your web space has been accessible (for the most) since I was like "here u go now leve me alone 4ever" way back when.
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Seriously, try it out it's best thing ever ;-;
Reason #1: Comments are now //
Reason #2: equation/counter/number differentiation are context sensitive now and have a degree of color coding
Reason #3: commands can be written in uppercase or have their first letter capitalized or whatever since the source is stored instead of bytecode.
Reason #4: Comments are now //
Reason #5: No more gigantic yellow mess of strings anymore (strings are still yellow, but equations are purple and counters are red)
Reason #6: Don't need quotes for fuckin' everything anymore
Reason #7: Comments are now //
Also, I think Insidious wins the flake award. Outside of webhosting, but he backed out from a PathFinder game he was running because he ran out of ideas. Thing is, he didn't tell any of his players about it, and we were stuck waiting around for him to show up.
Also, the Exo's poetry thing where he threatened to pull hosting on Z2
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Reason #1: Comments are now //
What were they before? I hate things with non // comments...
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. "text has to go inside of these quotes and has to have a period at the start of the line"
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Here's an example of debytecode: http://pastebin.com/fyvyFw5T
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That is the most retarded comment system ever. Also that looks like a kinda crappy language, overall. Reminds me too much of Basic :<. If it was worse before debytecode that's ridiculous.
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Sadly, as far as GCS scripting languages go, Robotic is probably the best :S
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That is the most retarded comment system ever. Also that looks like a kinda crappy language, overall. Reminds me too much of Basic :<. If it was worse before debytecode that's ridiculous.
It's meant to be a very easy to learn and use language for a GCS; it was never ever intended to be used for general purpose stuff. It worked exceedingly until people tried to make it operate more like an actual programming language. Many of the kludges are a result of the language being stored in the world files as bytecode (with only a byte per instruction), hence the significance of debytecode.
Reason #1: Comments are now //
Reason #2: equation/counter/number differentiation are context sensitive now and have a degree of color coding
Reason #3: commands can be written in uppercase or have their first letter capitalized or whatever since the source is stored instead of bytecode.
Reason #4: Comments are now //
Reason #5: No more gigantic yellow mess of strings anymore (strings are still yellow, but equations are purple and counters are red)
Reason #6: Don't need quotes for fuckin' everything anymore
Reason #7: Comments are now //
:D :D :D
Yeah, I'll have to vomit out some code with it one of these days. I need to stop failing at modern Robotic. Most of my issues are that most of my Robotic experience comes from v1.0-v2.51s3 and that the kludgey syntax for the newer versions makes my head hurt. Looks like debytecode is steadily fixing the latter issue.
I also have a nasty tendency to try and make constructs that make sense in an actual programming language but fall apart in MegaZeux due to the way code execution happens. I would *love* to have support for libraries and real functions.
Also, I think Insidious wins the flake award. Outside of webhosting, but he backed out from a PathFinder game he was running because he ran out of ideas. Thing is, he didn't tell any of his players about it, and we were stuck waiting around for him to show up.
Ouch.
Yeah, not cool.
Also, the Exo's poetry thing where he threatened to pull hosting on Z2
I don't seem to recall that. Linky?
At least throughout all of our various slap-fights these last few years I never threatened to pull your web space. ;P
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It's meant to be a very easy to learn and use language for a GCS; it was never ever intended to be used for general purpose stuff. It worked exceedingly until people tried to make it operate more like an actual programming language. Many of the kludges are a result of the language being stored in the world files as bytecode (with only a byte per instruction), hence the significance of debytecode.
Have I ever mentioned how much I HATE languages that do that? I mean, fuck, why not just re-implement Turing if you want an easy to learn language for something like that. At least Turing is a proper language. Plus, that shit's fucking ridiculously easy to learn (I literally opened the help file to look up functions names, and began programming...)
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http://zzt.belsambar.net/zu/wiki/Exophase's_poetry
Also, Spectere: the first thing you should learn is WAIT/CYCLE 1 in loops :-*
Read the review that I wrote, don't bother with the actual game (http://vault.digitalmzx.net/show.php?id=615)
I think real function support is somewhere on Exo's roadmap.
And you totally did threaten my webspace, back in 2007 or 2008. I had ceresius.zakamiro.net ready with my website backed up just in case you actually did. :D
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http://zzt.belsambar.net/zu/wiki/Exophase's_poetry
lol
Also, Spectere: the first thing you should learn is WAIT/CYCLE 1 in loops :-*
Read the review that I wrote, don't bother with the actual game (http://vault.digitalmzx.net/show.php?id=615)
Yeah, using WAIT 1s at the end of a robot's cycle is something that I've definitely gotten used to doing now that cycles aren't limited to 50 instructions. It was pretty easy to get used to, actually, since that's something you have to do in .NET languages to allow the WinForms display to update in the middle of a busy loop if you aren't multithreading (Application.DoEvents()).
The part that annoys me are things like the syntax for copying things between the vlayer. I always mess that up because it just feels so weird. :x Oh, and expressions used to drive me crazy, but it seems as though they fixed that.
I think real function support is somewhere on Exo's roadmap.
;D
And you totally did threaten my webspace, back in 2007 or 2008. I had ceresius.zakamiro.net ready with my website backed up just in case you actually did. :D
I don't recall that. If I did, I was talking out of my ass; I had no intention of cutting you off (mostly because that would be a very lame thing to do).
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Yeah, using WAIT 1s at the end of a robot's cycle is something that I've definitely gotten used to doing now that cycles aren't limited to 50 instructions. It was pretty easy to get used to, actually, since that's something you have to do in .NET languages to allow the WinForms display to update in the middle of a busy loop if you aren't multithreading (Application.DoEvents()).
Alas, as soon as you've gotten used to WAIT 1s like everybody else, Wervyn shows up and begins trying to get everybody to use CYCLE 1 instead. It actually doesn't matter at all unless you're sending subroutines to other robots -- if you send a subroutine to a robot that's WAIT 1ing, then when it finishes the subroutine, it executes the WAIT 1 again.
The part that annoys me are things like the syntax for copying things between the vlayer. I always mess that up because it just feels so weird. :x
You mean "COPY [OVERLAY] BLOCK x y w h #vx #vy"? Exophase's roadmap thankfully gets rid of those for proper COPY VLAYER BLOCK ... [TO BOARD/OVERLAY] and COPY [OVERLAY] BLOCK ... TO VLAYER commands AFAIK. I've been pestering AJS to add bch(x),(y) and och(x),(y) sorts of stuff to match up with the vlayer equivilents, since BOARD_X and BOARD_Y are so unwieldy.
Oh, and expressions used to drive me crazy, but it seems as though they fixed that.
Just when I'd gotten entirely used to a o x, it finally gets changed to & | ^. Also no more fucking apostrophes :D
I don't recall that. If I did, I was talking out of my ass; I had no intention of cutting you off (mostly because that would be a very lame thing to do).
The thread might not be around on this iteration of s.net forums, but I'll go look for it.
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Oh, and for people other than Pancake and Spectere, this is what MZX looks like
(http://kuroneko.spectere.net/games/mzx/lancerpg/tynewpal.png)
(http://kuroneko.spectere.net/games/mzx/lancerpg/ty-help.png)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGBofm4zR9I (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGBofm4zR9I)
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I checked out MZX once.... I think whatever I tried had ASCII graphics :/
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Well, I made everything in those screenshots with 96 different 8x14 1bpp tiles and 12 colors (the train engine and rail split swap back and forth because they both use like a third of them, and the video uses a different tileset and palette). Really, you'd have 256 of those tiles and 16 colors at a time in a game but I'm working with restrictions by the lead developer on the game. A lot of older stuff, and a few more recent games, like to use the default ASCII graphics, but they're easily changeable. Once you get used to the environment, you can figure out ways to make the limitations less noticeable though :p
In the near future, hopefully MegaZeux is moving away from some of the worst restrictions (the palette, the weird tile size, the restricted 80x25 tile window size), but the scripting language seems to be the main focus at the moment.
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Alas, as soon as you've gotten used to WAIT 1s like everybody else, Wervyn shows up and begins trying to get everybody to use CYCLE 1 instead. It actually doesn't matter at all unless you're sending subroutines to other robots -- if you send a subroutine to a robot that's WAIT 1ing, then when it finishes the subroutine, it executes the WAIT 1 again.
Ah, yeah. This is true.
Does doing that still bring MegaZeux to a screeching halt if you aren't careful?
You mean "COPY [OVERLAY] BLOCK x y w h #vx #vy"? Exophase's roadmap thankfully gets rid of those for proper COPY VLAYER BLOCK ... [TO BOARD/OVERLAY] and COPY [OVERLAY] BLOCK ... TO VLAYER commands AFAIK. I've been pestering AJS to add bch(x),(y) and och(x),(y) sorts of stuff to match up with the vlayer equivilents, since BOARD_X and BOARD_Y are so unwieldy.
OhmigawdYES.
Just when I'd gotten entirely used to a o x, it finally gets changed to & | ^. Also no more fucking apostrophes :D
Yeah, I'm more used to & | ^, so this is going to be lovely. :D
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My god, they used a o and x?? That is quite possibly the most retarded thing I've heard so far :/ I mean, every other language I know of that has and or and xor built in uses & | and ^ (actually, I think I saw one that used something other than ^ for xor, but I can't remember what)
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Dude, they didn't have a choice.
Like I said, the language got kludgey when people started adding things.
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Ah, yeah. This is true.
Does doing that still bring MegaZeux to a screeching halt if you aren't careful?
Sure does :D
I stopped using "set commands (-1>>1)" and started using "set commands (10000000)" to try making it less awful.
My god, they used a o and x?? That is quite possibly the most retarded thing I've heard so far :/ I mean, every other language I know of that has and or and xor built in uses & | and ^ (actually, I think I saw one that used something other than ^ for xor, but I can't remember what)
Exo had a reason -- & was already used for variable evaluation by the time he added expressions AFAIK.
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Still not much of an excuse. Any compiler worth it's salt can tell whether your using a symbol for one thing or another by the context it's used in, even if they don't support operator overloading by the user.
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Sure does :D
I stopped using "set commands (-1>>1)" and started using "set commands (10000000)" to try making it less awful.
Marginally less, you mean. :p
Still not much of an excuse. Any compiler worth it's salt can tell whether your using a symbol for one thing or another by the context it's used in, even if they don't support operator overloading by the user.
Not the way it was used in Robotic's syntax.
I suggest learning the language before completely bashing it; there are very, very good reason that things were the way they were and that they had to wait until bytecode was eliminated before being able to correct them.
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Marginally less, you mean. :p
Marginally? Using one million instead of 2 billion at least gives me a chance to get out of gameplay legitimately instead of CTRL+ALT+Delete and nuking the site from orbit Hoak Hogan
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Marginally? Using one million instead of 2 billion at least gives me a chance to get out of gameplay legitimately instead of CTRL+ALT+Delete and nuking the site from orbit Hoak Hogan
This is true. I've kinda been spoiled by multicore...
Speaking of having to nuke shit, do you know if 9.MZX still kills MegaZeux? XD
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Well...
(http://kuroneko.spectere.net/games/mzx/Summer2006.png)
Considering the image I used there in place of a screenshot
Actually, I have no idea, I haven't tried recently. I assume AJS has made the port a lot more stable and better at handling broken things (for instance, it wouldn't even run Mana Lust until GreaseMonkey fixed it, and the only thing broken there was a board pointer being off by 1).
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Oh wow. I love you for that. <3 Though I love how 9.mzx seems to have the power to pop up an application error over top of a BSOD. That's some serious shit. :p
My favorite part about the whole Lesbian Space Pirates thing is how pissy a select few people got over it. Unintentional trolling for the win?
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It was one of the first Google Image Search things I found for BSOD. The dialogue box actually says something like "bluescreen.exe has encountered a problem and must be shut down.". I couldn't remember the exact effects of 9.mzx, but I think at least one person complained about a BSoD.
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Yeah, I seem to remember that, too. Considering how quickly it sucked up RAM, I'd say their system probably had a hardware problem (bad RAM will do that) or they were doing something insane like running it under Windows 98.
That's one thing that 9.mzx never did for me was annihilate my system. All it did on my computers was to keep eating RAM until Windows finally said, "ah hell naw" and killed it.
In a way, despite how amused I was with the finished product, I sort of wish that it did work as intended. Alexis even gave me a few pointers about the intricacies of how MegaZeux stores boards. You see, it's all her fault. :p
The wave of MZX "viruses" that followed it were a little annoying, though.
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Windows ME.
Fix't
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The wave of MZX "viruses" that followed it were a little annoying, though.
ハッハッ、ごめんね。我没好笑了。
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Fix't
Windows Me is technically superior to Windows 98. Its problems -- like Vista -- primarily dealt with manufacturer support.
Regardless, run any Windows 9x/Me system out of memory and it's not going to handle it well.
ハッハッ、ごめんね。我没好笑了。
UR LANGUAGE IS FUNY.