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The Fours Reawakens – baron m.

baron m. from thus spake a.k.

Hail Sir R-----! Come join me for a tankard of this rather exceptional spring ale!

Might you also join me in a little sport?

You are, my friend, a most dependable fellow!

I suggest a game that puts me in mind of my second tenure as the Russian military attaché to Coruscant. Some years after I helped the Emperor-Mage Palpatine crush the uprising led by the blasphemous warrior-priests known as Jedi, news reached the Russian court that they were now waging a guerilla campaign against the duly anointed tyrant's armed forces and I was dispatched post haste to lend support once more.
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On Twenty-Niner – student

student from thus spake a.k.

The Baron's most recent wager set Sir R----- the task of placing tokens upon spaces numbered from zero to nine according to the outcome of a twenty sided die upon which was inscribed two of each of those numbers. At a cost of one coin per roll of the die, Sir R-----'s goal was to place a token upon every space for which he should receive twenty nine coins and twenty nine cents from the Baron.
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Twenty-Niner – baron m.

baron m. from thus spake a.k.

Sir R----- my fine fellow! Come in from the cold and join me at my table for a tumbler of restorative spirits!

Might I also tempt you with a wager?

Good man!

I propose a game that was popular amongst the notoriously unsuccessful lunar prospectors of '29. Spurred on by rumours of gold nuggets scattered upon the ground simply for the taking, they arrived en-masse during winter woefully unprepared for the inclement weather. By the time that I arrived on a diplomatic mission to the king of the moon people they were in a frightful state, desperately short of provisions and futilely trying to work the frost bitten land to grow more.
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Making Smolpxl work on phones and tablets

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I’ve added the first features intended to make Smolpxl games work well on touch interfaces like phones and tablets:

Spring game with touch controls

I’ve added a button bar at the bottom (and moved the navigation buttons to the top).

I’m looking for feedback on this:

  • Does it work on your device?
  • Are the buttons the right size?
  • Do they look ok? If not, how could they look better?
  • For games that require arrow keys, do you need them in the normal arrow-keys layout, or is a simple row fine?

Duckmaze game with touch controls in a single row

If you’re writing a game and you want to add buttons like this, you just need to add a single line like this:

game.showControls(["MENU", "SELECT", "BUTTON1", "BUTTON2"]);

or this:

game.showControls(["MENU", "SELECT", "LEFT", "DOWN", "UP", "RIGHT"]);

and they should appear.

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On Tug O’ War – student

student from thus spake a.k.

The Baron and Sir R-----'s latest wager comprised of first placing a draught piece upon the fifth lowest of a column of twelve squares and subsequently moving it up or down by one space depending upon the outcome of a coin toss until such time as it should escape, either by moving above the topmost or below the bottommost square. In the former outcome the Baron should have had a prize of three coins and in the latter Sir R----- should have had two.
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Streaming video with Owncast on a free Oracle Cloud computer

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I just streamed about 40 minutes of me playing Trials Fusion using Owncast. Owncast is a self-hosted alternative to streaming services like Twitch and YouTube live.

Normally, you would need to pay for a computer to self-host it on. Owncast suggest this will cost about $5/month.

But, Oracle Cloud has a “Always Free” tier that includes a “Compute Instance” (a virtual machine running Linux) that is capable of running Owncast.

Here’s how I did it:

Register for Oracle Cloud

This was probably the worst bit.

I went to oraclecloud.com and clicked “Sign up for free cloud tier”. It didn’t work in Firefox(!) so I had to use Chromium.

I had to enter my name, address, email address, phone number and credit card details. The email was verified, the phone number was verified (with a text message), and the credit card was verified (with a real transaction), so there was no getting around any of it.

They promise that they won’t charge my card. I’ll let you know if I discover differently.

Create a Compute Instance

Once I was logged in to the Oracle “console” (web site), I clicked the burger menu in the top left, chose “Compute” and then “Instances” to create a new instance. I followed all the default settings (including using the default “image”, which meant my instance was running Oracle Linux, which I think is similar to Red Hat), and when I got to the ssh keys part, I supplied the public key of my existing SSH key pair. Read the docs there if you don’t have one of these.

As soon as that was done, and I waited for the instance to be created and started, I was able to SSH in to my instance using a username of opc and the Public IP Address listed:

ssh opc@PUBLIC_IP

(Note: here and below, if I say “PUBLIC_IP”, I mean the IP address listed in the information about your compute instance. It should be a list of four numbers separated by dots.)

Allow connecting to the instance on different ports

Owncast listens for HTTP connections on port 8080, and RTMP streams on 1935, so I needed to do two things to make that work.

Modify the Security List to add Ingress Rules

  • On the information about my instance, I clicked on the name of the Subnet (under Primary VNIC).
  • In the subnet, I clicked the name of the Security List (“Default Security List for …”) in the Security Lists list.
  • In the Security List I clicked Add Ingress Rules and entered: 
    Stateless: unchecked
Source Type: CIDR
Source CIDR: 0.0.0.0/0
IP Protocol: TCP
Source Port Range: (blank)
Destination Port Range: 8080
Description: (blank)

    and then clicked Add Ingress Rules to create the rule.

  • I then added another Ingress Rule that was identical, except Destination Port Range was 1935.

Allow ports 8080 and 1935 on the instance’s own firewall

It took me a long time to figure out, but it turns out the Oracle Linux running on the Compute Instance has its own firewall. Eventually, thanks to a blog post by meinside: When Oracle Cloud’s Ubuntu instance doesn’t accept connections to ports other than 22, and some Oracle docs on ways to secure resources, I found that I needed to SSH in to the machine (like I showed above) and run these commands:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=8080/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=1935/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Now I was able to connect to the services I ran on the machine on those ports.

Install Owncast

The Owncast install was incredibly easy. I just followed the instructions at Owncast Quickstart. I SSHd in to the instance as before, and ran:

curl -s https://owncast.online/install.sh | bash

and then edited the file owncast/config.yaml to have a custom stream key in it. You can do that by typing:

nano owncast/config.yaml

There is information about this file at: owncast.online/docs/configuration.

Run Owncast

I ran the service like this:

cd owncast
./owncast

In future, if I want to leave it running, I may run it inside screen, or even use systemd or similar.

Open the web site

I could now see the web site by typing this into my browser’s address bar:

http://PUBLIC_IP:8080

(Where PUBLIC_IP is the Public IP copied from the Instance info as before.)

Stream some video

Finally, in OBS‘s Settings I chose the Stream section and entered:

Service: Custom...
Server: rtmp://PUBLIC_IP/live
Stream key: STREAM_KEY

Where “STREAM_KEY” means the stream key I added to config.yaml earlier.

Now, when I clicked “Start Streaming” in OBS, my stream appeared on the web site!

Costs and limits

Oracle stated during sign-up that I would not be charged unless I explicitly chose to use a different tier.

The Compute Instance is part of the “Always Free” tier, so in theory it should stay up and working.

However, if you use lots of resources (which streaming for a long time probably does), I would expect services would be throttled and/or stopped completely. I have no idea whether they will allow enough resources for regular streaming, or whether this is all waste of time. We shall see.

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Announcing Smolpxl Scores – a high score table for your game

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

It’s a very early beta for now, but I’m ready to announce Smolpxl Scores, which provides high-score tables for Free and Open Source games.

Each game can have multiple high-score tables – for example, you might want one for each level.

At the moment it’s deployed in my own web hosting and therefore written using the technologies that are most convenient for me to deploy there, which is PHP+MySQL. If it becomes more widely used and the performance suffers I guess I’ll ask for donations to host it somewhere else, and use more fashionable technologies.

To add a score you make a POST request like this:

curl https://scores.artificialworlds.net/api/v1/myappname/mytablename/ -d \
    '{"appId":"myappid","name":"Megan Tria", "score": 13.5, "notes": ""}'

and to look at some existing scores you can request them by pages:

curl 'https://scores.artificialworlds.net/api/v1/myappname/mytablename/?startRank=11&num=20'

or by name:

curl 'https://scores.artificialworlds.net/api/v1/myappname/mytablename/?startName=David%20Lloyd%20Geo&offset=-5&num=10'

The results are ordered by players’ scores, and are provided as JSON.

Each table stores only one score per player.

Of course, the API will evolve over time, but I hope that what I have now will be good enough to support some real-life games, and provide enough feedback to make it better.

As soon as people are actually using it, I will ensure the current API version (v1) remains stable, and release any incompatible updates as later versions.

If you’d like to use Smolpxl Scores to add a high-score table to your game, please create an issue at gitlab.com/smolpxl/smolpxl-scores/-/issues.

This service is only available to Free and Open Source games. Also, if someone abuses it (accidentally or on purpose) I will talk to them, and may eventually have to remove their access if we can’t fix the problem.

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Tug O’ War – baron m.

baron m. from thus spake a.k.

Season's greetings Sir R-----! Come take a glass of mulled wine to warm your spirits on this chill winter's night!

Will you also accept a wager to warm your blood?

It gladdens my heart to hear so sir!

I propose a game that oft puts me in mind of the banquet held in the great hall upon Mount Olympus to which I was invited as the guest of honour by Zeus himself!
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Why a Free Software web games site?

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

Recently I’ve been having a lot of fun working on Smolpxl, which is a web site featuring some little retro web games that are all Free and Open Source Software.

Here’s a sneak preview of the game I am working on:

A pixellated spaceship avoids some walls, then crashes into them

Why do this?

Apart from the fact that it’s fun, I also think there is a need for a site like this: a safe place for kids to play little games without creepy advertising looking over their shoulder, and perverse incentives for the site creators.

Little web games can be a diversion during train journeys, helpful distractions for parents and teachers to provide for kids, and even be a little educational around mouse and keyboard use. I’ve seen the sites that already exist be helpful in all those contexts, but I’ve always felt uncomfortable that these sites are supported by advertising, which always comes with concerns about privacy, and also leads game creators to focus on “engagement”, creating mechanisms like site-wide currencies and gambling-style rewards that drive addictive behaviours.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we in the Free and Open Source community could write some fun games that are free from those unhealthy influences?

Wouldn’t it be even nicer if we took the opportunity to encourage kids to learn how to make games as well as play them?

Well, that’s the idea. Have a look at smolpxl.artificialworlds.net, play a few games, and think about writing a few more…

Also, if you know of existing Free and Open Source web games that might work well on the site, let me know and I’ll have a chat with their creators: I definitely plan to include games by more people than just me.