Grrr 1.1 and Big Invaders

So I’ve been spending a bit of time getting to grips with Cmdlets and resurrecting interest in PSInvaders using Grrr and now have something to post.

Grrr 1.1 is now Cmdlet based and comes as a Snap-In. The most obvious benefit from this is performance, as I can now present a playable version of PowerShell Big Invaders.

BigInvaders is one of the demo PowerShell scripts that makes use of the Grrr.

Download this prerelease version 1.1 of the Grrr snap-in.

Update: this should now install on Vista - thanks to Chris Warwick for pointing out some issues

There’s no installer (yet) so to get going, follow this instructions:

Unzip the archive where you want to use it and CD to the top level director where the README file is.

Type: ./installgrrr.ps1 -r

The -r switch forces it to re-register the snap-in if a (possibly) older version exists. It then adds the snap-in to the current shell.

From here you can CD into the demos directory and run any of the scripts. Each one shows a feature of Grrr, but perhaps the most interesting is in the biginvaders directory.

To run BigInvaders, you need to have a very large console. To achieve this you probably need to set the font size of your console window to 6×8.

If you want sound, you need to install DirectX DirectSound. More on why later.

It should work without, silently, but this hasn’t had much testing as all my XP boxes have it installed If there are exceptions, start it with the -nosound switch.

Assuming all is well, type ./biginvaders.ps1 and you should see this title screen:

Hit ESC to quit or Space to play. In play, Space fires a missile and arrow keys move left and right. Hit F to toggle FPS display in the top-righthand corner.

The target FPS is 33. I achieve this easily on my MacPro, and my wife’s Dell (a core 1 duo, 1.66ghz) also just manages.

There are still a few snags to iron out here and I want to add proper PowerShell help and an installer, but it is functional.

I’ve learned a lot about C#, PowerShell SDK and .NET these last weeks and will write about my findings over the next days. It’s not all been rosy.

I’ll also be writing about the features of Grrr, and where I want to go with it.

That’s it for now.

Grrr, Cmdlets and PSInvaders revival

Still not much happening here, again partly due to being busy with other things, and also the final arrival of my Wii.

Anyways, I’ve almost completed the transition of Grrr to Cmdlets and it’s looking very promising as this screen shot shows (I get 50fps with only 20% cpu load doing this):

I intend to redo the original PSInvaders using Grrr, with more authentic gameplay and original graphics.

The scrolling tilemap support is looking good, so games like Gauntlet, Scramble and Super Mario Brothers should be possible… all scripted in PowerShell.

So apologies for the low post volume recently and please do watch this space.

Slow week

Not much happening here on the blog this week as I’ve been a bit busy with other things and also on some non-trivial PowerShell projects:

• A snap-in version of Grrr - I realised that PowerShell alone is just too slow for it to be useful, so thought I’d have a go at doing it all as cmdlets in a snap-in. It’s fairly easy, but I’m not there yet.
• In trying to understand the grammar of PowerShell better (the documentation is not so great, and Bruce hasn’t printed his book yet), I’ve started to write an interpreter in Java. I’ve got a more or less complete AST, and a prototype interpreter, but it’s slow going (well, I only started 4 days ago, and it’s in my spare time).

Watch this space.