niotes

  • I regularly (every year or so) checked out e-ink-displays for the RPi since I had my first one (2014ish). Lately I found that the Pimoroni Inky Impression is a good candidate. It works as a “hat”, so you just plug it onto the Pi and off you go. Also finally a use-case for the Pi. I have two, I used them for some gaming stuff, but ultimately they ended up in the drawer. I got the Pi 4 B, and the older 2.

    I ordered which now seems to have been the last one from the UK, which arrived quickly and was about 70€.

    The project for the display is showing todays entries from our family-calendar. For that I already made a program in Golang, which grabs the dates from Google and generates an Image that will be sent out to the E-Ink-Display.

    We use emojis for categorization, which don’t seem to render with the fogleman/gg library, but for a first version this is sufficient. I really don’t want to do this via headless-browser-screenshot, although it would be easier and more flexible, but not everything has to be web.

    I wanted to get started with the Pi today, but I didn’t have a Micro-SD for it, so it will have to wait until next weekend.

  • I still have a game-scenario-idea in my head, but haven’t been able to think up a game-design for it that I like: A space-port-manager where the player has to manage landing-pads, and certain resources to ensure happy visitors, and making sure that enemy fractions don’t land next to each other.

    I did a text-based version where you have 5 pads and make rent when a ship lands, and you have to make sure the fractions police/corporate/cartel don’t land next to each other. The alliances between the fractions may change, or even be unknown at first.

    The second one was like a puzzle-game, where the player needs to place Tetris-shaped ships, and resources on a grid.

    Both of them got a working prototype, but ultimately didn’t seem that fun to play.

    Another approach I tried was a Solitaire-Like card-game, where you have a 5x5 grid, and approaching ships happen via the card deck, or dice throw, you have resource cards etc.

    I still think there’s a game in there, preferably a more casual one that I can manage to do myself.

  • One of my current WIPs is a GTA1 clone/experiment in Godot 4. Using some Kenney and HumbleBundle Low-Poly Assets, I implemented some of the simpler things like entering/exiting cars, nearing NPCs with a speech-display and NPCs following the player within a restricted area. As long as it’s fun I may introduce some other mechanics, like a music-track playing on entering a car, some get-the-car-mission, or a mini-map.

  • This is still my most favorite CSS-hack of all time, from jQuery-times.

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