I have been watching a lot of game development coding tutorials over the last couple of years. This includes things like the excellent Game Developers Conference (GDC), Sebastian Lague and his wonderful coding adventures series, and Yahtzee's dev diary series to name a few.

It's difficult to not see developers use Unity when demonstrating their game developing online. Some developers will directly reference it, whilst others will simply look at the code they are writing. Unity, though, didn't appeal to me as it comes with some licensing costs. You only need to pay those licensing costs if you release a game, but as a hobby developer who advocates free and open source development Unity just didn't sit well with me.

Drupal's update hook system is a powerful way of updating your site to introduce things that wouldn't be handled using the configuration system.

Modules will use update hooks to bring sites that have the old version of the module in line with the latest additions to the module. For example, if a new field is added to a table that the module uses then an update hook will be needed to add that field to all sites that are current using the old version. This update hook will be in addition to the install hook that would install the table with the added field in the first place.

There are a number of different reasons why you would want to use update hooks on your own site. Normally being stored in either install profiles or custom modules they would be run on deployment in order to update your dev/stage/production site with changes without having to manually apply them. This is a useful way to do one of the following actions.

Bar charts are powerful ways to show the relationships between different data items. If the data you want to show is discrete then a simple horizontal segmented bar chart is a good idea. You can easily change a collection of numbers into a related set of attributes.

To display this bar chart you don't need a large JavaScript library or an backend charting system, you just need a few lines of markup and some styles. Here is all of the markup needed to generate the bar chart. This consists of a wrapper element and four inner elements that make up the data of the bar chart. Note that the width of each element is pre-calculated to be 25%. I'll address the maths involved in this later in the post.

As another step up from the game of snake I created in my last post I decided to try my hand at creating a side scrolling shooter. Just like my other posts, this is an ASCII based game played on the command line.

A side scrolling shooter, if you didn't already know, moves a scene from right to left across the screen with enemies moving with the scene towards the player's ship, which is on the left hand side of the scene. The player can fire bullets towards the enemies so remove them from the scene.

In order to create a side scrolling shooter we need to define a few elements.

Computers are not that great at creating random numbers as the methods they use are deterministic. That is, they start from a number (called a seed) and apply maths to that number to generate pseudorandom numbers. Most random numbers generated by computers programs use a seed provided by the system, which is generally the current time. If you can guess the initial value then you can start to work out what the random sequence of numbers generated is. Most random numbers, are therefore not suitable for encryption.

The git diff command will allow you to view the differences in your workspace. This can be used in a number of ways to look at the differences in a file, in a branch or between two branches.

For example, you can view the differences in your current workspace by just running git diff on its own. By supplying a file you can look at the differences in just that file.

To compare the difference between one branch and another you use '..' to separate the branch names. For example, to look at the differences between the head of the 'main' branch and the head of a feature branch use this syntax.

This can often be quite noisy, especially on large projects, so to check just one directory between two branches you can add the directory path to the command.

I was looking for a function that searched an array for another array, and after not finding one I decided to write it. What I was looking for was a function that took a smaller array and searched for that exact sequence of items in a larger array. As it happens, PHP does have a number of array search functions, but they didn't produce the correct result.

The array_search() function does accept an array as the needle to be searched for, but this does a multi-dimensional search instead. I also saw some techniques using array_intersect() or array_diff(), and although these functions were able to find one array inside another I was interested in the sequence. 

The implementation of the function contains a two loops, one for going through the haystack array and one for the needle array. If the number of matches found equals the number of items in the needle array then the function returns true.

Here is the sequence_in_array() function.

When creating regular expressions for PHP I tend to use the awesome tool PHP Live Regex.

This tool has really helped me over the last couple of years to create regular expressions for many of the projects I've been working on. Everything from validation functions to formatters that use regular expressions have had their expressions worked out using this tool. I even use it for testing one off expressions where I just need to find/replace in a file.