My project for the textjam, "akrete," is now at the point where the hard work begins. I successfully ported all the easy logic from Iron Arachne's Typescript to akrete's Python. The only hiccup I ran into was in the random number generator class's "next()" method, where in the Typescript version I was using unsigned bitwise operators to handle some of the logic. Python only has signed bitwise operators. It was easy enough to work around, and I knew I'd hit something like that when porting. Ah well, it's done.
Also, I discovered that my go-to CLI library for Python, argparse, has long ago been superceded by a library called Click. That was a pleasant discovery. Click is much nicer to work with than argparse. I'll be using that going forward.
Anyway. Akrete now generates random planets, including names and statistics, and outputs the results to the terminal. I even found and fixed a couple bugs in the statistics generation that I'll need to go back and fix in the Typescript. As it turns out, I was making a few silly hard-coded decisions about orbital distance and planetary temperature. The calculations for planetary temperature are still quite strange, but since they're mostly in line with what I want the output to be, I'm leaving that alone for now.
The hard part is next. I have to add ASCII images of the planet to the output. Effectively, I'll be generating very low resolution pixel art, using ASCII characters. For the Iron Arachne version of the planet generator I use GLSL shaders to handle the planet images. This will be very different, but maybe some of the logic will translate. Who knows; if this works, maybe I'll backport the ASCII image generation to Iron Arachne, to use in utility scripts for testing purposes. I've been doing that more and more lately, especially while working on the region map generator.
...oh yeah, I haven't mentioned the region map generator before. Ah well, just ignore that sentence for now.
Assuming I can figure out how image generation will work, Akrete should be done in time to submit to the jam. Once it's submitted, I'll add a link to the code base on my Works pages.