Fr0styMatt88

Submitter here Jon,

Firstly - I must apologize for submitting as 'Fuze BASIC' - indeed my confusion was from your previous product; I did not realize that 'FUZE4' was actually a new name and just thought it was a clever way of saying 'FUZE BASIC for Nintendo Switch'. EDIT: Mods, could you change the title if possible? I can't edit it myself.

Everything else you've said - I 99% agree! (I think we could have an interesting discussion around "every "coding for children thing" is fake"). I started out on the Commodore 64, reading the books and typing in the program listings; I'm thrilled that you've made something like FUZE4 and think it's a wonderful fit for the Nintendo Switch. Lots of people own this console and now they too can have the 'coding out in the living room on the TV' experience that I (and I'm sure many others here) had growing up. I also think having the tutorial material built-in is great; I have fond memories of spending evenings immersed in the comprehensive QBASIC help documentation, way before the days of the Internet and a thousand distractions.

I'm glad to hear that you've submitted a patch to fix many of the bugs - that comment was the only one that gave me pause with regards to purchasing FUZE4 right away. With that out of the way, I'm really looking forward to diving in!

One final note - I think the Nintendo Switch eShop stands out as a platform that hasn't raced to the bottom when it comes to the pricing of games. I hope it stays that way.

I think FUZE is closer to a fantasy console (eg- PICO-8) than it is to a 'coding for kids' thing (eg- Scratch or Alice), since you have to actually type in code and that code is text. There's nothing wrong with 'coding for kids' things either IMHO; I find the design of them quite interesting actually (from both a language design and a UI perspective).

What do you define as 'real coding'? What kinds of things are you thinking of as 'coding for kids'?

They could go 100% retro and release a printed magazine with type-in listings.... :)

I also believe that you can use a bluetooth keyboard with it, though I haven't tried.

So did the Blitz BASIC family. The thing that always impressed and astonished me about BlitzMax was just how many games seemed to actually get _finished_ with it. Lots of them even looked very polished. It was really cool to see at the time (around 2006ish I think is when I was following it, though not exactly sure).

Have there been any other games besides Cargo-Not made and released with it?

I really really wanted to like Codea, but couldn't get my head around how you'd organize a big project with it. That and I find touchscreen keyboards terrible to code with.

EDIT: Found this forum thread for games and apps made with Codea, looks inspiring: https://codea.io/talk/discussion/1983/app-store-games-and-ap...

The Switch version at least is available on the Nintendo eShop on the Switch, fully approved by Nintendo (unlike the Ruby interpreter that shipped inside 'A Dark Room' on the eShop).

For some reason HN changed the casing of my submission title - 'BASIC' got changed to 'Basic'.

It’d be awesome if they did this next with their movie and TV stuff. I have a bunch of stuff purchased on iTunes that I can’t play on my TV (out of HDMI ports and TV stand space and no AirPlay solution for Android that I know of will work due to the DRM).

Really cool they’re starting to open this stuff up at least.

I have a first-gen Parrot AR.Drone collecting dust. Great fun initially until I started reading about flyaways and then got too worried to actually fly the thing outside. Even nowadays I get the impression this issue was never solved. At the time it seemed like one of those widely-reported but never admitted-to things. I never understood why the software wouldn't just go into a fixed landing routine if the control signal was lost or if a watchdog tripped. Still really curious about that actually, if anyone here knows more technical details.

So yeah that and the battery was never good enough. Now I look at drones and it seems like you have either really really cheap, subpar options or incredibly expensive DJI-quality drones. Something that costs around $300.00 AUD and that could fly for half an hour at a time would be a great toy, but I get that the tech isn't there. So I end up feeling like they're great tech that's ultimately killed by a thousand little tradeoffs. At least for me; if I was into video then one would be great for some things. That's a limited market in the end though, I think.

It's amazing when you remind yourself that your web request is actually causing something physical to happen on the other side of the world. That blows my mind every time I really think about it. It's all so seamless most of the time that it's easy to forget that it's an actual physical process that happens in the real world, with real EM waves travelling through the real physical world.

I've seen a ton of Kitchen Nightmares videos and menu bloat seems to be a pretty common criticism, to the point where now if I go to a restaurant I'll get a bit worried that the food is going to be bad if the menu is big.

C++ is great, but I’ve always hesitated in pushing Qt at my employer because I’ve never quite understood their licensing. It seems like it’s really expensive for actual commercial use.

I keep meaning to dive into it to learn it now that my C++ is better, but what stops me there is that I don’t quite get where QtQuick + JavaScript fits in, or what parts of Qt I should be using / putting time into learning. For other languages, I don’t want to use an ‘unofficial’ binding in case it breaks.

There’s some really interesting stuff around this, once you start digging. I’m aphakic in both eyes (no lenses; they were removed as cataracts when I was a kid) and was blind as a child through some of the critical period of vision development. That left me having what I think can be described as bilateral amblyopia - essentially two ‘lazy eyes’, though that’s not really a good description in the sense that ‘lazy eye’ seems to be commonly misunderstood.

So the weird thing is that both my eyes have a visual acuity around 20/120 or worse; that’s with correction (glasses) and it depends on the day (tiredness/dryness/etc) — but having lived this way my entire life essentially, I find it REALLY difficult to describe what it’s like to people. People think things off in the distance must be ‘blurry’, but that’s not the case at all. It’s more like ‘less detailed’, like if you turn the resolution and texture detail down. It’s not like an unfocused lens at all. There are studies I’ve found that seem to back this up.

Another problem I have that’s related is a nystagmus - both my eyes oscillate involuntarily from side-to-side, separate from the normal saccades (rapid eye movements) that everyone has. You’d think I’d see the whole world oscillating from side to side - but I don’t at all. I don’t usually even notice these movements when I look in the mirror, though I can see them if I’m looking at a video of my own face.

That is, most of the time. There’s one really strange failure mode I’ve observed - PWM-controlled small LED lights or segment displays like on a digital clock, particularly if they’re red but green as well, in a dark room. If it’s dim enough that I can still dimly see what surrounds the display, I can sometimes notice the LED oscillating left and right, WHILE THE STUFF SURROUNDING IT STAYS STILL. It’s really freaking weird!

in short: the eye and brain are complicated!

With regards to Android apps asking for permissions like "view and edit the files on your device" -- I only recently stumbled into something about this while helping a friend with understanding app submission.

There is/was a long-standing bug on Android that as far as I can tell Google never completely fixed (though I might be wrong). For apps that have both an .APK and .OBB file, the Play Store would save the .OBB file to the user's device with the incorrect file owner. This would cause the app to fail (or at least the app wouldn't see the .OBB file already there and would, I think, re-download it). The workaround involved requiring the app developer to ask for this permission, even though their actual app didn't need it, in order to avoid this issue. ANother workaround was to ask users to reboot their phone, since (I think) the permission would be corrected after a reboot (not sure, didn't delve too deeply into that in particular).

For those that are unfamiliar - .APK files are the application packages and they're limited in size by the Google Play Store. To get around the size limit, developers can create a larger .OBB file that they could host on Play (I think?) but then have to download. Google then implemented automatic downloading of the .OBB file by the Play Store, but as far as I can tell never got it right. The whole thing seems to be getting superceded by a new format called AAB (Android Application Bundle).

See: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37544273

Followed by: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37075181

For some context: https://forum.unity.com/threads/android-app-bundle-how-to-up...

I think the exact same thing too. I know I'm in a relative minority in being able to keep my Facebook privacy settings in check, for example. It's a really tough problem.

One hint I can give you is that joining groups seemed to be the thing that really turned my news feed into something else. I've joined groups related to game programming, music production, Arduino and a bunch of others related to local music gigs (plus some support groups that I feel I can contribute to) and now there's actually a lot of interesting (and pleasantly technical) stuff in my feed. The other effect this had is that the ads I see are a lot better as well.

Somewhat related -- and boy I never thought I'd say this! -- some stuff started changing in my life for the better recently and I decided to get back on Facebook and get involved again (I hadn't deleted my account or anything, I just hadn't posted or interacted in a very long time). I joined a bunch of groups that interested me and more importantly for me, I started making an effort to like and comment on posts of extended family that I rarely get to see in real life.

It's been REALLY positive. Just last night, we had a huge family thread going sharing our family pasta sauce recipes. It.... made me really happy! Now at the somewhat-annual extended family get-together, we'll have something in common to talk about.

I know it's definitely not a substitute for face-to-face interaction, but in letting go of my prejudices just a little, I've found a nice bit of additional joy in my life and hopefully made other people smile at the same time.

Speaking of Wine, you can actually run x86 Wine using QEMU on a Raspberry Pi and run Windows software with it. You essentially chroot into an x86 Debian environment that's running with QEMU, then install Wine in there and run it. There's a product called 'ExaGear Desktop' which makes the process pretty seamless from what I hear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yZ5UiQyeFA

3Blue1Brown videos are awesome:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw

I think this is actually a good outcome, at least from a standpoint of avoiding a technical monoculture (especially in hardware). It's probably also good for general innovation as a whole.

ElectroBOOM does the absolute best segues -- makes me laugh every time!

This was what I took away from the post as well. The realism was refreshing and to me very positive. It shows there actually can be a middle-ground in indie development and not just the two extremes of “Have a viral hit and earn millions!” and “Spend more than your life savings and go broke!”.

All too often I think people are happy to throw their hands in the air and presume that indie success is just ‘impossible’. This article, for me, added some much-needed nuance to the discussion.

Did that facial capture technology end up anywhere? I still remember how amazing the facial animations looked in that game and can't think of any other game since where it's been that noticeable. Although maybe that was just because of how much better they were than anything else out there at the time?

I was thinking of updates before even getting to the third paragraph of your comment - to that question I would answer a definite 'yes'. I think slow Internet poses a massive security risk in this regard. It isn't even about users choosing to run or not to run updates - my parents had such slow Internet at one stage that a large Windows or OSX update would never get a chance to download before the next lot of updates arrived. They'd be several updates behind through no choice of their own.

Incidentally I think Windows Updates are getting better in regard to disruptiveness. What I wish they would do though is implement some kind of "reboot as many times as you need to apply the update and then just power down once it's done". I will hit 'Update and shutdown', then turn on my PC the next day and have to wait for the second stage of the update to run. Though again, it seems vastly improved as of late - that second stage takes very little time at all.

My gut feeling is that geoengineering has to happen. It's like trying to get rich by saving pennies here and there (cutting emissions) vs investing in a successful business (geoengineering).

I mean, we can cut and cut emissions but doesn't that just delay the inevitable (assuming continued population growth)? Plus getting everyone to change their behaviour is a nice goal but at some point we'll need to admit it probably isn't possible to create the behaviour changes needed to stop a catastrophe (human nature and long-term thinking being what it is).

For proofs, could you recommend any good resources for a beginner? Is there a 'beginner proof' that's great to start with?

I figured out I actually like maths waaaay after I'd left uni. From that time at uni I have a vague memory of proofs being something like a whiteboard full of equations that I got lost somewhere in.

I have a vague feeling that what I'm thinking of is 'formal proofs', but I'm not sure.

For me it was kind of the opposite. I was a die-hard Amiga kid until around 1994 I think. Then I started to see all the cool games getting released on the PC. I would wish for games like Commander Keen and Duke Nukem. The VGA Sierra games. That was even before CD-ROMs took off.

It was a shame; the Amiga was so far behind by that point. It was so far behind that the PC could beat it using mostly software! Accelerator cards were crazily expensive for the Amiga ($1,500.00 AUD+ if I remember). The A1200 was too little, too late for me.

Getting my 486 sparked off probably one of the most exciting gaming times of my life.

Still insanely fond memories - I wrote a chunk of an adventure game engine in AMOS on the Amiga. It Came From The Desert II is one of my most fondly-remembered games.

Speaking of adventure games - the early Sierra games had their best engine implementations on the Amiga. AGI on the Amiga used the Tandy 3-voice version of the game music and I believe also supported a custom game palette (so for example Leisure Suit Larry 1 uses a better skin-tone colour on the Amiga than on the PC version). SCI0 games (think King's Quest 4. Police Quest 2) used instrument samples (which I believe were from the MT-32 version of the music for the game) to play probably the best music outside of the MT-32 PC versions.

SCI1 on the other hand, was a total mess. Slow to the point of barely playable and -- worst of all -- horrible graphics. I heard somewhere (can't remember where exactly) that SCI1 games did not take advantage of the Amiga's palette capability - the ENTIRE game was reduced to one colour palette shared across all rooms. The Amiga could do so much better, even if it couldn't keep up with the PC at that point; a good example being the port of King's Quest 6, which was done by Revolution Software and not Sierra. That port was praised. LucasArts games were also great - Monkey Island II was great on the Amiga (it's actually where I first played it).

Such great memories!

I owned an A2000 growing up, great machine.

The real beginning of the end for me came when I started seeing what the Sierra adventures looked like on the PC in magazines.

Then Wolfenstein 3D.

Then Doom.

I wonder how that sentiment will change when people have no other choice. I can imagine now that it’s easy to say no to GMO bananas because there are still other varieties; it’s not something that people may see as directly affecting them. I think it’ll be a different story if non-GMO bananas become crazy expensive or non-existent.