TL;DR: the Scout ADS-B receiver transmits its data using a proprietary, undocumented format that I cannot decode, but perhaps with scrutiny it could be decoded and used for fun projects. Come for the story of my process; stay for the crappy responses from ForeFlight and uAvionix tech support. This article is part 1, wouldn’t it Continue reading
If you spend time around young children, sooner or later you ll end up playing the game Chutes and Ladders. This game actually has quite an interesting history, dating back to ancient India. The Milton-Bradley version dates from the 1940s. The game s history is probably the most interesting thing about the game, beause it is utterly Continue reading
I ve just returned from the week-long CppCon 2014 in Bellevue, Washington. Here s what I experienced. I ve absorbed a great deal from a variety of C++ developer conferences – CppNow, Going Native, C++ And Beyond – but always virtually, via video and webcast. This was an opportunity to jump into the thick of things and participate Continue reading
The continuing dissent and confusion about unit testing of private class methods surprises me. The access specifier is much like your choice of software license: it exists to limit consumers’ actions, not to limit yours. A method’s access specifier is completely irrelevant to testing, and only describes what you want the consumer to use; any code Continue reading
In a previous post I showed you a simple way to get beautiful, easy-to-read logs in your Rails 3.2 application. Rails 4 changed the game again; for Rails 3.2 or earlier, refer to my earlier post; but for Rails 4 read on It s really easy. Just make a new file in your config/initializers directory called something like log_formatting.rb Continue reading
I just released my Steering Behaviors package to Github, and an accompanying Gem to Rubygems. If you re building a game, you ll want your game agents and characters to exhibit realistic motion. A standard way of doing this is with steering behaviors . The seminal paper by Craig Reynolds established a core set of steering behaviors that could be utilized for Continue reading
I ve just released to Github my working fuzzy logic module, Fuzzy Associative Memory. A Fuzzy Associative Memory (FAM for short) is a Fuzzy Logic tool for decision making. It uses Fuzzy Sets to establish a set of rules that are linguistic in nature; examples might include: If the room is a bit warm, turn the Continue reading
Introduction Our Lunar Lander game is somewhat playable by this point but it still lacks some key features. After all, it would be nice if we could detect collisions and determine if the lander has safely landed on the pad. Let’s see how our flexible Entity-Component system permits us to expand our game with minimal Continue reading
Introduction Entity-Component systems, we’ve learned, are easy to implement and maintain; the elegance is basically “baked in” due to the way components and entities are married in the Entity Manager. One particularly tidy aspect of an entity-component system is how well it lends itself to data persistence, or in practical terms: saving game state. Let’s Continue reading
Introduction Now that we have laid the entity-component foundation and introduced some necessary libGDX concepts, we can finally get around to putting together a little game. Let’s make a “Lunar Lander” type game to illustrate all the concepts we’ve learned so far. Remember that the source code for this Entity-Component Framework and the game we’re Continue reading