Started a side project on rails, many guides on how to upgrade a Mac. Every OS has it’s weirdness. Ubuntu wants to control ruby and the gems. OSX has an older version included. Macports sometimes doesn’t add the PATH. It was all really muddy.

Then I found a page by Dave South. The article’s post date is old but at the bottom you’ll see he keeps it updated. Thanks Dave!

As I said in the TODO part of the Making Tetris post, a better way to do collision detection is to have the blocks on the field be bits. This is typically what I saw in academic assignments and student presentations. This is probably the right way to do it in other words. It’s more efficient and it’s more simple (KISS).

Even though this isn’t how I did it in the game, I still wanted to play around with the concept so I made a little prototype that demonstrates the basic gist. Instead of a piece, it’s a single block. Instead of a tetris grid of finished blocks, it’s random blocks. It’s really the same thing, it just looks and plays with different shapes.

So here it is. Space randomizes the grid and the arrow keys move. Play It!