Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The spaces

After all these years, I got back to mucking around with GearHead and GearHead 2 again. Something that bugged me about those roguelikes was that the were developed on Windows: in itself, not a terrible thing.

But the problem is with the difference in the nature of the terminals versus Linux. Linux terminals are usually 80 columns by 24 rows. Windows uses 80 columns and 25 rows. That missing row causes Pascal's drawing routines to go loco-roco. Makes the games unplayable.

I wrote a shell script a while back to send terminal escape codes to resize the terminal under Linux to use 25 instead of 24 rows. I picked it up, and it still worked.

The problem is: spaces. My directories have spaces ZOMG!!1 There's a long explanation for that transgression, but long story short, I needed my home directory to be consistent.

I just spent the last hour or so updating that script to work, regardless of where the thing was launched from. Anybody who has attempted to get scripts into Linux desktop launchers will know what I'm talking about: those scripts are never launched from the right directory. Stacks of quoting and unquoting, remembering that single quotes don't allow variable substitution, and a bunch of other things.

Spaces are a pain.

Maybe I'll contribute the script back to the GearHead community once I've brought it up to quality standards. I made it this far, I may as well finish it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been getting into Dwarf Fortress recently.

World generation takes 15 minutes, then build your own dwarf fortress (a la moria) or go on a hacknslash adventure roguelike style.

The level of detail is superb and some of the stuff that has been planned looks great.

Go for the mayday graphical version if you find the ascii too irksome.

tung said...

How well does it work under Linux?