code here:
http://arsdnet.net/dcode/minesweeper.d

Here's a bit of fun. I saw this article on reddit: http://rkoutnik.com/articles/How-I-Interview.html

Short summary: when interviewing people for a code position, this author gives the candidate one hour to write as much as minesweeper as they can. He says nobody has ever finished it in an hour and nobody is expected to, but he just wants to see how far they get.

Nobody has finished it in an hour? CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

I decided to give it a go over the last hour and hacked this together:

http://arsdnet.net/dcode/minesweeper.d

It depends on my simpledisplay.d and color.d from here:
https://github.com/adamdruppe/arsd

Download just those two files, simpledisplay.d and color.d, to your current directory with minesweeper.d and compile:

dmd minesweeper.d simpledisplay.d color.d

And play the game! At least on Windows and Linux. On Mac, you need to install XQuartz since I don't have a working Cocoa implementation in simpledisplay.d right now. Fear not, it is on my todo list for 2016, so it will be there eventually.



My game isn't exactly fancy.... but it is playable. here's a screenshot: http://arsdnet.net/minesweeper.png


I prolly could have used a downloaded icon set and made it look prettier, but I didn't want to look for one nor deal with copyright so I just drew text and rectangles.

Now, the interviewer used javascript, but I wanted another example for simpledisplay.d, so I used that instead. In JS, given the time constraint, I think I would have done it as an array of <img> tags with an onclick handler on the parent node which changes the src to a particular icon, or a class name for a css sprite. whatever. But the JS algorithm would be basically the same and I suspect I could do it in a similar amount of time since it is a simple program anyway. I just like D better.



I had to look up the flood fill which took seconds (I played real minesweeper and recognized it was the same algorithm MS Paint uses. I started to hack it myself but realized that I didn't really know it that well and figuring it out myself from principles, while doable, would likely eat my remaining time right there, so I Binged "paint fill algorithm".

Wikipedia popped right up with a description was good enough to run with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill

I implemented the simple recursive version as a template with a few parameters to fit my needs here, while also being usable in my other side project, which has a MS Paint like graphics editor and needs this feature anyway!


Anyway, he rest was pretty straightforward. The complete game has a timer, a scoreboard, a UI for selecting size, etc. I have functions that could do that, but didn't have time to actually put on more UI than the basic game with mouse clicks....

...so indeed, I didn't finish it either. Challenge failed :(

But since it is playable i'm calling this a pretty decent success anyway! And now I have one more example to show off with simpledisplay.d, which I will might add to the documentation

http://arsdnet.net/arsd/simpledisplay.html

along with the existing Pong game.




I didn't use any really special D features there, so not really a language showcase - like I said before, if I was doing it in Javascript, I probably would have done it largely the same - but hey, it is D, so I will post it here :)

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 02:11:58 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> code here:
> http://arsdnet.net/dcode/minesweeper.d
>
> [...]

Nice!

I love doing this kind of thing on a lazy Sunday. Pick any 80's arcade game and try to implement as much as possible in an hour. I have several languages I cycle through but the last 1-hour gamehack in D I did is here:

"D-Invaders" under: http://dgame-dev.de/index.php?controller=wip

The Github repo now has a bunch of extra commits since that initial hour to keep it compiling with Dgame and D. It isn't pretty, nor idiomatic, but I was learning D and Dgame at the same time in that hour :)

I realised two things from that first hour with D, which have both proved true so far:

a) (the most important for me) I can be as productive in D as I am in Python but still keep my static typing and native performance I get with C/C++.

b) D is only going to keep improving.

Cheers,
Stew

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 06:26:43 UTC, stew wrote:
> "D-Invaders" under: http://dgame-dev.de/index.php?controller=wip

Nice!

Dgame looks to be a pretty nice little lib too.

> a) (the most important for me) I can be as productive in D as I am in Python but still keep my static typing and native performance I get with C/C++.

My D productivity is so much higher than I am with ruby and python it isn't even a competition...

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 02:11:58 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> code here:
> http://arsdnet.net/dcode/minesweeper.d
>
> [...]


The code looks easy to understand also. You might consider writing this up into a blog post.

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 02:11:58 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> dmd minesweeper.d simpledisplay.d color.d
>
> And play the game! At least on Windows and Linux. On Mac, you need to install XQuartz since I don't have a working Cocoa implementation in simpledisplay.d right now. Fear not, it is on my todo list for 2016, so it will be there eventually.

I had to install libglu1-mesa* on Ubuntu. Nicely done though!

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 17:24:41 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> The code looks easy to understand also. You might consider writing this up into a blog post.

I might if I had a blog... which I need to set up at some point but haven't yet (well, I used to have one but not for years).

But what I posted here is the most of what I'd say anyway. I guess I could write a bit more about the code but most of it is IMO at least fairly straightforward.

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 20:58:25 UTC, Taylor Hillegeist wrote:
> I had to install libglu1-mesa* on Ubuntu. Nicely done though!

Huh, that's good to know! Everywhere else I tried on Linux it just worked but it does indeed require GL and GLU just because simpledisplay on Linux links to them, though I didn't actually use OpenGL for this program. (on Windows, opengl support is opt-in because the opengl32.lib and glu32.lib aren't included with dmd, I could do that on Linux too I suppose but installing glu isn't that hard anyway...)

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 02:11:58 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> code here:
> http://arsdnet.net/dcode/minesweeper.d
>
> [...]

On Ubuntu 64 bit:

$ dmd minesweeper.d simpledisplay.d color.d
simpledisplay.d(4477): Error: cannot implicitly convert expression (XCreatePixmapCursor(this.display, pm, pm, & blackcolor, & blackcolor, 0u, 0u)) of type ulong to int
$  dmd --version
DMD64 D Compiler v2.069.2


I casted the problem away with cast(int)XCreatePixmapCursor(...) to play a couple games. Not really solving the problem though...

Nice work though! 'Tis very cool.

The game code is very simple to follow too.
I'll try making a simple game using simpledisplay over the christmas.
It looks quite nifty!

On Monday, 21 December 2015 at 10:52:07 UTC, wobbles wrote:
> On Ubuntu 64 bit:

whoops, I always build 32 bit here and sometimes forget to test 64 bit before pushing. Fixed now.

> The game code is very simple to follow too.
> I'll try making a simple game using simpledisplay over the christmas.
> It looks quite nifty!

Sweet, let me know how it goes!

On Monday, 21 December 2015 at 02:28:27 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 17:24:41 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>> The code looks easy to understand also. You might consider writing this up into a blog post.
>
> I might if I had a blog... which I need to set up at some point but haven't yet (well, I used to have one but not for years).

You can write in "THIS WEEK IN D"... please do it!

Bubba.