Diary 2018-12-26
A couple things I did today:
- Finished reading one book.
- Started packing the tic-tac-toe sprites into an arrangement that cuts down on awful offset math. I've currently packed the marks and the board sprites, and my plan next is to move the cursor sprites to after the board sprites, make the missing cursor sprites, and pack the win-line sprites afterwards. I spent a lot of this packing process figuring out how best to move the sprites around. I think I found some nice workflows in Sublime Text for shunting around pixels in bulk, and I realized that moving around a single sprite in PICO-8 is sort of not that bad, sort of. Is there any spritesheet editor that lets you say "okay, permute these sprites in a straightforward fashion without shifting them around relative to their edges"? Like, pull a sprite up from one row, have the other sprites shift to the right, and the one on the end overflows to the next row? That's not applicable to this, but it seems handy in the context of using a png spritesheet or something.
- Started reading a book on Erlang. I'm going to trial this for the idea of blogging about books.
What I've got so far from the book, Introducing Erlang:
- Do not read this on a black-and-white display like most e-readers have. The fancy color highlighting will give you eye-strain.
- The period acts as a statement delimiter, and also a decimal separator. I'm cool with this as long as I'm not the one writing a parser for it.
- I haven't played around in the shell much, but I think I understand the basics so far.
- I just got to explaining modules, and it's too late at night for me to process this stuff properly, so I'm stopping now.