Hi,

My last post about the "broken engine in a tui" (text user interface)
was poor. The attached file named simply as p, was a text file
containing the output of debugging in gdb, a program which i am working
on at the moment.

The 'engine' is my attempt to write a 'Xor' engine which is based
upon the code I've written for the two games XorCurses, and XorGramana.

A car engine does not need a car to run, and so it is with this engine,
the Xor engine will not need any user interface to run, that is, it
should be able to play a Xor replay without displaying anything or
requiring any user input.

The other side of this, a user interface should be able to use the engine
and behave correctly with it *[1]

My recent development of XorCurses, and now this engine, has reduced my
'art' output to NIL. And so, to make up for this I from time to time
during coding, think this would be interesting or that would be
interesting and try to find some way to get 'art' out of the
development process... ARTifacts of code development.


Attached with this email is one such piece. It is a BZ2 compressed text
file, when uncompressed it is around 2mb. It is the output of the
xorengine running with a text ui redirecting to a file.

It is then an animation. To watch it, you need to decompress it. In
Linux, open a terminal and type "bunzip2 p" (without quotes). Then,
make sure the terminal size is 80x25 and type "less p" and hold the
"Page Down" key. In Windows, you will need a program to decompress BZ2
archives. Then open the Command prompt and type "cat p | more" (at a
guess) and hold down the page down key.


cheers,
james.


*[1] For testing of this engine, I have created a text user
interface*[2]. This interface is less than an ncurses interface (which
is what XorCurses uses). It is just text, ASCII characters, no colour.
Part of the reason of doing this, is a proof of concept - that the
engine will work with such a minimal UI, that nothing is broken by the
removal of user interface code from the engine - OR MORE LIKELY that the
abstracted user interface the engine does use actually works - the
hooks/callbacks... that there is nothing left in the engine which should
be in the user interface - the engine, requires an abstraction of the
screen - called screen_data - as when the player moves the screen needs
updating. engine call back screen hook text. scrolling threshold game
area display size.

*[2] The text user interface is not quite complete. It has taken a
shortcut such that bomb explosions are not visible.

Attachment: p.bz2
Description: Binary data

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