Ryan Alyea

There is nothing here. But on Twitter: @ROFISH I'm more active there.

[ryanalyea]

SFC30 XInput App

I got a new toy this week that’s really cool! Check it out:

Yep, just as it looks like, a Bluetooth SNES controller (well, SFC, I like the colors). Get one on Amazon. (FD: referral link)

And it works almost great; fast connects, long battery life, super accurate buttons. But, it’s not XInput for Windows; it’s just a generic controller. 

And that kinda sorta makes sense, there’s no triggers or sticks on this controller. Why use a controller spec when it doesn’t even come close to reaching it?

The downside is that many Windows games these days JUST use XInput as their controller input. The old generic controller driver hasn’t been updated in a long time, since DX8 at least and possibly deprecated.

I know that 360ce exists but it feels like a solution that’s trying too hard; instead of trying to emulate a controller it brings it’s own xinput.dll to overwrite the existing one. Apparently with compatibility issues? Also, you have to copy it for each game and I really want to easily swap between using the real 360 controller and this one. Having to remember where my DLLs are is too much of a pain.

So what I did was write an XInput emulator for this controller:

You select the controller and then start the emulator. It will work with the USB driver to pretend a controller was installed. You also have the option of the d-pad on the controlling going to either the d-pad or LS. And the ABXY buttons can either be as labeled, or remapped to their physical XInput equivalent.

If you have this controller (or it’s SNES equivalent, and possibly the NES one too), you can download this app to make games “just work” with it:

https://github.com/ROFISH/FC30XInput/releases

Special thanks to the DS4Windows project which already researched/coded the hard part of working with the USB driver.

[ryanalyea]

How to use ActiveRecord Migrations outside of Rails

Note, this assumes that you have ENV["DATABASE_URL"] preloaded somehow. Feel free to use env vars or dotenv to manage ENV. Or change the establish_connection section to preload with your config file. Then just add the following to your Rakefile:

include ActiveRecord::Tasks DatabaseTasks.db_dir = [::File.expand_path('../db', __FILE__)] DatabaseTasks.migrations_paths = [::File.expand_path('../db/migrate', __FILE__)] load "active_record/railties/databases.rake" task :environment do ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection end

And now `rake db:migrate` works!

[ryanalyea]

EB Battle Background Animation Simulation

http://rofish.net/ebbackground/?layer1=303&layer2=0

The background information was partially figured out by Mr. Accident from the forums, and this Javascript implementation was originally made by gjtorikian. Without which I couldn't have figured out as much as I have.

One thing that both above missed was the color cycle animation, so I disassembled the EB ROM to find how this cycle works. I posted the technical information on the PK Hack forums. After figuring out the details, I took the known information and ported it to the Javascript implementation, and now most animations work correctly!

I have a bunch of super-technical where-in-memory notes about exactly what's happening in hardware to perform the animation. But I'm not 100% through it yet though; I'm still missing the camera shift animation. I'm happy to share what I have though if anyone's interested.

[ryanalyea]

Elevator - A Quest in Finding the Fun

I've been spending a small amount of time learning Phaser to quickly prototype some games. What's great is that I could really quickly put together something to find out that it's not really that great of an idea in the first place.

This idea came about while waiting around for some elevator at PAX. The idea: is there a fun or fast way to send people up and down elevators?

I built a prototype, and you can play for yourself here:

http://rofish.net/elevator/

(Note, it requires a desktop browser to press keys, it won't work on mobile devices solely due to input restrictions.)

There's just something about that isn't mechanically... fun. It's just sending people up and down. To be fair, I had the idea of sideways elevators and multiple elevators, but that just on the outset appears to be more of the unfun mechanics.

Oh well, better to only put a few hours in rather than a lot. On to the next idea!

[starmendotnet]

[ryanalyea]

I'm reviving Starmen.Net on Tumblr. Follow it!

[fangamer]

Choose Your FINAL DESTINATION!

For the first time ever, a ton of classic Fangamer shirt designs are available to buy at our lowest price in history! Normally $23, we’ve set aside all the designs we won’t be reprinting and priced them at $15 each.

Choose any designs from the Final Destination collection for $15 per shirt!

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The shirts featured in the Final Destination collection are the same excellent quality you’ve come to expect from Fangamer. These shirts won’t be reprinted, so grab them fast before they’re gone forever!

[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 17: On The ActiveRecord

This goes a little into how to run SQL. You don’t need to know everything, but this is a great tutorial on straight SQL. Good news though, you don’t have to touch any SQL for this. Here’s the tl;dr:

A SQL table is a lot like a spreadsheet. You have rows…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 16: Data Models

By now we can render stuff to a webpage, which is cool, but there’s no way to make or save any data, so let’s fix that. Since we’re making a CMS thing, we’re going to need the ability to make and save data. So let’s start by making a silly flat-file…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 15: Action Packed Viewing

So as I mentioned in the last part of rendered, we built a fairly simple rendering engine using Rails’ built-in templating engine ERB. And that’s fine, but there’s still a lot of code in our controllers and Rails has a full featured rendering system…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 14: ERB My HTML!

And now for something completely different.

Let’s say you want to generate some HTML. Using interpolated strings is generally not a good idea as it can lead to unmaintainable code. The best way to handle this is through a templating engine, which is…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Meta 1: HTML

Just in case you’re following from the blog, the next few parts will involve HTML rendering. Since these lessons are about Ruby / Rails, I’m going to assume that you know how to write HTML by hand, since we’ll be introducing a lot of magic functions that…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 13: Revving Some Metal

Earlier we had put together a basic controller and used the Routing and Metal to render some basic pages, but since we’re going to build a simple Generic Content Manager out of this, the parameters seem important. The method in which we got that…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 12: Totally Metal

Earlier, we briefly went over the controller as a way to store the methods of routes, but there’s way more to it then returning a bunch of status codes and headers. So now we’re going to add another piece of the pie, the ActionController, which is…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 11: Railtying It Together

Having all this on one script is okay for now, but it’s best to start splitting up files just to make it easier to follow. So let’s create some folder conventions for us:

app/controllers will contain our controllers as determined by our routes

config/rout…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 10: Actionpacked Routing!

So as we saw in the last part, having different pages might end up being a slight pain, so let’s…

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[ryanalyea]

Ruby for Programmers – Part 9: Making Pages With Bundler and Rack

So ends the really basic tutorial. There’s still tons more stuff to go over, like Modules and Mixins, Monkeypatching, Begin/Rescue/Ensure, but we’ll get to those basics as we come to them. If you really want to learn some deep dark mysteries, I suggest…

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