the art of milking eeks

New hosting

My Milked Eek — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:23:08 +0000

I’ve moved from wordpress.com to my own domain and webhost:

http://mymilkedeek.net

Thanks for visiting and I hope to see you on my new website.

Ludum Dare 24 [03] Day 2 – DONE

My Milked Eek — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 18:14:26 +0000

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7229

I’ve finished this Ludum. Not the most exciting entry, but it’s almost bugfree. And that’s cool.

Got to leave the pc alone for a few hours.

Eek.

Ludum Dare 24 [02] 14.30 PM Second commit and new idea

My Milked Eek — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 12:39:40 +0000

So, I didn’t go with the mouse cursor thing. Too meh. Decided on a farm simulator. You start with a few crops and some money. You can grow crops, sell crops and breed crops. At the end of turn 99, the game ends and your money is your score.

The cool thing is that you’ll be able to enter your own dna code. Basically letting you be a genetic engineer. The goal is to find the dna code which gives you the best crop concerning marketprice, seed number and growtime.

At this point I just finished crop breeding. The next steps are:

- user inventory (grown crops, seeds)
- marketplace

In the far future:

- crop/seed detail view
- user dna code (comes at a price)
- crop placement

So, yes, I have some work to do.

Eek.

Ludum Dare 24 [01] 11.00 AM First commit

My Milked Eek — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 09:04:12 +0000

The theme is Evolution.

Wow, it actually won this time. I didn’t brainstorm on any idea for this them because, well yeah, it never wins. So, after about an hour I got to writing some concept code in Groovy. Threw it out, started over. Threw that out as well. And then I went back to my original thought: do something with the mouse.

The idea is to have the mouse do actions and stuff, not sure on what exactly, and from there, you can upgrade your mouse. Eventually your mouse will have the arms of a bodybuilder. I’m not sure how I’ll show the upgrades (if I’ll show them at all). The main idea here is that I’ll be learning about mouse interfacing and collision detection.

Screenshot time!

Ok, that’s lame. The mouse pointer doesn’t show…

Anyways, my code repository!

https://bitbucket.org/mymilkedeek/ludum

Ludum Dare 24 – [00] Getting ready

My Milked Eek — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:00:32 +0000

Rejoice game devs, it’s Ludum weekend! And I’m entering once more. I’m nearly ready for my third participation. My “I’m in” post.

Things on my To Do list:

get some raw ideas in my head. The last theme selection went up and I’ll need to see if I can come up with some simple ideas based on those themes.
decide on which genre/game mechanic I want to go. I’m undecided between a board game approach and a more arcade approach using only a mouse as an interface.
stock up on food and drinks.
linux screenshots for my timelapse.
check out launch4j.
check out some music programs.

I learned quite a bit from previous ludums. First of all, keep going. Second of all, keep going. Third, stupid fixes to bugs/errors are usually the best. Fourth, keep the code clean as possible. The first Ludum was a pretty codebase gone ugly. My second Ludum was an ugly codebase gone even more ugly. I plan to make the codebase for my third entry a pleasant one. I’m stressing the verb “plan”.

I should also do a bit more on the preparations side beyond coding. Or at least not the night before it begins…

Things I’ll do better than last time:

collision detection. I figured out how to do it “elegantly”. Still not there yet, but a whole lot better than what i did for LD22 or for LD23
coding. Didn’t you hear? Groovy is awesome.
deployment. This time, it’ll work everywhere else.
making my game fun.

A fun game, you say? Why didn’t I think of that? Well yeah, last times I went with what I had. But this time, I’m going to go somewhere.

My planning:

Friday-Saturday night; try to wake up at 3 AM to read the theme. Go back to bed and dream about it.
Saturday noon; basic gameplay, placeholder art and sfx/bgm
Saturday afternoon-evening-Sunday morning; advanced gameplay
Sunday noon-afternoon; art and sfx/bgm
Sunday evening; submission

I haven’t planned it, but somewhere in between there should be a spot or two for some panicking, anxiety and tranquility. Isn’t Ludum Dare fun?

Have fun,
Eek.

Groovy and Tomcat, Pt4 – Groovy Servlet Pages

My Milked Eek — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:50:02 +0000

Groovy Server Pages (GSP)

Setting up GSP is as easy as setting up scripts.

Add following to the project:

- groovy.jar
- groovy-json.jar
- groovy-servlet.jar
- groovy-templates.jar
- groovy-xml.jar
- antlr.jar
- asm.jar

web.xml



 GroovyPages
 groovy.servlet.TemplateServlet
 
 
 GroovyPages
 *.gsp

And then just create your .gsp file:



Groovy Pages

<% println "hello world" %>

Navigating to the gsp url gives me the following:

Still easy as 1-2-3.

The next part will be up later tonight as it’s under construction. It will feature a project that ties all the different groovy parts together into one project.

Until then, take care,
Eek.

Groovy and Tomcat, Pt3 – Groovy Scripts

My Milked Eek — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:43:16 +0000

In this part I’m going to show you how to use Groovy Scripts on a Tomcat. It’s very easy to do!

First add these libraries to your project:

- groovy.jar
- groovy-json.jar
- groovy-servlet.jar
- groovy-xml.jar
- antlr.jar
- asm.jar

You might need to add more to the project depending on the functionality of your scripts, but this is the minimum I needed to not encounter any exceptions.

Next, in your web.xml, add the following servlet;



 GroovyScript
 groovy.servlet.GroovyServlet
 


 GroovyScript
 *.groovy

Groovy will then compile your scripts and run them as requested. For a quick test, put this in your webapp root folder and have its name end with .groovy, I named mine script.groovy, but you should name it something more meaningful.


def ip = request.getRemoteAddr()

println """


Groovy Scripts


Hello ${ip}


"""

Navigate to the url of the script and you’ll get a warm welcome.

Wasn’t that easy?

Stay tuned,
Eek.

Groovy and Tomcat, Pt2 – Groovy extends HttpServlet

My Milked Eek — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:38:15 +0000

Continuing where we left off…

The jars you’ll need for this part are the same as the ones for part 1:

- groovy.jar
- antlr.jar
- asm.jar

GroovyHttpServlet


package net.mymilkedeek.tomcat

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse

class GroovyHttpServlet extends HttpServlet {

 @Override
 protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) {
 req.session.setAttribute("language", "groovy")
 req.session.setAttribute("sentiment", "awesome")
 req.session.setAttribute("message", JavaGroovy.message())
 resp.sendRedirect("index.jsp")
 }

 @Override
 protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) {
 super.doPost(req, resp)
 }
}

And add it to the web.xml

GroovyHttpServlet

net.mymilkedeek.tomcat.GroovyHttpServlet

GroovyHttpServlet

/groovyhttpservlet

Now, navigate to the Servlet url and watch Groovy take care of everything:

So, in short, what we did was replace a Java HttpServlet with a Groovy HttpServlet.

For my next blog post, I’ll show you how to set up a Groovy Script in a webapplication.

Stay tuned,
Eek.

Groovy and Tomcat, Pt1 – Calling Groovy from a Java Servlet

My Milked Eek — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:27:18 +0000

For this first post, I’ll keep it very simple: a Java servlet calls Groovy code to display a message to the screen. Start by setting up a regular Java servlet application. After your simple web application is set up, read the code snippets below.

index.jsp

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>


Eek's Groovy Sandbox


I'm using ! That's

In this .jsp code, we’ll print three attributes. Two handled by the Java servlet and one handed to us by our Groovy utility class.

The Java servlet


package net.mymilkedeek.tomcat;

import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import java.io.IOException;

/**
 * The Java Servlet
 *
 * @author My Milked Eek
 */
public class JavaServlet extends HttpServlet {
 @Override
 protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) throws ServletException, IOException {
 req.getSession().setAttribute("language", "java");
 req.getSession().setAttribute("sentiment", "ok...");
 resp.sendRedirect("index.jsp"); }
}

web.xml





 JavaServlet
 net.mymilkedeek.tomcat.JavaServlet
 
 
 JavaServlet
 /javacallinggroovy

That’s a simple webapplication. Now add the following dependencies to your project:

- groovy.jar
- antlr.jar
- asm.jar

Now add a Groovy Class, I named it JavaGroovy.

Groovy Class

package net.mymilkedeek.tomcat

class JavaGroovy {

static def message() {
 "I was called from Groovy. Exciting, isn't it?"
 }
}

And add following line to your Java Servlet:

...
req.getSession().setAttribute("message", JavaGroovy.message());
...

Now, navigate to the url of the Java Servlet and watch the magic happen:

So, in short, what we did was make a call to a Java Servlet. This servlet then gets a message from a Groovy class. And then we added that message to the session.

This kind of setup with Groovy is particularly useful with an existing Java Servlet: You only need to add Groovy jars and you can start hacking away.

For my next post, I’ll show you how to get Groovy extending HttpServlet.

Stay tuned,
Eek.

Groovy and Tomcat

My Milked Eek — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:04:36 +0000

It’s been a while since my last non-ludum blog post. Since I wrote “iText on the JVM” I’ve been playing with Groovy and Python occasionally. But for the past month and a half, I’ve been getting into Groovy a lot. So much that my next Ludum Dare entry will be written in Groovy/Java.

Up until this blog post I’ve just been experimenting with Groovy, using it to quickly test issues and bugs, but I wanted to do a bit more with it, so I tried using it in Tomcat. I didn’t set up Grails, didn’t want to do that just yet, but I set up Groovy and I’ll document several ways to use Groovy in Tomcat.

Table of contents:

Java HttpServlet calling Groovy
Groovy HttpServlet
Groovy Scripts
Groovy Servlet Pages
Bringing it all together

We’ll start out really simple; use Groovy as an extension to an existing Java servlet and work our way to using scripts in combination with .gsp’s.

Stay tuned,
Eek.