Category Archives: Uncategorized

Another Game Jam Entry – Tune Trail

A couple of years ago I participated in the VimJam2 GameJam and made the game The Boss and that was a fun experience where I tried out making a game in Unity (not really my thing.. just didn’t enjoy the process) but I think the humor became good and the music as well, so when VimJam4 came along this year I decided to jump in and try to make a variant of a rythm based game in DragonRuby.

https://nerdur.itch.io/tune-trail is the result.

It’s not a great game, but it didn’t take much time to make and I think I can build on this concept. The controlls are simple and with some design this can actually become fun to play.

Now, you might wonder why i chose to use DragonRuby, well. Its just feels right. I can code the game and I just need a command line and Emacs/VSCode or whatever. No installations.. And also the publishing system is excellent. I can simply just be a developer and understand this. I don’t need to be expert in a game engine. The concepts are simple and it just gets the job done and I can do the things I like. Develop.

I remember when making the Unity game the endless hours of trying to get a collision system to work correctly with the ground plane (it still doesn’t, its possible to fall through the floor..). This is trivial in DragonRuby. On the other hand, making a particle system in DragonRuby is probably a bit harder than in Unity where its just there. So what you use kind of depends on what you are making and WHY you are making it. I am making this for my enjoyment, so I use the tools I enjoy 🙂

As usual I put most energy into the tune. Hope you like it 🙂

DragonRuby vs Godot4 benchmark

What a click-baity title..

Amir Rajan, the maker of the excellent DragonRuby game engine put up a couple of Youtube videos comparing the engines performance to Unity and PyGame. Since I wondered how Godot 4 would stack up, I implemented the same benchmark there.

How did it stack up? They are quite similar from what I could see. DragonRuby a bit faster when handling 20-40k sprites but at 80k they were the same.

Code is here: https://github.com/SverrirValgeirsson/starfield_benchmark_godot

Is there any real take away from this simple comparison? Not more than both are plenty fast. If you land here since you are thinking about if you should use Godot or Dragon Ruby, then I think you can take speed out of the equation and focus on other differences. Both are excellent.

Todour 2.22

Time for a small update of Todour.

  • Potential bug for writing files fixed (flushing seems at times not happening on virtual filesystems)
  • Added documentation on GitHub pages
  • Added support for treating due as threshold
  • Added support for “business days” https://github.com/SverrirValgeirsson/Todour/issues/31
  • Updated QtAwesome to a newer version
  • Changed name of icon files to todour.* from newicon.*

As always, you will find the downloads on https://nerdur.com/todour-pl/

New game: Wordur

It’s christmas time and I am not working that much so that means there has been some time for pointless programming 🙂

I made a game called Wordur to sharpen my C# skills and use the very nice Blazor framework that Microsoft have been kind enough to provide now for a few years.

Play around with it! See if its any fun. It comes with bugs included so don’t expect a completely stable experience (just reload the main page and go from there).

New application: Kan Jag Duscha? (Can I take a shower?)

Due to the rising energy prices I have changed my Electricity supplier here in southern Sweden (Tibber) to one that bills me based on what the electricity costs when I actually use it (hourly), and that also has an API. So.. with an API comes the responsibility of making use of it of course.

I made this small application / website to tell me if its a good idea to take a shower or to wait, based on the electricity price right now.

Of course it only makes sense to you if you live in southern Sweden and have the same Electricity deal as I have, but if you do, this might be useful 🙂

More information is here

Why Firefox is my prefered browser

I use a few browsers on my different desktops and I normally don’t really care what I’m using. The standard is pretty high when it comes to browsers and even the bad ones are good. But there is a browser I always get back to, and that is Firefox.

Although writing this little post about it gave me an opportunity to tweet  Tweet about Firefox crashingthat Firefox crashed a lot today, I won’t mind. It usually doesn’t (and has just had a major upgrade).

But the main reason is that it is cross platform, and that the plugins are just so good (Pocket and Evernote mostly).

I don’t use many plugins, but those I have integrate well (on all platforms I use) and the browser does actually feel faster on my mac than Chrome. Then the fact that it’s very developer friendly is a big plus.

But the main reason is the fuzzy feeling of control and trust. Mozilla isn’t selling my data, and they work actively to make the web a little bit more secure.
That really matters.