Harsh J

I’m sure there has been a lot of incidents where you have cursed your most recently acquired game, be it anything from a silly to annoying bug, the lack of a feature that would have made playing more heavenly for you or even something as small as better detail on some object on screen.

Now what if the game were open source, to the fullest extent rather than just the “Extend”. You don’t like the character’s tail, you contribute an idea in form of a feature-request or by getting into the development yourself. So do million others. Together you can, over time, form a completely different game than the one you were being unsatisfied with!

Yo Frankie! - An open source game in active development.

The usual way of extending a game would be to add in map and skin packs while letting the functionality of the entire game remain constant. What if the game evolves with time, adding in new moves, more pick-ups and extras, and more elements to the game, such as weapons or collectibles?

Though these are present in some of the games alive today, it would be greater if the game were or went open-source, opening the game’s code to a world of never-before imagined possibilities and also getting in tons of optimization over time. Of course, building a game big enough like the heavyweights we have today requires the work of a large active team behind it, but once done with its release, getting in additions to the code would we amazingly easy were it supported by a good version-tracking system!

Playing such a game would mean endless hours of fun, repeated every couple of months for a completely different experience while still remaining the old charms that a player liked. New innovative concepts implemented by avid code-enabled gamers would add in more and more goodies, much like how Compiz-Fusion is today, an idea being born a day and implemented almost as fast.

Yes there would be a point where it would hit a roadblock and this is where the next game development has to begin. Ideas found in the older version could be tried out across a multitude of other genres, and what a learning experience would it be for creating that “ultimate” game many always dreamed about!

I hope some biggie in gaming gets onto this OSS bandwagon, with atleast a half-baked title cracked open, and pretty soon, since the game market is losing out on ideas really, and thats cause ideas are limited to them in the closed confines they live in.

You’d say what of the OSS games we have today, and I’d point at their evergrowing success till date. No game has ever been given a cold shoulder and kicked out of existence, right from Nethack to Nezuiz. Though this post was inspired by a particular game known as Yo Frankie!.

If you dare to post the true output of this from Linux:

grep ass .*/*cc*.x*

I’ve tried a lot of ways to do this thing in Linux (Ubuntu) and finally I found the easiest one to use.

Called simply as ‘chm2pdf‘, this is a small script written in Python and it uses a few dependencies you might have to install first.

Now to install it, simply follow this guide:

1. Install dependencies by running in the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install htmldoc libchm-bin python-chm
2. Download chm2pdf by clicking this.
3. Now extract the downloaded file.
4. Open your Terminal and browse to the folder you extracted and run:
sudo python setup.py install
5. You’re done!


Now to use it is very simple:
In Terminal, type:
chm2pdf --book filename.chm
# (Where filename is obviously your required file to be converted.)
And surprise surprise, a PDF copy will be waiting for you just next to your CHM file!

Have no idea why it took near 2 hours for me to write this. Maybe it was the stupid OOP paper I gave today, I’ve been in a bad mood after writing a 40-pager and yet feeling unsatisfactory about it.

So back to the post’s topic: The Look and Say Sequence, which I found today while solving the level 10 of The Python Challenge, is a very odd sequence of numbers which are formed by counting and spelling out the digits sequentially.

The series looks like the following:

1 11 21 1211 111221 and so on …
How this is formed:
See the first digit 1. Spell it as One One (One in quantity that is). This is the general idea.
Thus:
1 – One One: 11
11 – Two One(s): 21
21 – One Two and One One: 1211
1211 – One One, One Two and Two One(s): 111221
And on and on and on …

And now, for the Python Code.

( Took me over 80 minutes with lots of scrapping and frustration to write. Bad day )

Found this today while browsing del.icio.us.

Visit: The Python Challenge

(Actually its not necessary you should use Python just cause its named so. Its a regular programming puzzle and you should do just fine with any modern language such as PHP or Java as well. C/C++ might be a bit tedious for use here.)

The good thing about this kind of a challenge is that you never ever would encounter a dead end. Its all possible and you probably know how too, but the answer always depends on how you implement your program to solve things for you. Awesome way to learn and practice code!

Am currently on level 5, having just begun. There are a total of 33 levels currently.

Note: If you are solving it, please refrain from posting spoilers here. Defeats the purpose of the entire ‘programming puzzle‘ if you post code, etc. You may post tips though, that’d be helpful, or at maximum, the basic under-lying algorithm required to crack it.

Enjoy!