Welcome to another week of MiniScript news.
The Advent of Code is still going. I thought Joe's Day 10 entry looked interesting. Check it out in Joe's Mastodon article on Day 10. I have no idea what to make out of his Day 15 entry, but here's a picture of the result.
Speaking of articles, an awesome new article on MiniScript has been produced by the makers of Beanz Magazine, a great publication promoting STEM and STEAM education for children (or anyone wanting to learn more about STEM really). The article is about Making a Mini Micro Collection Game. Well worth a read. They also have other Articles on MiniScript Coding that are also good sources of information.
Related to above, the folks at Beanz Magazine could do with some help to continue their great work. So they have started a GoFundMe Campaign, for anybody who would like to support their efforts.
Joe's also getting in on the math side of things, and has written an article about Angles - yes that's correct, Math stuff! But computer programming and math really can't be separated, and it's more entertaining than it sounds. Check it out.
Seb is still working on his TypeScript implementation of MiniScript and has shown us a cool Pixel to ASCII Art demo.. You'll have to hop into the Discord and check it out if you want to see the demo.
My Roundup for the week on GDMiniScript development actually has some progress this week. The benefit of being on holidays. I've progressed the following :-
Updated the Godot engine build I'm testing against to the 4.3 development build - living on the edge!
Implemented asynchronous calling between MiniScript and GDScript, with configurable delay between waiting for the call to return, or running fully asynchronous. I actually ran through three iterations before coming to the final implementation. Goldilocks would be proud.
Refactored alias injection to better separate it from user code. This is a big improvement behind the scenes that will make aliases easier to implement and expand on in future.
Updated my call passing from basic strings, to fully support variant/value passing, so anything can now be passed back and forth between MiniScript/C++/GDScript as long as they can be converted from one language to another.
and of course the ongoing tidying and tweak of existing code that happens as things get updated.
This has gone a long way to completing big pieces of the core architecture. I now plan to work on finishing some of the basic UI updates such as being able to edit Alias functions in the script editor, instead of being hard coded in GDScript currently, adding a couple more menu options for file management, and add text Input handling. Once I get these elements in place, I think I'm ready to put up a demo windows executable, if anyone is interested in giving it a try. Keep an eye on the discord channel for news on that.
And that's it for another week. This time next week I'll be celebrating Christmas with my family. Not sure yet if I'll do the next Roundup the day before, Christmas Eve, or just put it off completely until after Christmas. I'll see how much news there is closer to the end of the week and decide then.
If you are celebrating Christmas or just the holiday season, I hope you all have a wonderful time with friends and family.
Until next time, may you code be swift, and your bugs beneficial.