Play a Ruby + AI Coding Game in Your Browser via Bloc

http://www.trybloc.com/courses/ruby-warrior

by choxi • 15 years ago

96 35 15 years ago

gerggerg• 15 years ago

Pretty cool, my issues:

  - The code box can't be resized.
  - You have to read the 'tip' every time. It contains core api and not just tips.
  - Some characters aren't in the map key (archer)
  - It's a little shy on instructions.

What would be awesome:

  - To see it run through your code in realtime with the healths and points displayed.

But honestly it's a really awesome concept and was fun to play even for someone who already knows ruby.

choxi4• 15 years ago

thanks for the feedback! we're working on adding a reference section on our site with the API.

the realtime thing would be awesome, hadn't thought of that.

cubicle672• 15 years ago

Could you please differentiate between an error in the code and the player dying?

I just spent ages trying to figure out what the error ("Oops, looks like we found 1 error in your code") was and it wasn't until after some amount of frustration that I realised there was more information below the fold showing the problem was my player was dying and not my syntax

trebor• 15 years ago

Syntax errors could use a bit of help. I know Ruby and haven't made an obvious error, so it'd be nice to see some kind of exception/description rather than "try again".

freehunter2• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, I have had some problems with Bloc's website every time I've tried to use it. This example took 3 minutes to load the initial page. Earlier today I was running through some Ruby code tutorials, and it got hung up on evaluating the code. Their site runs pretty quick, until it doesn't.

I don't know if it's just under heavy load every time I try to use it (admittedly only when it's on the front page of Hacker News, but it's seemingly always on the front page) or if I'm doing something wrong. Love the site, hate the performance.

choxi4• 15 years ago

sorry about that :(

it's definitely because of hacker news, I just increased our Heroku dynos by a lot though so it should be quicker

freehunter2• 15 years ago

Hey thanks for a response. I've been meaning to visit some time when it's not on the front page, so I can give your poor servers a break while I learn. Troubles of being a popular web app, I guess :)

trun• 15 years ago

The site is running kind of slow so I just did the first couple levels...

The directions (e.g. forward vs left) were a little confusing as you can't tell which way the character is facing at first. Not a problem after level 1 though.

I second gerggerg's suggestion of step-by-step animation, along with highlighting as it runs each line of code. That would really help drive home the point for non-coders.

Are you capturing incorrect responses to see what common sticking points are? For example, I thought .feel() returned a string at first before eventually having to look at the tip.

Awesome idea though! I've been working on something very similar that I hope to share soon.

choxi4• 15 years ago

got a huge traffic spike, increased our dynos so it should be a little snappier now. glad you like it though!

littleidea• 15 years ago

I really like the high level concept, but I dislike the poke the mutable state, disregard Demeter, nested if-else style of programming that the warrior api encourages.

Don't take it too harshly, I definitely like what you are trying to do with the service and I'm interested to see how your classes evolve.

choxi4• 15 years ago

completely agree, in the next iteration we'll allow you to create and edit multiple files to try and encourage you to use better programming practices

jmduke• 15 years ago

Really, really cool concept. I'm a sucker for in-browser coding, and wrapping it in a little game with 'AI' is a great idea.

But as someone who knows other languages and doesn't know Ruby, it does a pretty poor job of teaching the language. Take, for example, level 3, where you need two if statements (check health, then check for an enemy): it took me ten minutes to realize that ruby uses 'elsif' instead of 'else if' or 'elif' because the error thrown by the in-browser compiler was vague at best ("Oops, looks like we found a syntax error in your code. Try again and click "Grade it!" does not exactly illuminate any issues.)

I echo other commenters re: animation but I think in terms of actual didactic potential you need to add more actual coding documentation so newbies aren't lost. Still, huge amount of potential and I'm excited to see this develop.

jolan• 15 years ago

The syntax highlighting shows that 'else if'/'elif' aren't valid but it's pretty subtle.

sgrove• 15 years ago

It says I can use warrior.health, but that doesn't seem to be true - I constantly get

player.rb:5:in `play_turn': undefined method `health' for #<RubyWarrior::Turn:...> (NoMethodError)

Not sure if it's supposed to be added in later levels or what, but it's a bit frustrating. This looks really fun.

llimllib• 15 years ago

> Oops, looks like we found 0 errors in your code. Try again and click "Grade it!"

hmmm.

Also, when you have a syntax error, you need to copy it to a file on your system and figure out where the error is because the game doesn't even tell you what line it's on, let alone what the error said.

edit: Also, "a" is an archer, but it's not in the legend so you can't know what it is until you die from it: https://skitch.com/llimllib/gsi36/ruby-warrior-beginner-bloc

Groxx3• 15 years ago

I just got that, not quite sure what the cause of mine is. It happened immediately after I recursed though, so I wonder if that has something to do with it?

edit: apparently not, that's working now. Still not sure what caused it, though.

edit2: you can get it by calling non-existent methods on RubyWarrior classes - try .feel.archer? for example. I don't remember if this is what I did for my exact error, but it's likely it was something similar.

algorithms• 15 years ago

I think there is insufficient information on the pages on what to do, since you require very specific commands and there are no hints whatsoever.

I love the idea though. If someone would be interested on working(for fun and as a learning experience) on something like this with html5 canvas and some graphics and all with a Ruby or Python back-end, tell me :D

JonLim2• 15 years ago

I love this idea and learning from it, but I thought I could move left and right and instead I bump into walls.

Damn you archer!

JonLim2• 15 years ago

Actually level 5 is kinda wonky. The tips tell me to rescue captives, but regardless of what I do, it just says this:

    > Oops, looks like there was a syntax error in your code. Try again and click "Grade it!"

Without anything for me to look at. Weird.

bct• 15 years ago

I had the same problem, for some reason

    get '/:short_code' do
    end

got inserted at the end of the textarea.

germano• 15 years ago

It looks like this is because rescue is a reserved word in Ruby (Disclaimer: I'm not a Ruby expert, just basing this on a Google search and the syntax highlighting)

mrinterweb• 15 years ago

It kept saying I had syntax errors. I copied the code and checked it with `ruby -c mycode.rb` and it passed. Not sure which version of ruby they are using here. I was just trying to make the game fun with a little meta programming, guess that is not allowed.

bryanh• 15 years ago

Gonna have to echo that the code box needs to be much bigger or auto-adjusts.

tiptup• 15 years ago

As someone with zero programming skills, I find the course pretty frustrating for a complete beginner (not sure the segment you're targeting tbh).

I like the concept of in-browser coding as it removes the set-up barrier for noobs like myself, who struggled with setting up Python on Windows!

It would be great if there are better instructions as to what one needs to do. The tips aren't really tips when the info provided are essential to progress. It's pretty daunting for a beginner to go through the github page when I only need a couple of lines on the key need-to-knows for that particular level.

I echo gerggerg and trun's suggestion of step-by-step animation as the output failures leaves me none the wiser as to what went wrong as it's gibberish to me just now.

shubber• 15 years ago

As a side note (for all of you who've typed :wq in the code entry field), you can 'gem install rubywarrior' and play Ryan Bates's original locally. A little snappier, too.

kooshball• 15 years ago

It would be nice to have some syntax hints. I dont know ruby so I dont know what the syntax for an if/else statement would look like even if it's obviously simple to someone that's seen it before.

cubicle672• 15 years ago

    if warrior.feel.empty?
      warrior.walk! :forward
    else
      warrior.attack!
    end

Edit: if you're new to ruby syntax, then it's probably worth pointing out that the ? and ! on the end of the method names has no special function (they're both valid characters for using in method names). By convention, methods that return a boolean end in ? and methods that modify the object end in !. For example, Array has two sort methods - sort and sort!. some_array.sort will return a sorted copy of some_array but leave the original unsorted. some_array.sort!, however, will sort aome_array

numle• 15 years ago

A monkey patch for the archer:

  class RubyWarrior::Space
    def archer?
      self.unit.kind_of? RubyWarrior::Units::Archer
    end
  end

Groxx3• 15 years ago

Similarly, include this in the patch for .wizard?:

  def wizard?
    self.unit.kind_of? RubyWarrior::Units::Wizard
  end

zkarcher• 15 years ago

My attempt at Level 1:

  class Player
    def play_turn(warrior)
      warrior.walk!(:right)
    end
  end

The warrior keeps bumping in to a wall, and the code fails.

This is counter-intuitive, because the exit is to the right of the warrior. I can't endure another N levels of nonintuitive frustration, sorry.

lloeki• 15 years ago

actually the warrior starts facing right (which is not specified but could be supposed). so :right is actually moving down, since all movements are relative, which is inferred by :forward and :backward being present and :up :down missing, which I suppose would rather be :north :south :east and :west. Once you also understand that tips really are not, but the necessary API doc, well, it's smooth sailing.

xal• 15 years ago

Probably a good idea to speed up the ruby by compiling a ruby binary to javascript (through emscripten) similarly to how http://repl.it did it. That way you don't need a server.

akkartik• 15 years ago

I did the available levels a few years ago, if anyone's curious: http://github.com/akkartik/brooks-ruby-warrior

Groxx3• 15 years ago

FYI for confused:

  * you face 'forward', which is to the right.
    .walk! or .walk!(:forward) is what you want until later.
  * you can feel walls: .feel.wall?
  * you can print: p "Feels: #{warrior.feel}"
  * add this to the bottom of your file to get .archer? and .wizard? methods on look:
    class RubyWarrior::Space
      def archer?
        self.unit.kind_of? RubyWarrior::Units::Archer
      end
      def wizard?
        self.unit.kind_of? RubyWarrior::Units::Wizard
      end
    end

Thanks for the original monkeypatch go to numle at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435382

It's beatable w/o hand-coding each action - I ended with a fairly-general setup that only took a couple changed lines to solve the last task (a should_shoot? method, basically). But the 'course' as a whole needs a LOT of work. And better documentation. And fixes for the missing methods. And a better progression - if you don't set up something fairly flexible early on, you'll be re-writing a lot each time; the steps don't encourage you to generalize very well. And / or hints as to how to design something good to do this - there are absolutely no suggestions, no learning, just 'tips' that tell you half the API available to you.

If anyone wants a cheat-sheet for my setup for the end: https://gist.github.com/1574167 though it was tweaked at each level slightly, and grew into that. Definitely not my best work, but it works.

FuzzyDunlop• 15 years ago

I think this'd be really helpful if it was documented better. As it is, it assumes you already know what you're supposed to be doing. It tells you part of what you need to do, but buries the rest in the github page.

Some better error reporting, even providing the interpreter in JS (as suggested by another commenter), would allow people to run the app offline without leaving their browsers. Having the ability to install the gem is great, but I would say the browser opens it up to people who might not want to - or can't - do that.

Finally, the layout of the page means you have to keep scrolling up and down to refer to the level details and get back to the editor. There's a lot of horizontal space wasted with the fixed-width layout, when it could be used to present the level details and the editor side-by-side (thus allowing the editor to assume the full height of the browser).

This could be a really good tutorial with a bit more polish :) if I understood it all and knew Ruby well enough I'd gladly contribute.

Play a Ruby + AI Coding Game in Your Browser via Bloc

Related Stories