About Turing's Tarpit

This is a game for programmers. The eventual goal is to make a small game that makes programmer development live streams more exciting, but also makes it fun to try to keep your code bug free.

How It Works

0. You start with 100 Hit Points (HP).
1. Turing's Tarpit (TT) watches your git repo.
2. If you save any files in your git then TT will run your build.
3. It then uses a regex to detect errors, warnings, and notes from your compiler.
4. Every error is 4 HP of damage. Warnings and Notes are 1 HP.
5. If you successfully build with no errors then you get 10% HP back (healed).
6. It keeps track of your rounds, and your longest streak. A streak is how many builds have run without producing an error.

Eventually this will become more complex as I add in a few more mechanics, but this is the general game loop. Some of the ideas for future mechanics:

1. I have a real trash Brainfuck compiler. I want to have that in there somewhere.
2. I like the way Shotgun Roulette works where you get some items per round and can use them to gain an advantage.
3. I want streaks to be some kind of reward, either you just get some healing after a certain number, or you can "cash them in" for a special item.
4. It needs to detect when you don't make enough changes to be worth it, but I might try to punish you if you just change a file's timestamp.
5. Running your unit tests as well to analyze the TAP output and punish you for test failures.

Platforms

Currently this only works on Windows but there's nothing in this that will stop it from working anywhere else. It uses FTXUI to make a TUI so that means it's very portable. I just haven't spent the time to try to port it yet.

It's also only been test with GCC and C++. I'm betting the regex will be crazy wrong for any other language. BTW, where's the TAP output for compilers?

Compiling Setup

WARNING These instructions are off the top of my head right now so they're probably wrong. I need to do a clean build in a fresh VM.

To build this you'll need to install winlibs and meson but I believe my build process downloads everything else.

If you want to get setup quickly with a C/C++ build environment then you can use my installer scripts. Start a NORMAL user PowerShell to run this. If you're walking around the internet as a raw Administrator user then you might as well just inject ebola infected blood straight into your eye you idiot. No, UAC will not save you. Listen to Zed.

Now, in your NORMAL user PowerShell do this:

irm https://learncodethehardway.com/setup/base.ps1 -outfile base.ps1
powershell -executionpolicy bypass .\base.ps1

Do not go anywhere. You have to enter in passwords for your Administrator user. You do have a second user that's an administrator right? Seriously, what's your problem. Do you just like having your neighbor install a RAT tool to spy on you? Make two accounts already.

Now that you have this you can install the compiler tools:

irm https://learncodethehardway.com/setup/cpp.ps1 -outfile cpp.ps1
powershell -executionpolicy bypass .\cpp.ps1

For a bit of extra nice things, run my extras.ps1 too:

irm https://learncodethehardway.com/setup/extras.ps1 -outfile extras.ps1
powershell -executionpolicy bypass .\extras.ps1

Building

Once you have all of that you should be able to check out the code from this git:

git clone https://git.learnjsthehardway.com/learn-code-the-hard-way/turings-tarpit.git

Then change into the directory and run my setup script:

powershell -executionpolicy bypass .\scripts\reset_build.ps1

That should setup your meson build with everything you need, so now you run it:

meson compile -C builddir

The next dumb as hell thing is even though I've told meson to build a static binary it refuses. You have to copy a couple .dll files to your local directory for the easiest way to play with it:

cp .\builddir\subprojects\libgit2-1.8.1\*.dll .
cp .\builddir\subprojects\efsw\*.dll .
ls *.dll

You should then see the libefsw.dll and liblibgit2package.dll files in the local directory which will let you run the escape_turings_tarpit.exe game locally.

WARNING The reason you're copying all these files to the local directory is so you can run the game and the DLLs but also run the build on the code. Windows locks executables when they're active, so when you build builddir/escape_turings_tarpit.exe it'll fail if you're also running it. Copy it all up and then you can run builds in the game while you work on the game.

Then hang out for a while and it should build. You can then do your first run. First, run the tests:

.\builddir\runtests

If those run then try to run the game on its own code:

cp .\builddir\escape_turings_tarpit.exe . ;  .\escape_turings_tarpit.exe .\ "meson compile -C builddir"

Now it's playing, so all you have to do is open one of the .cpp files, make a mistake, save it, and watch the game play.