Stu's Rusty Bucket

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Brake Fluid

At some point over the winter my GT absorbed a shitload of water and air and turned it into a lethal cocktail.. At normal room temperature the rear wheel is locked fairly solid, thats how pumped up the brake is.

Thats no problem I just need to bleed and flush the old fluid and put in some new stuff…

Sure… no problem right.

Try buying DOT5.1 brake fluid. Was gonna take a week and have to be sent from california and any savings I make buying online I loose in shipping.

I did the next sensible thing, I went to the local auto parts store.. Only DOT3 and 4. So I go to the local motor bike store.. nah he has DOT3 but some guy came in asking for mineral oil last week…

I then visit the bike shop behind where I work, they charge 40$ A BRAKE for flushing.. so I’d be out 80$ plus tax, plus they order in the oil on Monday and it gets there on Friday.

So I’m back looking at that Motul DOT5.1 in the shop in California…

And while I’m changing fluids I should probably change the pads too..

So now the problem I have is finding pads for my Hope M4’s in America. EBay to the rescue! Waaaiit a minute, most everything I can find is for the “newer” model the Mono M4’s which wont work for me. I have old-style M4’s.

ARGH!

Well there is one guy on Ebay with some old style M4 pads…

Maybe I should buy a few sets just to be safe..

In a perfecet world I’d upgrade from old M4’s to new Mono-M4’s or Mono-Mini’s or whatever they are called…

Anyway, I need to go order some Motul from California.

Friday, June 06, 2008

Useless Database programming, a dbase inspiration

Having fond memories of the classic database app that helped kickstart the shareware movement, PC-File from Buttonware, I’ve been hacking up a little bit of C code to do a micro-rdbms. First off I didn’t want to just do some kind of dbase reader. There is a tonne of those in existence already, not it had to be a new wheel on an old axle! Second, I didn’t want to have multiple files, one file should contain everything needed, data structures, tables, indexes etc.

The first step in realizing this was that I was writing a file system driver on the bottom layer, something to manage small chunks of data in random places in the file.

The second hack was having dual data structures, the on disk structure and the in memory structure.

Current data types are;

* Auto ID (32bit unsigned integer)
* Integer (signed 32bit integer)
* Double (double...)
* String (of max 64kb)
* Date, Time, DateTime (uses data structure of basic month/day/year, hour/minute/second.)
* Foreign Key (table ID / Field ID).

The filesystem layer manages things in 8 byte pages. You basically ask this layer for X bytes and it returns you a buffer that you throw data into which gets marked dirty and later flushed to disk.

The real limitation (remember this is not some honking 64bit thing, its.. micro, wee for a better term) is that the complete size of a row is 64kb max, even tho strings have a 64kb size limit and you can have 255 fileds per table, the combined on disk size of the row can not exceed 64kb. Obviously changing the row size from holder uint16_t to uint32_t would alleviate this but I don’t see the point.

The maximum size the underlying data manager can handle is 32gb. (2^32 * 8).. originally it was 2^16 * 8 which is only a paltry 512kb.. but 512k would have fit just fine on an Amiga 880kb floppy or a PC 720kb floppy. Maybe I will revert back to using 16bit block number with a 8byte page size (512kb) or a 16byte page size (1mb)…

Database, Field and Table names are limited to 48 characters, a table can have 255 fields and 2^32 rows.

Currently you can create DB’s, tables, fields. You can add rows. The system will flush dirty information to disk and you can load the schema up from disk.

The next task will be to read the row data back into memory, then do the indexing info, most of the code for reading row data back already exists, so it should be quite simple.

Its big bottleneck is that it operates in a form of a single linked list. If I need to update row N, I need to load the row header information for row M so I can re-point it to row N when a new disk block is allocated. The presence of a row index will alleviate this tho.

No, I have no plans for writing a SQL parser or any other fancy things, I’m not going to re implement SQLite or anything, this is just a fun thing to spend a day or two on.

The name of this marvel is, CodPiece.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Combat is back

Got serious on Fishguts this weekend. I gutted my combat engine, ripped all my sprites out and each monster has its own file now, so I am not trying to shoehorn them all into the base combat sprite sheet (that is reserved for magic sprites, missile weapon sprites etc, targeting box, stonned overlay, explosion overlay, grass tiles, wall sets etc etc etc).

Ive also rewritten my cellular automata generator, this makes better use of my templates than the previous version.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The Economy and Wear and Tear

I was reading a great article on Single Player Economies at moogle.net and it made me bust out my old spreadsheet and touch it up.

Richard made some good points in the article and its hard not to think of all the classic RPG’s I’ve played and how they did the economy… I think it was a consensus that they all did id badly. Remember Pool of Radiance and that they forced copper, silver, electrum, gold and platinum on you.. oh and jewelery and gems. Thats seven different types, and everything but gold or platinum (since it was worth more than gold) was useless. Worse, it all counted as weight that reduced your movement points so why would anyone carry large amounts of copper around?

I don’t even remember any use in the game for copper, silver or electrum. What shop made you pay in electrum?

How important will shopping and the economy be to my game?
At what point in the game does it go from being a struggle to buy basic items to not even needing/wanting to go to the shop ever again?

I guess its a bell curve that the price of gold rides opon or a straight line going continually upward. One of my aims is to make money still valuable right up to the end game.

Towns will all offer different prices for whatever goods they sell but they all sell similar stuff (but some shops only sell certain things you cant find elsewhere!).

One of my driving economic factors in the game was an early decision to make gold scarce.

• Gold drops will be limited
• Eliminate or limit grinding / farming

By having monsters drop a tonne of useless junk (long swords, leather armour) it encourages farming items to sell (which would still yield litte return due to inventory capacity), but by not dropping you miss out on things (i remember about the only thing I’d loot from combat drops in Gold Box games was arrows if I was low).

One thought I had for combat loot is to not drop items lower ranked than what the player has, eg: if the player has a long sword, drop put any short swords into the loot pile, unless it had some special flag (eg: +1 bonus vs trolls or something), and never drop more than number of characters in the party -1 of any item, so when fighting that hoard of orcs in Sokol Keep and being rewarded with 1,000 short swords, we would only drop 3 short swords for a 4 character party.

The disproportion of loot vs enemies can always be explained away with a message like “After looking over all the loot this is the best of what they had” or something similar.

To help drive my economy, I’m going to borrow the ‘wear and tear’ factor for arms and armour from Magic Candle. This will drive players to either repair items or replace them, giving more usage to gold or trying new and different items out. If you want to keep using that named “Flail ‘Ghost Smasher’ +2 vs undead” all through the game, you will have to look after it.

I was thinking the basic mechanics for the wear and tear function will be,

arms : each successful attack (blocked or not) will reduce by 1
armour :  each blocked attack of less than its Armour Value, reduce by 1, each attack over its armour rating (where player takes damage), reduce by 2.

Your standard Long Sword might have 20 W+T points fresh out of the shop. Each repair in the shop will return it to its max - 1. So you could repair it the first time to 20 points. The second repair will give you 19 points, the third 18 etc.
Better made/graded weapons and armour will have higher W+T maximums. Armour would have more, a standard shield may have 40, a wooden shield may have 15…

This gets us into the grading system (crude, basic, well made, exceptional, master crafted).

This also opens the door for extra NPC’s in towns and castles, as it allows me to place Master Craftsmen in certain places to do weapon upgrades or create you special items.

Wear and Tear will also affect wizard staves and such. Each time you recharge that staff or wand you will incur W+T and incur one less spell. Custom wand charging may only last for as many spells are chaged in that wand (one offs!).

Its easy to put things into the spreadsheet and check the bell curves, but playtesting will be the big revealer of how well it all scales.

I need to go off and play with the spreadsheet some more…

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Spells

Because I am making some good progress on CNC I’m concentrating on it more than I should be to the detriment of Fishguts.

Right now Ive got spells working really well. Fireballs light up unlit squares, radiate out and pop everyone for damage. Poison gas clouds are basically green fireballs… that hang around. A cool thing is that they dissipate from the edges inward, so your target point is always covered the longest.

Need to work on lightening bolt so it rebounds off walls.and travel through targets.

Might cut a release once lightening bolt is done…

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Mandolin

I got a new mandolin on the weekend (thanks Nan-nan!), to replace the one I had that didnt quite work. The previous one had some frets inlaid really deeply to the point you couldnt hit some notes without the strings hitting other frets, no matter how high the bridge was set, it was a cheap mando, unfortunately this time, was not even suitable for learning on.

The new one is a Ibanez M511SBS, all solid woods, no ply or such, and yes, I checked all the frets, this one is good to go. Now I just have to get back up to speed and start learning again. You can see Joy’s Alvarez MD90 in the background.
I do need to tighten the nut on the armrest but apart from that…

Click HERE to read more

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Quest Journals

In between drawing some arms and legs (see previous post), Ive been doing some testing on the PSP. Its amazing the little things that show up on there that don’t on the PC. (Porting is not an exact science). I found a couple of really stupid errors, obvious things that really only manifest on the PSP because of how its control pad reacts. Auto repeat is not good in menus, dialogues and quest journals).

Speaking of quest journals, my roguelike has one and I’m thinking of implementing it to augment the current quest journal, only not as verbose as my roguelike.

Right now the quest journal just shows given but not completed quests which you can page through and then completed quests. Each screen has the option to quit out or go to next item. I need to change it to use ‘X’ to quit out or directional pad to scroll through the items instead of buttons to page through…

Thats the basic quest journal, but I want to add something like a game notes. Not something the player can edit but something the game tracks and shows you, example;

On 4th of Foo, year 1203 The Party defeated foobar the great
On 8th of Bar, year 1249 Pinky was turned to stone
On 8th of Bar, year 1249 Foozle died from poisoning
On 30th of Zot, year 1253 Baz was recruited to the party
On 30th of Zot, year 1255 The party accepted the quest to find the hold grail
On 24th of Bar, year 1376 The party entered a moongate

Now the roguelike is more verbose (detailing on move X you did Y etc), but we dont need that kind of granularity. I think the journal notes would be recording bigger events. Not every combat the party undertook but used more as a memoir type thing and using a book type interface drawn with good old pale yellowing paper.

mmm… if I should be able to adapt my CNC code…

mmmm Thinking some more I don’t know if it would really offer anything up to the game. It makes sense in the roguelike but this kind of journal, I dont know for a traditional CRPG....

Think I’ll stick to the quest journal.

Friday, May 02, 2008

The Combat Front

Not a lot of updates on the Fishguts front. Minor minor things really.

I’m going to split out all the combat sprites into their own sprite sheets rather than bung them all onto one large sheet. Its a minimal help for memory consumption and means I can make several versions of the same sprite and not feel guilty about having them all in memory in the one sprite sheet.

I’m still debating (though 95% sold on the below idea) paperdolling to a limited extent, only because the player will always be a humanoid size (so no need to account for dwarf / ogre sizes in paper dolling) .

1 - Need only draw a couple of same size icons
2 - Draw a couple of weapons.

Each sprite will consist of a couple of primary colours (chest colour, arm, leg, boots, hat etc) that the player can cycle through to select.

Once chosen, this sprite will be composed as a flat bitmap and saved as a file on disk, so I don’t have to recompose it each time we go into combat

Lets think it over a bit more.

Players icon is composed of;

1 - Ready/Guard sprite
2 - Attack sprite

That would consist of;

1 - head (bald, hat, short hair, long hair)
2 - torso
3 - arm overlay (see below)
4 - legs
5 - boots

Placement must accommodate any one of

1 - One hand weapon only
2 - One hand weapon and shield
3 - Two handed weapon
4 - Bow
5 - Staff
6 - Nothing

Now right away I can see that a two handed sword selection doesnt mesh with anything else so separate arm overlays will be required…

Each item could have a one or two colour selection.. lets make it a one colour selection, using the ‘bright’ colours and I can map in the second colour for shadow/detail as being its ‘dark’ alternate.
(Those that remember the old ANSI colours or 16 colour paint programs will know what I mean by this).

Looking over this I have immediately made things more complex than I intended, but I think its a good complexity than forcing the player to always have a preset icon…

Now, in an ideal world, and which I may still implement, is have the player choose his primary colours for torso/arms/legs/boots/head and at the start of combat dynamically create the sprite using whatever selected weapon is on hand. That would require recomposition when changing weapons mid combat… that shouldnt be too bad since combat is turn based and not realtime…

Time to get back to work-work and stop thinking game development.

Bump friendly

I’ve made the start town ‘bump friendly’ now, so if you bump into a guard you wont be summarily wiped out. You can still hit ‘a’ to attack and force an encounter but bumping by happenstance wont kill you.

I’m thinking of extending the time give before being kicked out of town, so that the player has more of a chance to see whats in the town than only being able to hit the supply shop first…

Things are slowly progressing nicely toward an 0.5 release

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Chaotic Neutral Human Fighter/Ranger (3rd/2nd Level)

I did the What DnD character are you meme (130 odd questions)
Kinda odd coz thats the character I create in any CRPG that I can play (usually I pick ranger over fighter but dualclassing both is nice). My stats are a bit low :( doh!

I Am A: Chaotic Neutral Human Fighter/Ranger (3rd/2nd Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-15
Dexterity-14
Constitution-15
Intelligence-14
Wisdom-15
Charisma-11



Alignment:
Chaotic Neutral A chaotic neutral character follows his whims. He is an individualist first and last. He values his own liberty but doesn’t strive to protect others’ freedom. He avoids authority, resents restrictions, and challenges traditions. A chaotic neutral character does not intentionally disrupt organizations as part of a campaign of anarchy. To do so, he would have to be motivated either by good (and a desire to liberate others) or evil (and a desire to make those different from himself suffer). A chaotic neutral character may be unpredictable, but his behavior is not totally random. He is not as likely to jump off a bridge as to cross it. Chaotic neutral is the best alignment you can be because it represents true freedom from both society’s restrictions and a do-gooder’s zeal. However, chaotic neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it seeks to eliminate all authority, harmony, and order in society.


Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.


Primary Class:
Fighters can be many things, from soldiers to criminal enforcers. Some see adventure as a way to get rich, while others use their skills to protect the innocent. Fighters have the best all-around fighting capabilities of the PC classes, and they are trained to use all standard weapons and armor. A fighter’s rigorous martial training grants him many bonus feats as he progresses, and high-level fighters have access to special melee maneuvers and exotic weapons not available to any other character.


Secondary Class:
Rangers are skilled stalkers and hunters who make their home in the woods. Their martial skill is nearly the equal of the fighter, but they lack the latter’s dedication to the craft of fighting. Instead, the ranger focuses his skills and training on a specific enemy a type of creature he bears a vengeful grudge against and hunts above all others. Rangers often accept the role of protector, aiding those who live in or travel through the woods. His skills allow him to move quietly and stick to the shadows, especially in natural settings, and he also has special knowledge of certain types of creatures. Finally, an experienced ranger has such a tie to nature that he can actually draw on natural power to cast divine spells, much as a druid does, and like a druid he is often accompanied by animal companions. A ranger’s Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.


Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus

Detailed Results:

Alignment:
Lawful Good ----- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (15)
Neutral Good ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (16)
Chaotic Good ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (17)
Lawful Neutral -- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (22)
True Neutral ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (23)
Chaotic Neutral - XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (24)
Lawful Evil ----- XXXXXXXXX (9)
Neutral Evil ---- XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Chaotic Evil ---- XXXXXXXXXXX (11)

Law & Chaos:
Law ----- XXXXXXX (7)
Neutral - XXXXXXXX (8)
Chaos --- XXXXXXXXX (9)

Good & Evil:
Good ---- XXXXXXXX (8)
Neutral - XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (15)
Evil ---- XX (2)

Race:
Human ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (14)
Dwarf ---- XXXXXXXX (8)
Elf ------ XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Gnome ---- XXXXXXXX (8)
Halfling - XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Half-Elf - XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Half-Orc - XX (2)

Class:
Barbarian - (-2)
Bard ------ (-6)
Cleric ---- (-2)
Druid ----- (0)
Fighter --- XX (2)
Monk ------ (-13)
Paladin --- (-21)
Ranger ---- XX (2)
Rogue ----- (-2)
Sorcerer -- (0)
Wizard ---- (0)

Thursday, April 24, 2008

High Scores and Tombstones

I branched my cnc repo tonight (git checkout -b is sooo nice!) and added highscores for multiplayer goodness. I’m going to use the same framework for tombstones and display small markers in the park of the last couple of deaths.

I can “trust” this on unix (my primary development system) but cant really trust it on win32 (everyone runs as administrator so… shrugs).

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Minor Updates

Honestly, I’m not doing a lot of work on fishguts lately. Been mostly messing with my language/compiler and my roguelike.

I did do some work on cleaning up my quest interface. I split it out into three files, one is just a set of constants, one a set of descriptions and such and the third is the basic routines. This way I can use my quest functions and just include the constants for things that dont requires the mss of loaded text for the quest descriptions.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Szechuan Chicken

So I went looking for a szechuan chicken recipie online… I googled, as you do, and started hitting the top 20 or so links. I even hit the first 10 links at places like cooks.com…

NONE used szechuan peppercorns. They all just listed generic garbage like chili peppers or “cayenne pepper” to taste. ugh.

There is a tonne of “10 minute” recipes out there too. Most seem to think rice wine / vinegar is all you need. One of the top links is even a Betty Crocker recipe whose secret ingrediant is… ”bag (1 lb 5 oz) Green Giant® Create A Meal!® frozen szechuan stir fry meal starter”. Thats just pure awesomeness. Another mix recreated the zing of Szechuan Chicken with powdered mustard and texas pete hot sauce!

I also learnt some new things.

- Chinese pea pods = snow peas.
- Szechuan Chili oil recreates any meal prefixed by Szechuan, aka Szechuan {insert favourite food type here}
- Barbecue sauce makes for great “authentic” recipe’s.

The top rated recipezaar “Szechuan Chicken” recipe is basically nothing but rice wine vinegar and has from 13 reviews 4 and 9/10ths out of 5 stars… ridiculous.

No wonder you cant find good Chinese food in America.

I did end up finding a proper recipe which included Tien Tsin Chinese Chile Pepper, Szechuan Peppercorns and Arrowroot Powder… at The Spice House which is a online seller of exotic spices… So of course they need something to showcase szechuan peppercorns!

If Joy wouldn’t kill me because we are in a “no spending” mode, I’d love to spring for some unground peppercorns and the other two aforementioned spices.....

Monday, March 31, 2008

Financial Meltdown

I read this article on CNN Careers vanish after subprime ‘free fall’, its a wonderful tale of woe of the family of Kent and Mysti Cope who live in the so impoverished Orange County in California.

Lets take some quotes.....

He has been out of work since August when he was laid off

OK, He lost his job and has not found one in… 7 or 8 months.....

Today, they’re trying to get by on his unemployment benefits of about $450 a week, which covers only about an eighth of the basic payments they owe every month.

For Mysti, 37, all her efforts to find work since she lost her job last May have been futile.

His wife has no job either… and hasn’t had one for 11 months…

Their home equity line, mortgage, health and life insurance premiums alone cost about $10,000 a month. Still, they are trying to hang onto what they call their dream home with a view of the Pacific Ocean

Awesome! Keeping the dream alive, a mansion on the coast…

“We’ve used up most of our reserves, cashed in her 401K,” said Kent. “We’re going Mach 1 into a wall. When we run into it, then we’ve got to decide what to do next.”

This is the “we have no plan going forward” routine, also known as “we are waiting for something magical to happen and money to fall into our laps!!”

And they’ve made cutbacks: trading in Kent’s Corvette for a Suburban and getting rid of the gardener,

Awesome, they switched from a gas guzzling corvette to a.. gas guzzling huge ass SUV!

Since he lost his job, Kent has gotten a real estate license and is trying to start a business selling the rapidly increasing inventory of foreclosed homes in Orange County, Calif. Mysti is trying to build an online business selling jewelry and beachwear, some of which she designs herself.

I know!! Lets get a job selling houses.. that don’t sell in a market that is thrashing around and wallowing in its death throes! Awesome decision there Kent. You go Mysti (Is that her porn actress name or something?), just think how many sea shell necklaces and self designed bikini’s you need to sell to make that 10k minimum a month.

“The media has somewhat tarnished the subprime industry and all the employees, and portrayed them as being dishonest,” she said. “We’re not dishonest. Not everybody was a bad borrower. Not every company was a bad lender.”

Yes yes, its all the fault of the media Mysti, thats why you cant get a job.

Must be tough living in Orange County, CA and needing to make 10k a month to pay your mortgage and health insurance.

They obviously didn’t create any kind of safety net with there 2million+ income (they both had a six figure+ income each)… I mean.. really.. you have a combined two million plus income and you don’t push jack shit into savings and we are supposed to sympathise how tough life is for folks living in Orange County CA?

Cry me a river.

Using Skills

So I know what my frame limiter was… I had sped time up to test some time triggers, which in essence converted it from 1000 ticks a second to 250. Hence the dropping by 1/4… Putting this back to 1000 ticks brought me back to 16/17 frames a second…

I double tasked the use option, so now when using an item you can toggle to using a skill! Now I can hunt in forests for food.

When using the hunting skill, it scans the tiles around the player, different tiles give different weights to what game can be found. Forests are best, then woodland then grassland. Each tile type has a multiplier, and a bonus is applied if your enclosed in all forest. The scan is a 49 tile block (3x3 around the player). This is calculated into a chance of finding game, making that chance then applies your hunting skill to see if you actually brought down and bagged that game. Passing that, gives a random chance for game type, the rarest gives the most meat, the most common, the least meat, (There are only 3 types of game).

Without building big, what I would have liked to implement would be a reference underneath so you couldn’t hunt more than once in a set area without reducing the amount of game there. IE you couldn’t farm a set of tiles indefinitely without exhausting them, and over time they would replenish… but thats not code I am willing to spend on something I’m trying hard not to bloat unnecessarily…