cactus.purge

Introduction

This package commemorates "The Great Cactus Purge of 2020" in which data scientists across the globe obliterated the cactus operator (%<>%) from their code, in an attempt to make their function arguments and returns more explicit.

It was a significant and critical time for epidemiology data scientists, performing many late night data processing tasks, waiting for the inputs to arrive, if they ever did, coping with the inevitable changes in date format, column headers, and general interpretation of data, or the absence of data.

This package was designed to provide therapy to those scientists concerned with both the real-time modelling, and the purge. It is, also, some might say, the pivotal moment where R at last reveals its true nature as a potential retro-gaming platform.

Requirements / Issues

• The package has been developed on Windows; it should also work nicely on Mac OS.

• Hopefully we now have Linux audio support, via /usr/bin/paplay which I think is available on all ubuntu installs'. You still need to sudo apt-get install portaudio19-dev for now because of the detection process - I will remove that later; I just didn't want to delay the excitement...

• I also noticed a small problem handling keys being held down in Linux; the buffer is not emptying, and it takes a while for later keys to get registered. For now: you don't need to do any holding down of keys in the games, tempting though it is at times. I will try and make this nicer too.

Execution

install.packages("devtools")   # if necessary
devtools::install_github("weshinsley/cactus.purge")

• Open a terminal or a Windows Command Prompt, of size 80 x 30 characters or more. On Mac/Linux I believe you just drag the size out. On Windows, right click on the top of the Command Prompt, Proprties, Layout tab, and set the window size there. If you have a snazzy themed terminal, you may want to also somehow set the background colour to black.

• From your terminal/command prompt: Rscript -e "cactus.purge::launch()"

• You can't play Cactus Purge within RStudio; it must be run from a terminal-like environment that supports ANSI control codes, including command-line R itself if you like.

• On Windows, the first time you run Cactus Purge, a registry key may need to be set to allow coloured output in your Command Prompt window. The game will detect the problem and offer to fix it for you, (after which you need to open a fresh command prompt). If you prefer to fix it yourself, then from the command-line:-

REG ADD HKCU\CONSOLE /f /v VirtualTerminalLevel /t REG_DWORD /d 1

or, run Registry Editor (regedit), and go to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console and set the VirtualTerminalLevel to 1.

If 'RScript' is not recognised....

• You are probably on windows, and need Rscript to be in your path. Click Start, and begin typing env - you should see Edit the System Environment Variables, Click Environment Variables, and look for Path in the top window. Edit, New, Browse, and find a folder somewhat similar to This PC: C:\Program Files\R\R-4.2.2\bin, then click OK until everything goes away. Open a new Command Prompt and try again.

Performance

• Terminals are not that fast, surprisingly. You would think writing characters to a console would be speedy. Additionally, it seems that R sometimes incrementally slows down while playing - not clear why at this stage. Restart to renew fast and slick frame rates.

License

MIT