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Got a few hours to waste?


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marto
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Joined: 08 Jul 2004
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Location: Brisbane, QLD


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Got a few hours to waste?

Here is a programming game I came across a few weeks ago.

Quite fun, needs a bit of coding experience but worth a look if you got some spare time.

http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/

Steve
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Steven Martin
Twisted Constructions
http://www.botbitz.com

Post Wed Apr 23, 2014 7:45 pm 
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Spockie-Tech
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Joined: 31 May 2004
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Location: Melbourne, Australia


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Since I'm familiarising myself with Processing at the moment for a job, which is Java-based (although not JavaScript) , I rationalised that spending a bit of time having a look at this diversion would be constructive to gain an overview of different Java-ish techniques. Smile

A nice concept, but inconsistently and patchily done.

The premise that you can edit *this bit of the source code file, but not *that bit, is a bit of an unlikely frog to swallow, but I suppose its the only way to keep the challenge purely in the coding realm, unrealistic as it may be.

If thats what real Javascript is roughly like though, its no-wonder that so many people hate on it. What a mess. Function definitions nested inside each other and object definitions, event-triggered behaviours with no clear trigger methods and all sorts of weirdness. Im only a dilettante O.O. Coder, being more of a linear machine code hack, but that structure looks way wacky to me. Is Javascript really like that ?

Some of the puzzles hang together well, others seem like they tried to be clever, but have many un-obvious but trivial ways of bypassing what it seems like was the puzzle they wanted you to solve.

I got up to about level 17 in an hour or so, then got bored and went looking to see what others had done with it.

Whoa, some incredibly arcane complex solutions (particularly the Robot A.I. level), which I solved with about 3 lines of code and a couple of map reloads to get a layout reasonably compatible with my simple solution, and others that looked like they would be hard, but were simple if you made some guesses about the API functions that would require significant javascript experience and werent documented anywhere in the game.

Thats probably the weakest part of the game. The API functions are badly documented, you cant refer back to functions doc'ed in earlier levels easily, and some of the workaround fudges people used to implement global variable types were creative, but would never be necessary in a real programming language.

Overall, its trying to walk the fine line between excluding the 99% of the population that doesnt know anything about programming, and making it trivially easy for anyone who does

B for concept, E for Effort

Something like Robocode - http://robocode.sourceforge.net/
or the older Core-Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
with a plot-line/story wrapped around it would have been better.

Nice find though Steve Smile
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Post Thu Apr 24, 2014 2:02 pm 
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Knightrous
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Joined: 15 Jun 2004
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Location: NSW


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I remember playing a coding game years ago that was a giant SQL database and you had to run SQL commands to attack/defend tables.
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Post Thu Apr 24, 2014 2:18 pm 
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marto
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Joined: 08 Jul 2004
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Location: Brisbane, QLD


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I dunno I found it interesting.

I do agree that there is some simple hacks around stuff which I definitely did and yes the API is tedious to read and a pain when it becomes necessary.

But I quite like the concept though it is a bit poorly implemented.

Steve
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Steven Martin
Twisted Constructions
http://www.botbitz.com

Post Fri Apr 25, 2014 10:06 pm 
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