Monday, November 02, 2009
Being stubborn
I’ve been pretty stubborn lately, not working on Fishguts (I’ve been working on my compiler), but now its time to get back into the swing of things, so I have picked some low hanging fruit to knock off the todo list.
That being said, sometime in the next couple of weeks I hope to bash out the following;
- Using a horse for transport, this basically is nothing more than an icon change and an enumeration. The game already takes care of food consumption when on a horse or ship. I do need to test some timing so that the party can travel faster on horse than on foot.
- As above, but using a ship
- Proper testing of splitting the party. The code is all there but I need to knock out a script that allows you to choose whom you want in what party based on who is currently in your party (you follow me?!)
- Fix the bestiary, to log how many of each type of monster you kill and have it display other info like a short description to go with its battle icon.
I’m also thinking of rewriting the quest log so its not so much of an “You have 2 open quests. 1 - foo, 2 - bar, You completed 4 quests - .....” type plain boring list of stuff, but to make it more like playing the game writes your open epic.. or more diary like… the problem with going diary like is the diary then is required to be infinite as far as storage goes “You traveled to the city of X, you traveled to the city of Y, you traveled to the city of X, etc” each action is a point of data stored. Showing a plain old open/closed quest list just uses existing data…
meh. If I were not restricting my memory usage…
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Thursday, October 22, 2009
Haiku testing
Was going to do some port testing on Haiku but there is no current ruby port and a lot of dev tools are lacking right now. I had to hack lua to build, as it does not support libm.. they folded libm into libroot, which is a real pain in the ass and they wont change it (even tho everything in the world links against libm grrrr).
Without ruby I’m dead in the water as my build system is all ruby based. :(
sigh…. haiku was looking so nice too
Filed Under : Computers • Development •
Tags: haiku
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Sunday, October 11, 2009
Because I’m not doing enough things
I’ve been poking at D (the programming language) for a long time but never really done more than ultra basic things and look at some of its included examples.. Well, know I figure its time to actually build something with it and learn it for real. I’m going to combine a few things together to tie the learning experience.
The goal is to learn D v1 and GTK+ at the same time and use it to build a useful application (well one I find useful). I’ve always wanted a good tool to manage Firebird databases on Linux, that is connection manager, stored proc manager, sql editor, table manager etc, ddl, import/export data etc. The EMS tools on windows make me jealous.
I’ve decided on D1 because D2 is still half baked and I really don’t like the idea that its everything and the kitchen sink..
To that affect, I’ve already got D1 + GTK-D working on my linux box (install was actually quite simple and painless), I’ve got it loading glade files, so I’m not building the GUI in code.
Time to write a small function + technical spec to keep me on track, otherwise I’ll wander all over the place. This way I can define exactly what I’m going to be doing and come up with a basic feature set to avoid feature creep.
I have my copy of Lean to Tango with D (Even tho I am using Phobos, its still a good D primer), and my copy of Foundations of GTK+ Development… both sitting unused for ages so its time to dust them off and see what comes.
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Tags: D • GTK
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Split Personalities
Tonight I re-ordered a little code and I now have the ability to split the party up into 6 teams. I did draw a line, you can only have 6 players in the party, so if you split them all up into 6 individual teams, those teams of 1 can’t go off and hire 5 more players… You can only hire players until all 6 slots are filled (otherwise you could more or less have infinite parties of any hireable NPC).
Its one thing I loved about Wasteland and Magic Candle I was the ability to split up your party, so I _HAD_ to have it in mine. Obviously it will bring with it the obligatory split up and push levers puzzle of course!
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Thursday, September 10, 2009
Fixing the Data Driven
Sometimes thinking about it is enough, I’ve actually knocked out a data driven model based on one I had done before for one of my defunct roguelikes, that is a lot more compact in code and works much much better. All I had to do was step back, scrap the current stuff and voila, it all fell into place.
The data remains the same, its just a different implementation and that makes all the difference.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Data Driven
Lately I have been implementing my spell system into the game and I have realised something I didn’t really want to. Ideally I had wanted my spell system to be data driven, in that I could describe the spells I needed with some attributes and voila, generic system works on the data and you have spells. Which is fine for most spells that deal or reverse damage or alter a stat. Those are the simple ones.The issue I wanted to avoid is one where you have code that basically says “if spell name == ‘foo’ then do this” and suddenly you have tied your spells directly to code…
So spells that affect stats and damage are really easy but how do you deal with abstract spells like ‘See Invisible’ or ‘Sharpen Steel’ to fix weapons. Right now I have columns in my spreadsheet for everything, sometimes existing for only 1 spell, which feels like a waste. It does make it all data driven, it just does not feel so good in its implementation.
Already I’m kicking around an alternate implementation thats a lot more concise and much easier to implement but still giving me the exact same ingame output.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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