Heliodex

Heliodex project update – February 2025

Spring has sprung, the grass is ris. I wonder where the monthly project update is? Welcome back all.

litecode

Litecode is in the process of being rebranded! The name "litecode" will now only be used for the VM, standard libraries, and execution system. This means that the rest of the project, what I'm coining the "communication system", will be separate, and will communicate with the litecode execution system over a(n internal) network. Litecode will handle the execution and return of programs and their results, and should cancel them if they run for too long.

The combination of the execution system, the communication system, the protocols they rely on, and the network of these systems communicating with each other is being rebranded as follows.

Heliodex

Heliodex project update – January 2025

Hello again! Your monthly update is here once again, with the usual side of assorted sections of rambling.

litecode

Some bug fixes and a better external API have been added, alongside four string library functions I was hesitant to implement: find, match, gmatch, and gsub. Pattern matching was, as I had suspected, a pain in the ass to get working. What next, maybe metatable support? Eh, perhaps if they actually turn out to be useful someday.

Pretty much all standard library functions apart from the really naughty ones have been implemented now, so I'll call it ready for further battle-testing as part of a larger-scale system. If any bugs crop up that I haven't caught yet, they'll probably be really insane time-sink ones.

Heliodex

Heliodex project update – December 2024

Happy new year! Small update from the end of last year here.

litecode

Litecode is, solely for the purposes of the larger project I would like to use it in, nearing completion. I ought to change the tagline to something other than "Semi-working Luau bytecode interpreter" at this point lol

I'm taking full advantage of the fact I can break compatibility with the reference implementation in a couple of places. The interpreter now features a faster, simpler, and lighter implementation of tables, at the cost of a few tiny edge cases being different with vanilla Lua/Luau. Bugs are sometimes difficult to track down because of little debugging/error handling support at the moment, though the steadily growing test suite helps a lot with this.

Heliodex

Heliodex project update – November 2024

Sup. Hope you're all excited for this epic completely regular post about the progress of what I'm working on.

litecode

I've been steadily stabilising litecode's interpreter and continued work on the standard library. math and table libraries are now complete, and I have some functions working on the string library.

However, I'm unsure I'll be able to match the compatibility of the reference implementation, especially given that what I'm building might not even be considered Luau anymore. Most deprecated functions have been removed, math.random/randomseed have also been taken out, and the string library, the most complex so far, I'm only planning on implementing about half of.
Relating to randomness – I'd like determinism to be a priority, as this would be extremely useful for the larger project I intend for it to be a part of. Relating to the string library – A lot of the stuff relating to iterators I

Heliodex

<script>
	let name = 'world';

	let map = []
	let colours = []
	const petals = 13

	const hue = Math.random() * 360
	const stdev = 10

Heliodex

Heliodex project update – October 2024

Eh. Welcome back, fellow monthly update viewer! Here's the October one.

litecode

litecode is a bytecode interpreter for Luau, modelled after Fiu. It's semi-functional at the moment, though handles a lot of stuff I've thrown at it. Building it ended up being a huge pain learning experience (even though it was still way easier than attempting to embed Luau itself).

Implementing this has given me loads of insight into how Luau works, and interest about what I can use it for as well. It's also given me some crazy ideas like "hey, what if metatables were bad?" and "what if I made tables index starting at 0?" and "what if I made if-conditions only work with booleans?" and so on. I'll see if I can keep those out of my head or if I'll power trip and let them stay there.

Heliodex

Heliodex project update - September 2024

Hello again. Here's another monthly update to show what I've been working on.

Sprig Shooter

The Heliodex/sprig repository includes a set of tools and the Sprig Shooter game for the Hack Club Sprig game console. While the engine was designed to work with tile-based games, Sprig Shooter is a bitmap-based arcade-style game. Shoot enemies and avoid crashing into them to gain score, and the game gets harder as you progress.

The limited capabilities of the Sprig was a fun challenge to work around, and making bitmap graphics and music alongside custom engine behaviour and collision detection was a great learning experience. I've applied to get my hands on the real hardware, and I can't wait to see how the game runs on it.

Heliodex

// F# version, bit of a hack because it relies on luau anyway so just use the luau version, it's faster
// also I'm never writing a mathematics evaluator

open System
open System.Diagnostics
open System.Collections.Generic
// digits one to ten must be in order

// numbers one to ten, with 3 operators placed between them
let sum = 100

Heliodex

Heliodex project update - July/August 2024

We're doubling up baby! I didn't have time to write a post last month, so this one will cover both July and August.

Mercury Core

After ~28 months in development, the highly anticipated open-source release of Mercury Core has finally happened. This is (hopefully) the final form of this several-times-recycled codebase, and will continue to be supported by maintainers and by community contributions for some time. However, we're still considering how releases will work, and whether the main branch should be considered stable for production use.

This first release is intended to be only for highly technical users or programmers, though the README does include instructions for easy configuration with the mercury.core.ts file. We're working on a comprehensive video guide to Mercury Core, which includes setup instructions as well as a full tutorial walkthrough of creating your own fully fledged revival project w

Heliodex

Heliodex project update - June 2024

Can't put this one off any longer... you'll see. Here's the update for June, it'll be a long one this time.

Mercury

The Mercury 2 website has been replaced with a memorandum titled "The Future of Mercury 2". The short and not-sweet gist of it is that we ran into a whole host of effectively insurmountable technical issues regarding communication between the client and DLL hooks, and we didn't have the time, resources, experience, or incentive to solve them. Dare I say this is one of the "great filters" of any Revival project – and we've fallen to it.

We made the decision to close down the Mercury 2 website, services, and branding abruptly (as is taskmanager's forte), specifically to avoid the late-stage burnout and neglect that we've seen in other projects. Instead, we'll be using the time and resources we have left to rebuild and rescope the project by splitting it into multiple component parts. We're honing our focus on the eponymous