While I was bored a few days ago I thought I’d have a look at how terminal based GUI applications work, as I was wanting to see the nitty gritty of it I decided that it would be more educational to work directly with ANSI codes.

The project I ended up with was writing a terminal based version of the game Netwalk, probably best known from Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. This was inspired by playing around with the box drawing characters, making a grid and thinking, “hey, that looks like Net!”

Thus, I have created a fairly simple version of the game, the source is on my GitHub page. If you want to try playing it then you can download it from there and compile it with g++. Alternatively if you have an account on codd (the Warwick compsoc server) then you can run it directly from /home/zed0/programming/net/netgame .

The game seems to run without issue through PuTTY, on the condition that you are using UTF-8. The only other configuration I’ve tried it with is Cygwin, which compiles and runs fine, however, assuming you’re using the default Cygwin terminal, you’ll need to change the font to one which has the box drawing characters.

As this was made in the space of a few hours there are quite a lot of improvements to be made.
My current todo list includes:
Adjusting the drawing methods so that it only updates the bits of the screen it needs to.
Adding wrapping as the game is fairly trivial without it.
Writing a better map generation algorithm.

On that last point I haven’t really got many ideas. Writing an algorithm to generate a tree which takes up the entire map is fairly trivial, however I have no idea how to ensure that the map has a unique solution which would be desirable. If any mathsy people know how to do this then please comment.

Feel free to suggest other features or report bugs. Multiplayer has been suggested, which I may, at some point, try to implement.

During the Easter holidays I found myself rather bored at points, thus, given the amount of Lego in my room, I did the only logical thing:

As usual sorry about the quality of the pictures, I’m terrible at keeping my hand steady for them.

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I started making this, it looks rather more like it’s from Bioshock than intended. I also didn’t expect it to be this yellow, but then realised I didn’t have enough dark grey pieces.
I have actually made quite a few Lego models over the last couple of years, I’ll probably blog about them too before too long.

Over the next week or so I’m planning to make a few posts about my trip to Canada over the summer, especially if I can find all of the pictures.
At the moment I’ve got a maths exam though so I’m going to have to you all with a picture and write about it later.leave

(click to enlarge)

Edit: So, I rather forgot to do this, but here are the photos that I meant to post back when I wrote this post: http://zed0.uwcs.co.uk/Misc/Canada/

Yep, I’m starting up my blog again with news from me at uni.

Warwick is pretty cool so far, work is pretty good and at a level where you can do pretty much as much or as little as you like, though naturally you need to do more for decent grades.

I’ve joined waaaay to many societies and sports clubs:

Juggling
Sci Fi
Climbing
Computing
Mountaineering
Video Game Design
Assassin’s Guild
Snow Sports
Student Cinema
(in no particular order)

Juggling is really fun, despite my crappiness at juggling, I tend to do diabolo or poi there instead.
There was a society trip to Leeds yesterday to a juggling convention which was awesome, especially the shows at the end. Thoguh I did somehow manage to spend a ridiculous ammount of money on a new diabolo and poi, though they’re pretty nice and should do me for a while.

Also heres a picture of me doing poi at 3 in the morning on top of a 12 foot sculpture wearing a toga…. don’t ask.

(right click and view image to see full size)

Sci Fi club, however geeky it may be is pretty fun too, as the name suggests it is mainly to do with sci fi, but it isn’t actually movies rather than board games and pen and paper role playing games.

Climbing is great fun especially since theres an awesome wall in our sports centre, which at £40 for the year is pretty good.

Computing, or compsoc as its known is another geeky one, also fun, though I haven’t been along to many of their events, the exception being their 49 hour LAN party (note I didn’t stay in there the entire 49 hours like some did).

Mountaineering is good in that it gets me out walking some more (since my last post I’ve done barely any walking and I was disgraced the other day to find that me feet were aching after a 15 mile walk), there was a trip to Snowdonia two weeks ago which was great fun, we did some nice walks and scrambles as well as a lot of table traversing (climbing over and under tables without touching the floor) in the evenings. There is another trip, this time to Ambleside (in the lake district), next weekend which I am looking foreward to imensely.

Video Game Design is just what it sounds like, and also gives me an excuse to pla my DS with otuer people from time to time.

Assassin’s Guild is rather odd and apparently originated in Cambridge. Basically you sign up to a game over a few weeks, you get given a target who is someone else who has signed up, and you have to kill them in a novel way i.e. dropping a (polystyrene) fridge on their head, shooting them with a water pistol or setting up elaborate water traps. Unfortunatley I ahven;t managed to sign up for any games of this yet, but it should be fun.

Snow Sports is mostly a reason to go skiing, though they do a lot of socials too, I didn’t make it into the Christmas trip to France, but I’m probalby going somewhere with Warwick Mountains instead anyhow.

Student Cinema is what it sounds like, they take over a huge lecture theatre and then project a film every night. So far I’ve been too busy with work and other societies to go and see anything but I’m hoping to go and see Brick (an awesome film) late tonight after our lamb roast.

Well, thats what I’ve been up to since I got to Uni, more details will probably follow.

Stay Alive
Zed0

…ok well maybe only one hundred…

Well I am glad to say that I managed it in a time of 33 hours and 59 minutes. I got to the last checkpoint at 7:20 (33 hours and 20 mins) with 3.2 miles to go over a hill and was wondering whether I would managed to finish in under 34 hours, I got in to the school at the end just as the church bell was chiming. =)

I was going to go for a Marvin like approach to this post (i.e. “The first twenty miles were the worst. The second twenty, they were the worst too. After that I went into a bit of a decline…”) but I changed my mind at about 80 miles round the route when I got into a checkpoint where they happened to be playing “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” as I left and it stayed in my head for a while and I decided it would make a good title.
You can listen to the whole song on the Proclaimer’s site here (Track 4 under “The Best Of…”) although unfortunatley you have to have Real Player (or Windows Media Player Classic).

Anyway, onto the actual walk. I promise I will get photos up when they are developed (I wasn’t the one taking the photos) and I will then scan my certificate too.
The start was fairly easy and pretty fast, I did 8.12 miles in an hour and 50 minutes, ariving at the first checkpoint 10 minutes before they were allowed to let people through. From then on it got a bit slower although until the fourth check point at thirty miles it was reasonably fast going. After that the route went over Windy Gile among other bumps along the Cheviot ridge which slowed things down a little bit, however props to the mountain rescue who were on checkpoint duty there between 6 in the evening and 6 in the morning (on a bloody windy and cold ridge). I got down off the hills and into the next checkpoint just as it got dark and I spent a good twenty minutes there equiping myself with a torch and easting cheese pastys. Then we went up over a marilyn which my dad was very annoyed he had not yet been over and the Marshals walk skirted around (however he took some time to go up it as he was sweeping the route). It got light eventually and I got to my preakfast point which was great. Just after breakfast I slowed to a crawl but eventually sped up about five miles later just in time to avoid getting lost where the route description was rather vauge.
The 10th last to the 3rd last miles weren’t great as they were pretty much entirely on roads. =(
I did survive though and manage to do over 4 miles an hour at the end to get into the finish in a pretty good time.

My mum also drove around the route and walked along with me or some stretchs which was nice and gave me someone to talk to (though I talked to random other walkers that I happened to be walking by).
I was the only 18 year old to take part (the average entrant is about 50) although there were a couple of other guys below twenty (one of him had his 19th birthday two days beforehand).

Anyhow I’m glad its over and I’ve no idea how I got talked into doing something so stupid.