A major drawback of Ruby and Python is that they are slow. Ruby 1.9 is much, much faster than 1.8, and Python just keeps getting faster as bytecode improves. But compared to the C family of languages, you might as well run the calculations by hand.

I've been looking into wider-audience programming, namely through Microsoft's .NET interfaces. That sounds dirty to UNIX programmers, but honestly, it's kind of handy.

Tangent: iPad

Before I get started, I just wanted to get it out there: yes, I bought an iPad. That stupid, consumer-oriented, plus-sized iPod Touch? I've got one in 32GB form. And you know what? I don't regret buying it. Nothing's quite the same as holding the Internet in your hands... in a form you can actually read it in (without the need for a mobile site). 99% of sites I go to work just fine without Flash, thanks to the video codecs and HTML5 tech that Apple stashed in this device.

Having friend'd Mike Rayhawk himself on Facebook is glorious. Yesterday, he posted a link to this guy's personal LEGO redesign project. The research and schematics behind it are insanely extensive, and everything looks perfectly functional. The sketches themselves were even really nice...

And thus, feeling inspired, I popped open my shiny copy of GIMP early yesterday afternoon and set to work.

Ruby was originally created as a multi-paradigm language. Recently, it's just been a web programming language, thanks to Ruby on Rails. While it's not a bad thing, and has certainly shot Ruby into the mainstream programming community, what about the other parts? What about systems coding?

Well, look no further. I looked and noticed I didn't have the tree command installed on my Xubuntu box, and decided this would be as good a test as any for the workhorse. I fired up gedit and away I went! After only about fifteen or twenty minutes, I'd pounded out a working version.

I've never been a fan of unit testing. I didn't get the point. Why would I write code that looks at the results of this test or that function when that's what I need to be doing? My tests consisted of starting up my application and then navigating my way to the feature that needed demonstration.

But then I started Zombies! 2, and it ended up changing everything.

7DRL is an annual competition to make one thing: a roguelike. The timeframe? Seven days, from start to finish. No code you already used, etc. etc. Basically, it's a Nanowrimo for roguelikes in a week.

I'm going to use something I already tried to do this with: Javascript. HTML and some tricky use of div tags should get me a nice fake console, and then it's just a matter of writing my own curses on top of it. Though I'm not officially in the contest, it starts Monday.

As usual, it's up on Github: github.com/h0rs3r4dish/jack

So, I'm still working on the Wesnoth Strategy series, but a side project has come up while I was doing more multiplayer research.

A while ago I made an IRC game called Zombies!, which was sort of loosely based off of an audio-only miniseries Olothontor and I produced an episode of a while back. It was a turn-based game with support for a few different kinds of weapons, and user-created maps. It was pretty fun, but then I started building on its success.

The patches brought the game to its knees.

In Part One I introduced the basics of tactics & strategy (plus the distinction), and gave some examples of applying those basic ideas.

Part Two is about some of the subtleties of warfare: misdirection, unit choice, and of course, recovering from a bad outcome. Let's start at the top.

Tricky Play & Just Being Obnoxious

Giving your opponent a run for their money isn't always the result of a fair match.

I stumbled upon an interesting variety of MOC building recently, and one that has brought me some excellent warships over the past week or so. For those of you who aren't awesome and don't know, a MOC (acronym for My Own Creation) is a construction made of LEGO briks (yes, without the c. That's just how it goes).

Wesnoth. Olothontor already blogged about this yesterday, but on a different note. He seemed to mainly be venting on the shortcomings of the Knalgan Alliance (aka Dwarves). I'm going to talk about winning and losing, zones of control, income, rushing...