moshcode 0.45.0 → 0.47.0

package/package.json

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 {
   "name": "moshcode",
-  "version": "0.45.0",
+  "version": "0.47.0",
   "type": "module",
   "description": "moshcode — a metal wrapper for coding engines and native UGig/CoinPay workflow CLIs, with OpenPRD and moshscript",
   "repository": {

package/src/games-breakout.mjs

@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
 // decides the angle it leaves at, so the paddle is a steering wheel rather than
 // a wall. Without that you cannot dig a channel up the side of the wall, and
 // digging a channel is the entire reason anybody still plays this.
+import { advanceBall, drawnBall, drawnCell, snapBall } from "./games-draw.mjs";
 import { acid, amber, bone, danger, rgb } from "./ui.mjs";
 
 export const WIDTH = 40;
@@ -16,7 +17,11 @@ export const BRICK_TOP = 1;
 
 export const PADDLE_W = 7;
 export const PADDLE_ROW = HEIGHT - 1;
-const PADDLE_STEP = 2;  // a keypress, not a tick — unchanged by the tick rate
+// A keypress, not a tick, so this is unchanged by the tick rate — but it does
+// have to keep up with the ball, and a ball taken off the end of the paddle now
+// crosses a column in under two ticks. Three columns a press stays ahead of it
+// at a terminal's key-repeat rate; two only just did.
+const PADDLE_STEP = 3;
 
 /**
  * How often the wall is stepped. See the note in games-pong.mjs: the ball can
@@ -31,8 +36,20 @@ const PADDLE_STEP = 2;  // a keypress, not a tick — unchanged by the tick rate
  */
 export const TICK_MS = 16;
 
+/**
+ * How hard the wall is played, against the pace it was first tuned at.
+ *
+ * Launched, the old ball took three seconds to cross the board and two and a
+ * half to fall the height of it, which is a slow enough ball that you can put
+ * the paddle under it and go and make a cup of tea. It also meant the drawn
+ * ball moved twenty times a second, and twenty steps a second does not read as
+ * travel however even they are. Everything below scales together, so a ball off
+ * the end of the paddle leaves at the angle it always did.
+ */
+const PACE = 1.9;
+
 /** The speeds below are still written per 50ms, the rate this was tuned at. */
-const SCALE = TICK_MS / 50;
+const SCALE = (TICK_MS / 50) * PACE;
 
 const LIVES = 3;
 const BASE_VX = 0.62 * SCALE;
@@ -66,6 +83,7 @@ export function brickAt(wall, x, y) {
 function rest(state) {
   state.ball = { x: state.paddle + PADDLE_W / 2, y: PADDLE_ROW - 1, vx: 0, vy: 0 };
   state.stuck = true;
+  state.drawn = drawnBall(state.ball.x, state.ball.y);
   return state;
 }
 
@@ -81,8 +99,12 @@ export function launch(state) {
 export function step(state) {
   if (state.stuck) {
     // A ball that has not been launched rides the paddle, so moving before you
-    // serve aims the serve.
+    // serve aims the serve. It is carried rather than travelling, so it is put
+    // where the paddle is rather than paced there — a stationary ball earns no
+    // steps, and would otherwise sit still while the paddle slid out from under
+    // it.
     state.ball.x = state.paddle + PADDLE_W / 2;
+    snapBall(state.drawn, state.ball.x, state.ball.y);
     return state;
   }
 
@@ -121,11 +143,16 @@ export function step(state) {
     }
   }
 
+  advanceBall(state.drawn, ball);
+
   if (ball.y > PADDLE_ROW) {
     state.lives--;
     if (state.lives <= 0) {
       state.lives = 0;
       state.over = `out of balls · ${state.score} points`;
+      // The last ball is left where it went, below the board and so off it,
+      // rather than resting on the row it fell past.
+      snapBall(state.drawn, ball.x, ball.y);
       return state;
     }
     rest(state);
@@ -197,7 +224,10 @@ export const BREAKOUT = {
     }
 
     for (let i = 0; i < PADDLE_W; i++) put(state.paddle + i, PADDLE_ROW, bone("▀"));
-    put(Math.round(state.ball.x), Math.round(state.ball.y), state.stuck ? amber("●") : bone("●"));
+    // Drawn on half-rows and on its own even clock, so the ball steps the same
+    // distance down the wall as across it, and at a rate. See games-draw.mjs.
+    const ball = drawnCell(state.drawn);
+    put(ball.col, ball.row, (state.stuck ? amber : bone)(ball.glyph));
 
     return grid.map((row) => row.map((cell) => cell ?? " ").join(""));
   },

package/src/games-draw.mjs

@@ -0,0 +1,115 @@
+// Shared drawing for the things in the arcade that move on a diagonal.
+//
+// A terminal cell is about twice as tall as it is wide, so a board drawn one
+// object per cell has half the resolution going down that it has going across.
+// For a ball that is not a rounding detail, it is the whole reason the motion
+// looks wrong. Two things fall out of it, and both of them read as bad physics
+// rather than as a coarse grid:
+//
+// A step sideways moves the ball one pixel and a step down moves it two, so the
+// same ball appears to travel faster down the board than across it, and a
+// trajectory the maths has at forty-five degrees is drawn at sixty.
+//
+// Worse, the two steps keep their own schedules. Crossing into the next column
+// and crossing into the next row almost never land on the same tick, so a ball
+// going diagonally does not move diagonally — it hops sideways, then a tick or
+// two later hops down. Measured on pong, the ball holds a cell for four ticks,
+// four ticks, then two and two as a row change splits one of those spans. That
+// 4-4-2-2 stutter, three or four times a second, is what is left of the jiggle
+// after the clock was fixed.
+//
+// Half blocks fix both. `▀` and `▄` each fill half a cell, which is close to
+// square, so the ball is drawn on a grid with the same pitch both ways: it
+// steps the same distance whichever way it goes, a row is two steps rather than
+// one, and the corner it turns is half as wide. It is also a better ball than
+// `●` was — a square pixel moving on a square grid, rather than a round dot
+// snapping between cells twice its own height apart.
+//
+// Half blocks fix the size of the steps. They do not fix when the steps happen,
+// which turned out to be the other half of it — see `drawnBall` below.
+
+/**
+ * The ball's position in half-rows — the unit it is actually drawn in.
+ *
+ * `y` is a row centre, so row r covers y from r - 0.5 up to r + 0.5: below the
+ * centre the ball is in the top half of that cell, at or above it the bottom.
+ * Half-rows and columns are the same size on screen, so this and the column
+ * together are a square lattice, and a step is a step whichever way it goes.
+ */
+export const halfRow = (y) => {
+  const row = Math.round(y);
+  return y < row ? row * 2 : row * 2 + 1;
+};
+
+/**
+ * A drawn ball, released on its own even clock.
+ *
+ * Equal pitch fixed the size of the ball's steps but not their timing, and the
+ * timing is the rest of the jiggle. Rounding the true position to the lattice
+ * moves the ball whenever it happens to cross a column edge or a half-row edge,
+ * and those two are on unrelated schedules: a ball with the two periods close
+ * but not equal — which is what a near-diagonal is, and what breakout launches
+ * at — beats between them. Measured, breakout held a cell for 16ms, then 80ms,
+ * then 48ms, five times a second. The steps were the right size and still the
+ * ball looked like it was struggling, because nothing was moving at a rate.
+ *
+ * So the true position is not what is drawn. It decides only which way the
+ * drawn ball owes a step; when that step is paid is decided by a clock that
+ * ticks at the ball's own speed. `owed` accrues at |vx| + 2|vy| lattice units
+ * per tick — the distance the true ball covers, measured the way the drawn one
+ * has to travel it — and a whole unit buys one step. The drawn ball therefore
+ * moves every 1/speed ticks whatever angle it is on, trailing the true one by
+ * under a unit, which is under half a character.
+ *
+ * It cannot fall behind: the same accrual that paces the ball also lets it pay
+ * two steps in a tick when the ball is genuinely moving that fast.
+ */
+export function drawnBall(x, y) {
+  return snapBall({ col: 0, half: 0, owed: 0 }, x, y);
+}
+
+/**
+ * Put the drawn ball exactly where the real one is, with no debt either way.
+ *
+ * For the moves that are not travel and so have nothing to smooth: a serve, a
+ * fresh ball on the paddle, the ball riding a paddle that is being aimed.
+ */
+export function snapBall(drawn, x, y) {
+  drawn.col = Math.round(x);
+  drawn.half = halfRow(y);
+  drawn.owed = 0;
+  return drawn;
+}
+
+/** Far enough apart that the ball was put there rather than travelled there. */
+const TELEPORT = 4;
+
+/** Pay out whatever steps the ball has earned this tick. */
+export function advanceBall(drawn, ball) {
+  const col = Math.round(ball.x);
+  const half = halfRow(ball.y);
+  if (Math.abs(col - drawn.col) + Math.abs(half - drawn.half) >= TELEPORT) return snapBall(drawn, ball.x, ball.y);
+
+  drawn.owed += Math.abs(ball.vx) + Math.abs(ball.vy) * 2;
+  while (drawn.owed >= 1) {
+    const dcol = col - drawn.col;
+    const dhalf = half - drawn.half;
+    if (dcol === 0 && dhalf === 0) break;
+    // Whichever axis is further behind goes first, which is what keeps a
+    // diagonal a staircase instead of a sideways run and then a drop.
+    if (Math.abs(dcol) >= Math.abs(dhalf)) drawn.col += Math.sign(dcol);
+    else drawn.half += Math.sign(dhalf);
+    drawn.owed -= 1;
+  }
+  // A ball that has caught up banks at most one step, so that standing still
+  // for a moment cannot be turned into a lurch later.
+  if (drawn.owed > 1) drawn.owed = 1;
+  return drawn;
+}
+
+/** The cell and half block to write for a drawn ball. */
+export const drawnCell = (drawn) => ({
+  col: drawn.col,
+  row: drawn.half >> 1,
+  glyph: drawn.half % 2 === 0 ? "▀" : "▄",
+});

package/src/games-pong.mjs

@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@
 // A flat return it will always get; one taken off the end of your paddle it will
 // not. That is the whole game, and it is why the angle off the paddle depends on
 // where the ball hit it.
+import { advanceBall, drawnBall, drawnCell, snapBall } from "./games-draw.mjs";
 import { acid, bone, danger, dim } from "./ui.mjs";
 
 export const WIDTH = 44;
@@ -36,13 +37,25 @@ export const TARGET = 7;          // first to this many
  */
 export const TICK_MS = 16;
 
+/**
+ * How hard the table is played, against the pace it was first tuned at.
+ *
+ * The old pace put the ball across the table in just under three seconds. That
+ * is not a ball being hit, it is a ball being carried, and it was also why the
+ * drawn ball only moved twenty times a second — too few steps for any of them
+ * to be smooth. Everything below is scaled by this, the machine along with the
+ * ball, so the balance is exactly the one that was tuned; only the clock it is
+ * played against changes.
+ */
+const PACE = 1.9;
+
 /**
  * The speeds below are still written per 55ms — the rate this game was tuned
  * at — and scaled to the tick. Keeping the tuned numbers legible matters more
  * than saving a multiply: they are what makes the machine beatable off the end
  * of the paddle and not from the middle, and that balance is the game.
  */
-const SCALE = TICK_MS / 55;
+const SCALE = (TICK_MS / 55) * PACE;
 
 const SERVE_SPEED = 0.85 * SCALE;
 const MAX_SPEED = 1.7 * SCALE;
@@ -64,6 +77,8 @@ export function serve(state, toward) {
     // Never dead flat: a ball with no angle is a rally nobody can lose.
     vy: (state.rng() < 0.5 ? -1 : 1) * (0.15 + state.rng() * 0.2) * SCALE,
   };
+  // A serve is a ball put on the table, not a ball that travelled there.
+  state.drawn = drawnBall(state.ball.x, state.ball.y);
   return state;
 }
 
@@ -105,6 +120,12 @@ export function step(state) {
 
   if (ball.x < 0) { state.theirs++; point(state, 1); }
   else if (ball.x > WIDTH - 1) { state.yours++; point(state, -1); }
+  // Anything else is the ball travelling, which is the only thing the drawn
+  // ball is asked to follow — a serve puts it back itself.
+  else advanceBall(state.drawn, ball);
+  // A match ends with the ball where it went out, off the table and so off the
+  // board, rather than parked on the edge it left by.
+  if (state.over) snapBall(state.drawn, ball.x, ball.y);
 
   // The machine: idle in the middle until the ball is on its half, then chase
   // the ball's row. Perfect tracking here would make the game unloseable for it,
@@ -164,7 +185,10 @@ export const PONG = {
 
     for (const row of paddleRows(state.you)) put(YOU_COL, row, acid("█"));
     for (const row of paddleRows(state.them)) put(THEM_COL, row, danger("█"));
-    put(Math.round(state.ball.x), Math.round(state.ball.y), bone("●"));
+    // Drawn on half-rows and on its own even clock, so the ball steps the same
+    // distance up the table as across it, and at a rate. See games-draw.mjs.
+    const ball = drawnCell(state.drawn);
+    put(ball.col, ball.row, bone(ball.glyph));
 
     return grid.map((row, y) => row.map((cell, x) => (
       // The net, which is only there so the middle of the table has a middle.