Ephera
I was playing this really simple mobile phone game, where you basically go on these mining trips, then you tap the screen as quickly as possible. So, I thought to myself, I wonder if there’s a way to simulate screen taps, to tap at superhuman speeds.
I found an app for that, this app had its own scripting language. Admittedly, there weren’t many concepts to learn in this language, but wait, there’s more.
Then I thought, maybe I can also automate the menus, between the mining trips.
But this language didn’t have support for multiple files, nor functions, you couldn’t even use labels in your goto statements, meaning my code started to get quite complicated.
So, I actually sort of implemented support for goto labels / shitty functions within my program.
Basically, at the start of the file, I had an if-else block, which read the value of a variable and based on that, it would select between different goto statements.
So, if I wanted to “call a function”, I would set the variable to the function/label name and then goto 0.
If I remember correctly, I did still need to manually update the line numbers in that lookup table at the start, but at least, I didn’t have to do it everywhere in the code anymore.
And yes, I did manage to completely automate grinding that game, using this shitty scripting language.
It was an offline game, and not a good one, I didn’t actually care about making progress in it. But scripting it was significantly more fun than playing it myself.
To make this maybe a bit more concrete, without decoupling them, your game logic will look basically like this:
- Update all the values (e.g. if something has a velocity, then move it forward).
- Read the values to render graphics into the framebuffer, from where your screen can grab it.
- Repeat from step 1.
For these things to be decoupled, you suddenly need them to run at the same time, which means you suddenly have to deal with multiple threads and inconsistencies in the state and whatnot.
If you’re using a proper game engine, these things are typically largely solved for you, but especially in the 80s, you wouldn’t have game engines that you could just use.
I’ve only skimmed it, but Figure 1 shows their skin temperature consistently above the 31°C air temperature, so the humidity should inhibit evaporation of their sweat, which is bad for body temperature, but the humid air should still be conducting heat away from their body rather than into their body.
During the pandemic, lots of offline shops built up a web shop, so that’s where I order most stuff. Often enough, just opening up a map and looking at the shops near you, can already give you an idea. I’ll also just do web searches for a product and see if any specialty, offline-first or manufacturer shops show up.
What also often works, is to look on big aggregator platforms like Amazon, Ebay, Etsy etc., but when you’ve found a product, then look if that brand/manufacturer has an own web store, or again via web search, if there’s any other smaller stores also selling that same product. If you do that a few times, you’ll usually find decent stores where it’s worth looking at their other products, too.
That’s kind of also what I actually like about doing this: Anyone can sell any crap or scam on Amazon et al and since you can’t look at it for real, it’s difficult to tell what’s garbage and what’s not.
These specialty/offline-first/manufacturer shops usually have a reputation/customers to lose, so they generally only sell stuff with a minimum of quality.
Also, if you order multiple products, you don’t get a bazillion different packages delivered, but often rather just one, with all products combined.
