Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Tilecode

microsoft.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 63 posts

Re: Microsoft Tilecode

#22

Post by alxmdev »

gadgetoid wrote: post #18
roywiggins wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those don't have GPIO pins, the Odroid Go does. There's something inherently charming about being able to run emulated games on a microcontroller. Also, because it's an ESP32, it supports Arduino so playing around with programming it is fairly straightforward. The Go has good battery life, instant-on, and has a certain DIY spirit. I don't know if it's possible to run MakeCode programs directly on the Odroid Go but it…

You're speaking my language. This is a shameless self plug but we - that is Pimoroni - are working on 32blit which is an STM32F750-based microcontroller games console that should be up for general sale soooon - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/32blit-retro-i... Our beta backer tier have been godlike in their ability to make the STM32 do things I'd never thought we'd see... much less see before it's even…

I've been keeping an eye on the 32blit, glad to hear there will be a general release! I ported my game framework to the Cortex-M0+ Gamebuino earlier, and Cortex-M7 with FPU and 1MB RAM are next level in comparison, sounds more capable for computation than the GP2X too.

Re: Microsoft Tilecode

#26

Post by nickloewen »

adolph wrote: post #25

This is a fascinating pairing to what the block editors they have for micro:bit. I wonder if the new micro:bit will work with it. Current hardware list: https://arcade.makecode.com/hardware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763120

The micro:bit doesn't have enough buttons or pixels, but you can maybe go the other direction: the "meowbit" appears to be compatible with both MakeCode Arcade and micro:bit accessories—although maybe you have to use MicroPython instead of micro:bit MakeCode to do microcontroller stuff? It would definitely be cool to have something that is perfectly compatible with both.

Re: Microsoft Tilecode

#27

Post by sneeuwpopsneeuw »

chrismaltby wrote: post #17
mittermayr wrote: post #7

With Christmas coming up soonish, and many of us going to be locked in at home (even more than ever before), there's a device I can recommend that is fun to build and reasonably fun to build on. It's basically a GameBoy (and runs emulators for it and other devices) for a laughably low price: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/ (first link I found, there may be better ones — I bought it in Europe, where a few o…

If it can play Game Boy games I’ve made an easy to use game maker that’s starting to get quite popular https://www.gbstudio.dev/

Wow It is really cool to see you on hackernews as well. I have programmed 2 different gameboy advance games for game jams in the past. But building it from scratch is really hard. Most resources are down with the exception of TONC https://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/ So you will have to use the spec sheets a lot. Gbstudio is very well made and easy to use. But if you are looking for a challenge i will leave the trivial excessive to you, the reader.

Re: Microsoft Tilecode

#28

Post by Macuyiko »

It's good to see Microsoft pursue the field of educational programming further.

I remember another MS project (which I just had to look up). It was called MakeCode https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode and I remember it because they had a nice Minecraft integration. Well... it still exists: https://minecraft.makecode.com/

So to go on a bit of a rant: there's Scratch, MakeCode, Tilecode now, on top of "fantasy consoles" and dozens of very easy-to-use game engines (like, really, lots of them, in the browser, native... way below the Unity and Godot stepping stones). You know what's sad? Somehow I feel like we can't solve this barrier to entry for casual coding. On the one hand, a teacher or parent wanting to teach their kid(s) is overwhelmed with choice. On the other hand there's the attention economy basically saying: "don't bother."

Later on in the academic career, you have lecturers either having to overwhelm students (especially non-CS students) with all the best practices at once (you need this IDE, and GIT, and tests...) or having to resort to something which looks like it's made for kids and "won't make it in the real world" (speaking from experience here).

It's a pity that computing got so complicated. This is a hard problem to solve. Nonetheless, I applaud any efforts made towards this.

Re: Microsoft Tilecode

#29

Post by indigo945 » 

  > If a tile predicate has a non-empty Include set that 
  > contains only sprite kinds then the associated tile must 
  > contain a sprite if that predicate evaluates to true on a 
  > state. We call such a sprite a sprite witness, as it 
  > witnesses the truth of the predicate. Sprite witnesses are 
  > TileCode’s form of variable binding.
I can't figure out who this manual is written for. TileCode and the example games appear to target programming beginners and even children, but the lingo here is unlikely to be comprehensible to anyone but CS majors. And it's not like they're describing a complex idea here, it's just the language they use to describe it seems almost willfully arcane.

Re: Microsoft Tilecode

#30

Post by Impossible »

indigo945 wrote: post #29

> If a tile predicate has a non-empty Include set that > contains only sprite kinds then the associated tile must > contain a sprite if that predicate evaluates to true on a > state. We call such a sprite a sprite witness, as it > witnesses the truth of the predicate. Sprite witnesses are > TileCode’s form of variable binding. I can't figure out who this manual is written for. TileCode and the example games appear to…

This is a side effect of it being a research project. It's interesting to me because I've worked in this space (I designed and built the visual scripting system for Facebook Horizon) but otherwise I agree. Kids and non-programmers won't understand this
Post reply on HN