Family commitments meant I missed last week's roundup, so here's two weeks new for you.
- For those looking for a little downtime, why not try out Joe's implementation of the classic RTS game, Galactic Empire? He's got it to the stage it's ready for testing, so why not jump in and give it a go?
Seb has been doing a full rewrite of the MiniScript language in TypeScript so it can run natively in a desktop browser. Not an easy undertaking, but he's been powering through, showing us many updates every day, and it's even possible to do line-by-line debugging. This looks like a fantastic project that will make writing MiniScript more universally accessible. It's early days for his project though, let's just hope he manages to work it through to completion. You can check out the details in the MiniScript Discord thread for his project, or even test out the demo (note you need to turn on the browser console to see the output).
Good news and bad news. The good news is, that Joe has rolled out a custom GPT (a chat AI) that can answer all your MiniScript questions. The bad news currently is that only ChatGPT+ subscribers can access it. Hopefully, it will be open to the public in the future. Read about it in Joe's Blog post.
Another very interesting article from Joe, featuring one of the demo projects that come with Mini Micro, is 2dVis, which can be used to visualise the two-dimensional visibility of an area from a given point. If you go check out the post, it has a great demonstration of cast shadows from a point light source.
An amazing developer Ayecue has written a Visual Studio Code extension for MiniScript, as an update to a previous project supporting GreyScript for the game GreyHack. For those who like using VSCode for development, it has some very nice features for writing MiniScript code in that IDE. Check it out a https://github.com/ayecue/miniscript-vs
Someone in the discord threw out the challenge of writing a MiniScript interpreter in MiniScript, so as a fun exercise, Marc Gurevitx took up the challenge and put up a GitHub repository of a parser implementation. It's always great to see people thinking outside the box.
Another quick tip blog post from Joe, demonstrating his excellent findFile function is Mini Micro 1.2. Go have a read at https://dev.to/joestrout/quick-tip-findfile-202a
There's always lots of other discussion going on related to MiniScript, Mini Micro and another general coding discussion, on the MiniScript Discord, so why not stop by and say hello?
And of course, my final entry each week is on the progress of my MiniScript in Godot implementation. As mentioned, family has kept me busy this week (and Black Friday sale shopping hasn't helped....). But I have a new laptop for more mobile development, which is great as I can't always get to my desktop machine when I have spare time.
So, what have I achieved? Well, I've done quite a bit of refinement of behind-the-scenes code improvement for passing multiple types between Godot/C++ and MiniScript, instead of just using strings for my testing as I did originally. This is one of the last big pieces to get working for the core layer of my design.
Other pieces I've been working on are a UI Toolbar for the script editor, so far implementing script save/load functionality, and I've also implemented hotkey code expansion in the editor, so you can type short text snippets and with the press of a hotkey, have that expanded in full sections of code, as long as you like. These expansions are hard coded in GDScript at the moment, but I plan to expand them into a configuration resource as well, so a simple text file can be used to add as many or as few expansions are required, very easily.
That's it for this week. See you all next time.