2024 update

 Well, it's been three years since the last one, so I guess I'm due for a new Not Dead Hugo post.  In the past few months, I have been cracking open some Hugo code once again.

First off, a special shout out to the hundreds of bots who visit this blog every month.  Thank you, Hong Kong!  

I still have never learned any general purpose coding languages to the extent that I know Hugo.  I mentioned on here at one point how I wrote a Hugo "game" to coordinate my family's Secret Santa program.  It allows me to easily disallow Secret Santa matches from previous years so people don't get the same pick, and using game transcripts, it writes all of the picks to text files so I can be as surprised as everyone else, as far as who has picked whom.

In the last year, I decided that it would be nice to have a companion compilation that would allow my family members to look up Secret Santa's on their own (for the times you have a really inspired gift idea for someone so you would like to pass the idea on to their actual Secret Santa... or whatever other reason you might want to know).

So, I wrote this companion app.  The two programs shared a file that both could write to or read from (like I did in my joke game "The Halloween Horror").  For some reason, though, at first, values were getting overwritten by the second one.  I decided this merited some more in-depth examination of my "configuration file helper" extension, but by the time I got around to doing the deep dive, I had already redesigned my pair of "games" and was no longer able to replicate the issue.  Sometimes it's kind of disappointing when everything works, no longer able to figure out why anything ever went wrong.

Hugella over at the Jolt Country interactive fiction started a project to review all of the IF Archive's uploaded Hugo games at the tail end of 2022.  One of the early games covered was Robb Sherwin's port of the BBS door game "HAMMURABI."  Opening up the game myself reminded me that I once thought it'd be a good coding exercise to add some perks.  The main thing I wanted to do was to have the game use the normal Hugo engine game loop instead of 'while' loop so that meta commands like SAVE, RESTORE, and (most importantly) QUIT worked.  I also wanted to stop it from accepting negative numbers and other things that could easily mess up the game.

I thought about this idea in 2023 but I think I actually even gave up on it at some point, since Hugo only understands a few numbers as dictionary words by default and commands need to be understood for the game loop to work.

But there I was, in 2024, with new ambition and grit!  And I was successful (the new version is now up at the IF Archive, I believe)!  So that was fun.

There was a snag at one point, though.  My Roodylib code that turns inputted-numbers into actual numbers expected unrecognized words in the word array to have the value 0, and in my code, they were coming up as -1.  Part of me remembered seeing parse$ (the variable where Hugo saves unrecognized words) having the value -1 in the past, but I just figured I must have gotten something wrong.

So this (and another sort of meaningless update- just added some additional information at the start of game transcripts in games compiled in debug mode) caused me to upload a new version of the Roodylib suite and updated the Notepad++ packages.

Only after all of this was done did I discover the true culprit.  parse$ in a word array filled by the parsing engine gets the value -1, but parse$ in a word array filled by the input command has the value 0.  So future releases of Roodylib will allow for both values (since no legitimate dictionary word will ever have those values) but I'm not going to upload a new Roodylib suite right away.

In other Hugo news, I recently made the acquaintance of a blind IF fan so I was excited to share some Hugo games I've compiled with some accessibility stuff that strives to make games work better with screenreaders.  I don't think he noticed any of those features (which isn't a big deal since they are barely noticeable, to be honest), but he did notice that a daemon wasn't triggering properly in the game Spur.  While I was quick to suspect that some of my Roodylib updates had broken something, it turned out that some of Spur's 1999 daemon code doesn't play nice with the modern Hugo library.

It was easy enough to replicate the intended behavior in other ways, though, and I made a note about this Spur code over at Hugo By Example.  I've been trying to update Hugo By Example more in general.  Among a handful of pages, I added a step-by-step walkthrough on using the Windows Debugger as I get the impression that many Hugo authors don't take advantage of it.

In other project news, as someone who feels he has awful time management, I coded a thing in Hugo that randomly picks tasks I want to do and rewards I could have (again, I don't know any general coding languages well).  I used Hugo's system time stuff to determine what day of the week it is and what time of day so that some tasks can be limited to day or night or weekday or weekend, if need be.  Finding online equations for finding the day of the week was fun; I can't remember the last time I've needed the mod function for a game.  Still, it's unlikely that any game most people write will care if players are playing the game on a Monday so I don't think I'll be adding that code to any of the Roodylib libraries.

The plan is that I will work on my own game ideas at some point, but since working on my own games is the worst, I'll probably find one or two distraction projects to do before that happens.