📚 How I go about testing a little fix to a DRAW statement bug

 

🖥 Circular Meander

About Meanders: read this Wikipedia article. 

This program is based on the image shared by bplus in this post (QB64 Phoenix Edition forum).

NOTE: Somebody is insisting (or "some may insist") that the graphic generated by my program is NOT a meander.  To me, although the program's process does not draw the pattern in one continuous line, the result is "a decorative border that is a continuous line, shaped into a repeated motif."

This animated program repeatedly draws the same style of meander in an infinite loop, with plot points that are relative to each other, but together varying depending on random screen resolution on every iteration, and random colors.

This is an unstructured program, coded very organically/incrementally without any planning, and without any desire to minimize the amount of code.

Although I originally created the program to generate the graph in one step, I've setup the animation to draw the graph in four steps.  This gives a visual idea of how circles are used, and plot points used at specific angles on points of each of the eight circles.

The program has short pauses throughout.  At any time, you can click/touch the screen to pause the animation.

• Run the program
• View the source code

🖥 Golden Ball 1 Crop Circle

Over in the QB64 Phoenix Edition community, bplus (one of their prolific programmers) suggested (in this post) a little programming challenge to recreate the pretty awesome "Golden Ball Hill" crop circles:

In this program, I tackled the formation that interested me the most, but stopped short of the partial doughnut holes in the "half moon" shapes in the formation.  For me, the gist of this as a "brain age" kind of exercise involved just getting the fundamental process figured out, and graphing the thing via a simple animation in an infinite loop with random colors:

• Run the program
• View the source code

🖥 Café Wall Illusion

This program is based on the graphic output of a BBC-BASIC-for-SDL program created by Kurt Moerman and shared with the "BASIC Programming Language" Facebook Group.  (Although Kurt's post cannot be shared, his code is available on Github here.)

This BAM program:

• Run it
• View the source code

🎉 New version of Blitkrieg Stratagem Chooser

Barely a moment after sharing the program, I decided to immediately tackle a few personal annoyances:

• I decided to let my coding style freak flag fly  That involved:
• slight reorganization of the code to fit my tastes, including moving some bode into GOSUB routines
• some "strategic" use of emojis here and there to help me quickly spot certain particular things
• naming conventions for my GOSUB routines (I like to start them with an alphabetic character followed by a three digit number, and an emoji) 
• I added the ability to, at any time, copy the current A.I. Turn statistics to the clipboard, which you can then paste anywhere of use
• I figured, if the program is presenting that info, might as well make it possible to "export" that info via the no fuss no muss approach that is making use of the clipboard.
• I pasted sample output at the bottom of this post
• Because I needed different actions when clicking/touching the screen:
• I modified the program to require clicking a defined area of the screen related to getting the stratagem for the A.I. Bot's Next Turn
• I added another defined area of the screen related to sending game statistics to the clipboard
• I reconsidered my use of colors in the bottom half of the screen to keep usage of color to a minimum (as in only for those very important things we really want to highlight)

Compare the screenshot of today's new version to the screenshot of the previous version found in the earlier blog post.

• Run the program
• View the source code

Sample stats copied to the clipboard (best formatted with a fixed font after pasting):

Statistics:

    BigGun: 4

    CounterAttack: 4

    EconomicWarfare: 2

    ForTheGlory: 4

    RapidDeployment: 3

    ResearchAndDevelopment: 6

    Secure: 2

    SteamRoll: 6

Turn  Stratagem

----  ---------

   1  CounterAttack

   2  EconomicWarfare

   3  ForTheGlory

   4  BigGun

   5  SteamRoll (BigGun)

   6  ResearchAndDevelopment

   7  ForTheGlory

   8  EconomicWarfare

   9  CounterAttack

  10  Secure

  11  CounterAttack

  12  ResearchAndDevelopment

  13  CounterAttack

  14  ForTheGlory

  15  SteamRoll (ForTheGlory)

  16  RapidDeployment

  17  SteamRoll (RapidDeployment)

  18  Secure

  19  ResearchAndDevelopment

  20  SteamRoll (ResearchAndDevelopment)

  21  BigGun

  22  SteamRoll (BigGun)

  23  ResearchAndDevelopment

  24  SteamRoll (ResearchAndDevelopment)

  25  RapidDeployment

🖥 Blizkrieg Stratagem Chooser

UPDATE: 🎉 New version of Blitkrieg Stratagem Chooser

I really enjoy tabletop games, particularly games that I can play solo: 1-player games, multiplayer games that have official solo rules, and multiplayer tabletop games that have fan-created solo variants.

Right up there among my favourites, you'll find Blitkrieg! World War Two In 20 Minutes (about the game at BGG).

This two-player game is fantastic, and the included solo rules are very well designed.

However, no matter the tabletop game: I do get a little bit annoyed by cumbersome/fiddly and/or time-consuming mechanisms/processes.

With Blitkrieg!, although I'm quite happy to draw "unit tokens" after every turn, I get annoyed with the process of drawing a stratagem token at the start of the A.I. Bot's turn (when playing solo.)

I have no idea why I'm annoyed, and I don't really care.  I think: "what am I going to do about it?"

That problem is just a fun programming exercise.  Since my heart belongs to the BASIC programming language, then it is BAM to the rescue.

• Run the program
• View the source code

🖥 Stratagem Icons for Blitzkrieg! World War Two in 20 Minutes

I created this little program to show 16x16 pixel icons created with 2x2 groups of custom characters.

• Run the program
• View the source code
• About Blitzkrieg! World War Two in 20 Minutes