Chat Thread: Tokyo Drift

I took a train home. And yep, lots of gorgeous mountain and river views

Originally I was giving it the big one that I would walk both ways . . .

I'm guessing that plan faded out somewhere around hour 9 of the walk.

Fair play Buska! I got knackered mowing the lawn and doing some weeding this afternoon, so the idea of that massive walk seems utterly impossible to me.

At least you're taking in some fresh air! I go for two walks a day, one short one long; and my tum's starting to feel it. What's 'worse', The Lady (a very good cook) has taken up baking.

This has got to be the first-worldish of first-world COVID problems, surely.

It's all above board now, I can go for all the walks and meet all the people and cough in all the pensioners' faces.  Boris said I just need to use some common sense, but I don't have any so I guess I'll just do whatever I want.

I've got a headache today, so I assume that means I'm dying of COVID or something.

Er... different topic: was there a thread in Off Topic or GNamer Community where we said "I made a thing?" I've seen a writing one, but I thought there was a general content-y thing. Er... long story short I'm going to have a go at the Weekly Game Jam starting tomorrow. Will probably give up in 30 minutes.

I think there was in the Community sub-forum... not 100% sure, mind you.

That's me out of the office and working from home now. It's been very relaxed so far - it's been so quiet that I've been able to sit watching shite on my iPad between taking calls and I'm enjoying being able to log off and immediately go to my kitchen to start making food. But I do miss the social element of not being able to speak face-to-face with my colleagues, so I don't know if I could do this full time.

Please make it Jim!

Not before time Jay. Sounds like you've settled in as well as you can.

Yeah, I'm making the best of it. I actually made an effort to prod my teammates to chat on Microsoft Teams and found myself having a better time for it. It's not the same as face to face banter and whatnot, but it'll have to suffice for now!

Funnily enough I genuinely wish my teammates would stop talking to me. We have far too many calls now, meaning I either need longer working days or get less done.

Not sure where to put this, but: I'm making my first ever game and I needed to tell someone/some people!

Now that I've said that, let me clarify: it's very basic and probably won't be seen by anybody outside this flat. It's The Lady's 30th in not so long and she grew up on adventure games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, so I'm doing a text adventure game which ties in all of the presents I've got her as usable items. It's got an eleven-room map and EXAMINE, USE x ON y, and COMBINE functionality. It's even got an enemy of sorts: a giant slavering badger that's released halfway through the game. (This is one of her gifts. I took some poetic licence.)

What's more, it's coded in R, the only programming language I know and have access to. R is good for statistical modelling and not so great at all for making a game. What we have is lots of bulky .csv files with all the interactions with all the items, possible combinations (up to a point), uses etc.; and then a bunch of individual functions that at this point is looking like it'll hit sixty by the time the game is completed, all to do with going into tables to remove items or change the room because you put a cat on a chair so you can't examine the chair but instead can examine the cat... And I have a deadline of a few weeks away.

Still, it's an interesting experience that's teaching me a lot. I'm enjoying it overall, and feeling challenged but not overwhelmed. Hasn't left much time for gaming though: I haven't played something that isn't ACNH in weeks.

Sounds good although you're making us all look bad with presents like this (I did make a Happy Birthday design in Animal Crossing for the Mrs, that was alright).

I reckon all the effort will feel worth it once she receives her gift, Balla. How's the development been going since you last made that post?

I hope you don't give the surprise array before the big day.

I had to mislead her without actually lying. She knows it's coding-related because apparently I talk to myself a lot while coding (mostly swears I reckon), but she assumed I learned Unity or something and I could honestly tell her I wasn't using Unity.

JayMoyles wrote:

I reckon all the effort will feel worth it once she receives her gift, Balla. How's the development been going since you last made that post?

Most of the hard development work is now done, bug-catching aside! (Not as fun as in ACNH, sadly. I have like five banded dragonflies sitting in storage waiting for Flick...) The tricky bit was figuring out how to make enough puzzles to fill the other three rooms... Now it's a dash to the finish line, and then a week sweating over the user interface.

Treesmurf wrote:

Sounds good although you're making us all look bad with presents like this (I did make a Happy Birthday design in Animal Crossing for the Mrs, that was alright).

Is your lady 30 as well Smurf? To be honest I got the idea after a FB friend posted about having a lovely thirtieth after his girlfriend made him an escape room, to which my response was to look at the calendar and go 'S**T'.

Balladeer wrote:

 To be honest I got the idea after a FB friend posted about having a lovely thirtieth after his girlfriend made him an escape room

Ah, you mean she nicked his keys and locked him inside his own house


Balla, that's some excellent work there - I hope it is received well.


If it's a bit fiddly writing the text adventure in R (I don't know what R is!) a lot of people have praised Quest - although I appreciate (a) it's a bit late now, and (b) it's a bit Windows-centric.

EDIT: is R for doing graphical calculator stuff? Wowsers! If you can port it to the Oric next, that'd be great

I'm still not very good at writing code and nested objects give me the willies so I wouldn't be able to come close to what you're attempting to do (although to be fair I only started coding a month ago).

I've not made any romantic gestures with the little I've learned, but I did make a function which printed out an ever shrinking willy in lieu of the numbers in the song, 10 green bottles.

My girlfriend wasn't very impressed with that.

Can't imagine why! Coding definitely has a learning curve. What are you using Muss?

Jimbob wrote:

EDIT: is R for doing graphical calculator stuff? Wowsers! If you can port it to the Oric next, that'd be great

It seems to be primarily a statistical tool, but I'm sure there's a package that runs Quest through it. There's a package for everything.

Currently programming a magician's study that starts off in the pitch black with a looming coffin. It's an arse to work on.

Been going through the freecodecamp website. Polished off the html/css sections relatively easily, real confidence boosters those. The website features various projects for you to try, which is one of the nice things about it.

Then I hit Javascript

Html and CSS are really great tools to use because it's very easy to wack something into a text editor and see what's going on. Javascript quickly becomes abstract and requires you to understand how everything slots together. There's not enough challenges on the website for someone of my level, or enough reinforcement, so even if you get through the challenges 10 exercises or so ago, you'll feel a bit blindsided by a sudden ramp in difficulty that requires you to remember something from hours ago.

I managed to struggle past their basic Javacript section, and they then launch you into a section on ES6 - or the latest syntaxes - and that section seriously blows. Things have got a bit better since then but still.

I've been going through it for work. They want me to learn some coding and be involved in building databases with php in case our programmer gets ill. I'm just getting into objects and prototype objects and all that jazz now so I still have a very long way to go. We're hoping that if I'm capable of at least reading the code which underpins our databases, that that'll be enough for the University to keep me on after my contract expires in July. By then I should, in theory, be capable of creating new reports should we need them.

Javascript seems to be the language which has the most online materials about it though so that's what I've been going with as a start.

Ah yes, I taught myself some basic html and CSS a while ago and it's very instant - more like layout tools than coding really. Can imagine the switch to JS was quite a curveball! Sorry to hear that FreeCodeCamp is bobbins - I did shell out for a paid Coursera course to teach me R, but I'm guessing your work won't pay for you to do that? Are the databases written in Java?

I'm a bit harsh, it does have a nice practice interface, but in many ways it reminds me of being in maths at school whereby I'd have teachers who thought they were explaining steps a to b, but for me there were steps missing. You go on the forums to look for help or look up their hints and it feels like it's written by people who know what they're talking about but don't know how to tell people not in the know what's going on.

I've got a bunch of books that should be quite helpful though. One in particular looks quite childish, because it has pictures everywhere and bad jokes, but it's laid out a bit like a sane person taking notes, with arrows and annotations in places which make sense, so hat's been quite helpful.

Our in-house databases are written in Php predominantly. I think there's some javascript mixed in with css for front-end stuff, but as most of the Php courses I found were premium ones I decided to go with Javascript in the first instance.

Ah yes, I know my sister had that in maths and I had it in my degree in places.  ('This step is trivial.' )  Anyway, once you've become a master of php you can make the forum software brilliant!

I have basically finished designing the adventure now, besides - gulp - testing it. And the input 'device', and the guidebook, and actually writing her birthday card...

I had another of my misadventures. I saw on google maps a "Tree that looks like a godzilla" on a mountain. Well, I had to go check it out, didn't I?

It looked like if I took the train over to Matsumoto, the next big city over from Nagano, it should be pretty equivalent to my usual big hikes. So on Sunday, I woke up bright and early and was in Matsumoto McDonalds eating breakfast by 8:30 am. Google maps told me it would be about a 6 hour walk. It lied.

It was about 5pm when I reached the point google was leading me to - admittedly, a wonderful 7 hours of walking through rice fields surrounded by gorgeous mountains and rivers - but that turned out not to be the tree, but the start of the nature trail which leads to the tree. Still, I persevered, and through a gorgeous forest I reached the tree in question. It was cool.

Now it was time to start my journey down. We're talking around 6 or 7pm, and I'm looking at my phone; I can make it to the nearest train station in time for the last train, which will get me to Matsumoto in time for the last train from there to Nagano. Bish bash bosh.

Alas, google maps estimates are based on walking at maximum speed the whole time. By this point, I was absolutely exhausted. One km in the evening took as long as 5km in the morning.

Needless to say, I did not make it to my train on time.

I picked up provisions from the convenience store and spent the night on the bench in a quiet little rural train station. I made it home at around 8:30 am, with Matt coming to my apartment at 9:30 to record an Independence Day podcast with one of his buddies in the states. I think I'm a bit loopy and delirious on that recording.

It was fun! I walked about 65km in total on Sunday, a good third of that uphill

Oh boy! Rather you than me. I'm getting less adventurous as I get older.