I was pretty busy programming at the start of 2021 across a few different languages. Let’s jump right in!

C#

I’m nearing the end of the GameDev.tv online RTS course, and it’s been a lot of fun. Since last time we added player colors to the units, a minimap that can be used to move around the screen, new units, and a Lobby UI. I’m a few lessons away from being able to create binaries I can use to play online with others or via Steam.

Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?

• Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
• Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
• C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
• Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
• 3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
• Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.

So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!

C#

Back when I was doing GameDev.Tv’s Unity 2D class, I really wanted to know how to do multiplayer games (I also wanted some better support on using Xbox/PS3 remotes in games). Well, this year they released their Multiplayer class. So, naturally, I bought it up. I started working on it, resulting in two Github Repos. In the first section we were learned the basics of the Mirror add-on. I’m currently working through the second section, where we will create a basic RTS. I haven’t reached a real differentiation point from the GameDev folks. That may come later after we get past the basics.

Selenium for Automated Pool Signup

Spent the last week debugging that script. Turns out the key to getting it to run in cron is to add export DISPLAY=:0 && before your command. That’s because Chrome will not launch without a display to send Chrome to.

Python Morsels

The most recent Python Morsels exercise was to figure out if a number was a perfect square. Trey began his problem statement this way: “This week I want you to write a function that might seem simple at first, but there’s a number of ways to solve it.” It definitely took some out of the box thinking for me to figure out how I was going to solve the base case. The math.sqrt() function returns a float so that it can give answers for non-perfect squares. So I kept thinking and I realized that any perfect, non-complex square root must be an integer. So I came up with the conditional to return. (And after all this Pythonic learning, I’ve learned not to evaluate for truth and then return a variable. Just return the evaluation)

Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)

Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)

For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)