Got the text wrapping working! I had to do a few things to make it work like using a monospaced font and changing the entries from entry to text widgets, but it works now! This took a lot longer than expected, but now I can actually start working on the looks of the app and all that.
Finally after working on the Pi game, I’m working on this again! And I got a new feature in; editing! Now you can edit the ideas you add after they’re added, so if you want to add to it you can! Makes the app much more usable for sure, and now I’m going to work on making the app look nicer! Though I might add text wrapping first because that’s another oversight…
It’s done! fixed the last couple issues and added some more sound effects. Finally done!!!
Almost done! Got the delay nearly fully gone with the help of itch user kevinthompson who showed me how coroutines work. I used the coroutines to split up the code that generates a digit of pi after each correct guess over many frames, so it will run at about 50% speed for like a second and then continue on lag free. There was also an edge case there, if the digit hadn’t finished generating and you picked the correct digit, it would say it was wrong! To solve this I made the game just wait for it to finish, and added some static noise to it so you would know it was intentional. Definitely not a perfect solution, but as good as I’ve come up with. I’m also considering adding music to the background, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Kind of annoying for sure…
Changed the game a lot! It feels much more polished now (better menus, etc) and most notably, the initial loading screen is gone! I made it so now the next digit is generated on the fly instead of in advance so you don’t have to wait for minutes on end before being able to play. There is a major issue though, it makes a pause happen when you get the digit correct which is very jarring. Might look into something like co-routines. You can also play it now! Let me know what you think please!
Work is being done on the game! I’ve got the main mechanics working (gameplay loop, digit selection and checking, scoring, a timer per digit, high score) but it’s all rudimentary right now. Next I’m going to make a display to see the digit you need to guess with previous digits and other visual things to make the game look better. Hope it goes well!
Got all the digits working! The issue that was causing it to stop working seemed to be an issue with the 16-bit integer limit, since at a certain point the numbers get too large to have proper precision, so they are off by a bit which causes the numbers to be inaccurate. Now time to actually make the game! Hopefully the easy part.
I figured out how many digits my stupid program can generate… 263 I have no idea why more won’t work…
I’ve gotten the first 200 digits of pi generated in Pico-8! But the 300th is wrong… okay… a bit of background. First, why am I trying to generate pi, why not just precompute it and store it in rom? Gee I wish. A limitation in Pico-8 is that one cart can only have about 8000 tokens total, and each list element counts as a token, so having a sufficiently large amount of tokens, like 10 000 would literally be impossible, so instead I’ll just compute it when the program loads up and store it in RAM. What is interesting though is how I got this done! I used an algorithm by Rabinowitz and Wagon (link to the paper: http://stanleyrabinowitz.com/bibliography/spigot.pdf) where you start with a bunch of 2s, and do various operations on them from right to left involving division and multiplication to get a number who’s 10s digit is the digit of pi for that iteration. My implementation should be working the same, however for a reason I am yet to figure out it stops working between 200 and 300 digits of pi, most likely due to a small error in my implementation that causes it to drift very slowly, only mattering after a couple hundred digits.
Found compatibility issues with test users because they didn’t have special characters in their fonts, so I’ve started to use images. I also added some code to make it possible to change the font on my end (Times New Roman for example). I’ve also been trying to add the ability to edit ideas the user added, but it seems really hard. If anyone is reading this, let me know if that’s an important feature to you, since if not I might scrap it.
Finally got the undo feature working after 3 hours of work. I had a lot of issues throughout, and I think I can put it in 3 stages. In stage 1, I was trying to make the undo feature work by running inverse commands to get back to where you were (for example, undoing adding an idea by removing an idea). This wasn’t a good idea because it was making the undo function very large and complicated. The second stage was more just a new approach, instead of trying to undo the actual changes, I tried to fully replace the list with an older version. This was closer, but it ran into lots of errors when I tried to do it because of how I was creating objects and not getting rid of them correctly, and referencing things that didn’t exist, and overall making a mess of memory and lists. The technique however was made working when after too long of not knowing what was wrong (turns out a lot) I caved in and asked ChatGPT. Still not proud, but it did work. It showed me what I did wrong, and then I fixed it’s fix because it made a couple mistakes (it’s AI after all, so that makes sense). Now with these fixes, it works as intended to my relief.
Added a bunch of new features this update!
Firstly, you can now save your lists as a JSON file and load them again whenever you like. This took a while for me to fully figure out (working with two libraries now instead of just one is definitely more complex) but now I can save and load lists easily, allowing you to actually save your ideas for later if you need to do something else, for example.
Another addition is the exit button, since to me it feels more proper than just pressing the “X” button in the top-right. It also reminds the user to save in case they forgot, since forgetting to save your stuff is a pain I think everyone has dealt with. I did this pretty easily, though it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to run two different things with one button in tkinter.
I also fixed a bug, which was that as you added items of different lengths to your list, they would become misaligned, but be fixed when you changed the list’s order. I just ran the line of code that did this in one function and put it in another, quite simple! I’m sure I added more bugs though, which I’ll hopefully fix tomorrow.
Also, this update did not require any AI, just some classic copy-pasting from geeksforgeeks and stackoverflow, like in the olden days :P
Added the last main feature: idea rearranging! You can use the arrow keys to move the different ideas up and down as you like to rank them. While this technically works, there’s still more to do. Other things I’ve added since the last devlog was making it so you can’t add an idea with no text, since that makes no sense. I did sadly have to use AI for help, since I couldn’t find a solution anywhere else online. I however have commented the code it made and have fully understood how the code works. Side note: AI is still really annoying to use.
Fixed two bugs. The first one caused the text to overlap with the X button with longer idea phrases (I was able to fix this by making the X button’s position relative to the text instead of being relative to the parent frame). The second bug I was able to fix was that the longer idea phrases caused the input menu on top to go separate (label goes further left, enter button goes further right). I was able to fix this second issue by putting the typing menu and the list is separate frames that can’t interact with each other. Next I will finally add the last feature to make the app fill all technical criteria; the ability to drag around the ideas to sort them.
Item removal is now working! It took a while to figure out, but it now works. In addition, everything is now centered (with a little help from AI, and then immediately turning it off because of how annoying it was). The main issue with this version is longer strings will overlap with the X button, which will be fixed when I can. After that bug is patched however, I will make it possible to change the order of the listed items.
First feature added, making a list. I have decided to use tkinter for this project since I’ve used it before and it’s pretty simple to use. The list can’t be edited yet, but this is a good start. My next addition will be to make it possible to delete the ideas you add.
All the mechanics and stuff are in! Just need to export! Been a fun few days of work on this for sure!
Game loop done!
