I wrote a program a little while ago that draws a Hilbert Curve. Really all I did was adapt the Java source code that’s on the Wikipedia page talking about the curve. That Java source used a class called SimpleGraphics that I’m not familiar with. I wanted to use SDL in C++ for my program. It was easy enough to convert the Java code to C++ but to do the drawing I decided to just implement a SimpleGraphics class in C++ that uses SDL to perform the actions that the program needs.
Since then I revived my interest in integrating scripting with C++ and pulled a Lua interpreter in to that project. Now my program loads a Lua script and executes it. The Lua script has access to the SimpleGraphics class that I wrote. Now that the script interpreter works and can call the drawing methods I decided to take the algorithm for drawing the Hilbert curve and implement that as a Lua script. It was actually pretty easy. The resulting source code works as a sort of Rosetta stone for the three languages.
I took a little break today from the C++ and Lua stuff I've been doing to have a look at Google's new phone platform. I followed the installation instructions and had some demos up and running pretty quickly. I also grabbed the source and poked around to see whose shoulders they stand on.
At level 69 you can use a Riding Crop to get a mounted speed bonus. Since my main is finally level 69 I've been eying the Auction House. I just lucked out and found one for only 41 gold. On my server they're usually over 80 so I snapped it up right away. Of course then I have the issue of switching trinkets so can have the Riding Crop while mounted and go back to my other trinkets when I dismount. This got me looking at macros again and since macros are written with Lua in WoW, I thought this ties in nicely with the Lua interpreter stuff I've been writing about lately. Today I'll share the macros I've been using for a while now to smooth the rough edges off the World of Warcraft interface. I didn't write most of them but I've tweaked them to meet my needs.
There are a couple things I've done to tweak World of Warcraft on my Linux box. I run OpenSuse 10.3 now but most of this will be the same for other distros, especially if you use KDE. These are just specific to what worked for me but I guess that some other Linux WoW players might benefit from the same settings.
First off I lost the ability to do a quick self-cast. Self-cast is done by just holding alt while clicking the icon for a spell. So, as a mage, every half-hour I want to self-cast Arcane Intellect. That's no big deal since it's not in combat. Remove Lesser Curse is a bigger problem. The second fastest way to use that is with a shortcut key or click followed by F1 (which also targets your own character). I thought the problem was because of some multi-language keyboard customization I had done but as it turns out it was a setting in KDE for moving windows by holding the Alt-key. To turn this off just follow the steps here - I included pictures, click each to get a bigger image.
I’ve been poking around with a couple C++ programs recently and I started thinking again about how cool it is that you can hook in a scripting language. I’ve wanted to try setting up scripting for a few programs in the past but it always seems too far removed from any one project. This sounds kind of abstract, more concretely I’ve been thinking about scripting behaviours in a game or exposing a script interface from some simple graphics program.
Lua’s a popular scripting language for games. It’s used for add-ons in World of Warcraft and I’ve heard it brought up over and over again at the Game Developer’s Conference. I tried a short example of Lua a while back but I never went back to write any real code with Lua. Since the license is so liberal and writing a little Lua would help me out writing WoW macros and add-ons, I decided Lua would be a good place to start - have a look at yesterday's post about setting up an SDL project in Visual Studio.
Next for the test harness. I took some code to draw a Hilbert curve from Wikipedia about a week ago and converted it into something roughly equivalent in C++ using SDL. The code compiles and runs under Linux (I used KDevelop) or Visual Studio 2003. In the code I implemented a SimpleGraphics class which takes an SDL surface and gives some methods to draw lines on that surface. The HilbertCurve class uses a SimpleGraphics object to do the drawing. I decided this little program would be a great candidate to get scripted.