Thomas Thomassen

Motorcycling Trondheim, Norway to Lund, Sweden round trip (2025) Like last year I decided to ride my motorcycle, a BMW F750 GS 2021, from Trondheim, Norway to Lund, Sweden for this year conference in May. Relying on staying at campsites, lodges and hotels I only…

I finally got around to finish the travel journal of the first of my two longer #motorcycle rides in 2025.

Again I rode from Trondheim to Lund and back in May to meet up with some good friends of mine.

Full sett of photos can be found in my travel journal:
www.thomthom.net/thoughts/202...

Very pretty glitch art! 🤩🫖

You can play the game at: games.evilsoftwareempire.com/sweeper/play/
(Doesn't work too well on mobile devices)

Sweeper — A hat tip to the simple fun games Minesweeper that came with Windows was part of my childhood since the early Windows 3.1 version. The whole family would battle for the highest score. It was simple, it was fun, it was always there.…

I made a thing!

A nostalgic remake of Minesweeper that runs in your browser, loads instantly, without any ads (ehem - Microsoft), it even have cute little retro-like beeps and sounds.

I wrote about it on my good old fashioned blog:
www.thomthom.net/thoughts/202...

#gamedev #indiedev #retro #tui

Dependencies.., as in if you pull in another project via add_project or FetchContent?

I think most my projects are targeting 3.20+, some even 3.30+, using target_* commands.

I was mainly curious if there was any significant workflow changes in 4.x that makes it worth to update.

@crascit.com Any recommended reading on moving from CMake 3.x to 4.x?

I didn't see any dedicated section in Professional CMake. Are the changes not that big?

Struggling to get good video recording of the dark colours of the TUI game.

YouTube video by Thomas Thomassen rsl sim - FOLL "Follow that bot!"

Implemented the FOLL command. Robots can how follow other robots.

However, they lack the ability to evaluate their own state so they won't evade when they have the doll or getting too damaged. (yet)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj_3...

#gamedev #tui

Also testing out the Beeline Moto II GPS. Really like that it's possible to rate road sections. Something I've been missing on other GPS units. App is pretty easy to use as well. Promising first impression.

Getting to the last bit of the motorcycle season here in Norway. Soon they will start to salt the roads which I don't want to make the bike suffer through. Days are also getting shorter. But loving the autumn colours. 🍁🍂

#motorcycle #scrambler

YouTube video by Thomas Thomassen rsl-sim - Robot Vision "like moths to a flame"

Robots now have vision - but still lacking the ability to pick up anything. Do they end up hovering around their target.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvJA...

#gamedev #tui

Many thanks to @stuffwithstuff.com for his excellent Crafting Interpreters book that inspired me to tinker with lexing and parsing the RSL language which in turn snowballs into a little simulator. (Influentially I'm also finding great use of this Game Programming Patterns book. A++)

YouTube video by Thomas Thomassen rsl-sim - "hello world"

In the early 2000s I played droidarena, an online multiplayer game. It featured bots that played against each other controlled by RSL scripts.(Robot Scripting Language)

It was a simple assembly like language and I started toying with an interpreter for it.

#gamedev

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvd...

Toilet paper during pandemics

It's so fun to ride! 🤩

The standard 10/90 tyres works better than I expected. Will probably replace with something like 50/50 tyres once these are worn out.

New bike 🤩

Rides well on both tarmac and gravel. Sounds and looks great as well!

#motorcycle

@stuffwithstuff.com where do you prefer reports of dead links in your books? (Game programming/Crafting interpreters)
(Love the books btw! I feel they fill some key missing gaps many other articles/books misses)

Heh, a Skippy GPT could be fun. I have to try that.

Last week I tried to create a "Charles Henry Higginsworth III from Boston, Massachusetts" GPT, but it wasn't too good. Doesn't seem to have enough knowledge of the side story in After On.

Looks stunning!
Where is this?

👀

And that's not really a rare use-case. I wish IDEs came with more tools like this built-in.

But I kept mixing up my Y:0=top or Y:0=bottom as I was moving data between image formats and third party APIs... Kept drawing the data for hand on a grid paper until I bit the bullet and just generated it for every failed test. Made it a lot easier to see what my code really did and iterate faster.

Probably very similar logic. All I'm doing is walking the dualgrid of a bitmap filtered to a threshold to extract "features". Then doing a DouglasPeucker simplification.

I have however been thinking of test-visualization and how IDEs could support ways to display generated images along with their test-runners. Would help the test workflow - especially in TDD.

The SVG logic was rather simple for this grid-viz. I used tinyxml2 to craft the data, and it was mostly doing that in a handful of loops.

But for nodes like you describe, then graphviz or similar is probably better.

Here is an example SVG: www.thomthom.net/thoughts/wp-...

(From an unpublished blog post I've been working on - on the topic of test visualisation.)

I have used SVG as a nice test visualisation output tool. Easy to author without fancy libs. (XML lib helps)
I found that I could easily create interactive SVGs as well. I was doing a bitmap tracing algorithm and I needed to visualize the data and steps.

I might have to have a another look. While YARD docs and Solargraphs has worked ok, I have wished for deeper static analysis that's able to follow deeper into the call chains.

Interesting. I looked into RBS a couple of years ago. But found tooling support challenging. It was then easier to stick with YARD doc comments for IDE type insight.

I felt type annotation in Ruby wasn't complete and fragmented. Compared to Python, PHP and Typescript.

Things have improved?