Tag Archives: simpleCodeTricks

The magic JS console thing

Source here – https://github.com/devdave/DevDave-s-miscellanious-bucket/tree/master/jsConsole

Just wanted to see what would be involved in making a terminal like UI for the web. Honestly there’s a few REALLY annoying bits, but with a bit of hackery it was pretty straight forward. I’ve found splitting up the keyCode/which between key press and key down events was a lot simpler then making some sort of jury rigged code to character map when trying to compute shifted keys.

Also, I put in a brutally ugly left to right parser that does auto-complete / tab completion for good measure. It’s got a very limited vocabulary but I could easily snap it into an asyncronous Ajax handler to bridge it with a much more powerful server side module.

Like all of my short term projects, no warranty or guarantee that it works is provided or implied.

Advanced collision detection

Unfortunately I haven’t gotten the chance to completely read this ( http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/03/25/speculative-contacts-an-continuous-collision-engine-approach-part-1/ ) but what I’ve read has been very educational and potentially useful for future game development.

A quick synopsis is that the linked article provides a very well documented approach for dealing with collisions in time. Say you have an object that should have collided with another, but it’s velocity or translation across the drawing surface is so high that in the time between frames it completely skips over another entity without colliding. In physical reality there would be a collision, but in computer terms there isn’t easy logic to detect and resolve these false-negative near misses.

Hosting local, the ghetto fabulous way

One of the first big draws of Ruby on Rails in late 2006 was the ability to host my development environment locally. Not only did this cut down on the chore work of developing in an environment, but it probably also boosted productivity for me substantially. A year later when I started teaching myself Python, another nail was hammered into the coffin that is my opinion of PHP. That said, I’ve toyed with a lot of different idea’s of hosting a PHP environment locally but to a degree stymied in the effort.
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