Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Two odd thoughts on Pool of Radiance
I was thinking about things to add to my CRPG (Not like it needs MORE stuff added), was two things that stood out for me in Pool of Radiance, the attract screen or demo, and the computer guided introduction for the player.
Now POR was not the first game to have the attract demo screen, the Ultima series had them since what? Number III I think, only it was more cut down, you did not see the real combat action. Pool of Radiance cycled through lots of different screens and displayed a really great demo setup.
The second thing was when the player started a new game, you got that awesome guided tour that brought you into the game. I remember when you first walk in and see ivy on the wall, it was like, AWESOME in its pseudo 3D-ness.
I want this type of introduction in my game, but I’m not sure how to go about it. For the 3Dlik ness of POR it worked, everything is hidden that is not in the immediate view and reveals as you go through doorways and around corners, yet with my 2D tile approach you don’t get so much of the ‘reveal’ factor. Whats there is there, the LOS hiding does not have the same affect.
Right now I have a simple attract screen much like Ultima III with characters walking around the screen in random fashion (unlike Ultima III’s scripted sense). I would like to have an entire scripted display of some 2d tile action with a AI controlled combat (so it should be different each time).
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Tags: Advanced Dungeons and Dragons • CRPG • Gold Box • Pool of Radiance • SSI
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Sunday, December 27, 2009
Hacking on the combat
Wow, its been ages since I’ve hacked on Fishguts. Tonight I managed to get some free time so I whacked a few thorns on the combat engine.
Managed to split out the Cluebook from the Players guide so I can print separate booklets, for some reason I like that idea more than stuffing it all in one booklet. XeTeX rocks, I wonder why I never bothered with Latex years ago.
Tweaked some AI + A* pathing.
I need to fix some horse issues, and generate a list of enemies from nearest outward so the Next/Prev automatic targeting works.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Thursday, December 17, 2009
VPS
If you noticed a blip in downtime, thats because I moved my VPS. I switched from slicehost to linode, gaining heaps more speed, more disk/ram/bandwidth for the same price. very nice 
Also switched from a 64bit host to a 32bit host, saving more memory in the process as well.
Took a bit for DNS replication to go around, and annoyingly I think I was one of the last to see the changes go live, tho I saw the logs that others had seen the changes very quickly but for me it was a day. Seems some places don’t respect the DNS time to live setting.
Everything should be back up and working just fine.
Filed Under : Computers •
Tags: Hosting • Linode • Slicehost • VPS
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Saturday, December 05, 2009
Two little Git helpers
Git is really powerful but some of its commands can be very obtuse. Two little helpers I have in my .gitconfig that I thought some of you might find useful are
[alias]
uncommit = reset --soft HEAD^
unstage = reset HEAD
The uncommit will back out the last non-pushed commit. Unstage will do as it says, remove a file from the staging buffer.
The alias section is a great place for your shortcuts.
Filed Under : Computers • Development •
Tags: DVCS • GIT
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Monday, November 23, 2009
Busy Busy
With the arrival of our new baby (Sebastian) things have been hectic but I did some time on some of my to-do list. Some of the low hanging fruit turned out to be harder than expected.
I have horses appearing on the main map now. I learnt that I cant draw a horse to save myself! Ha, it looks so bad its funny. Adding horses to the main map proved slightly problematic mostly because the main map is handled different from the other maps because of its size and that all the maps are segmented, so a minor technicality on my part and we have horses appear outside town after you buy em.
Added some more attribute extraction to my maps so more things are generated by tools than by hand written code. Map transitions (entering towns, dungeons, etc) are no longer hard coded and handled in the tool.
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
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Saturday, November 07, 2009
Some of that fruit
(This post has embedded CSS that does not look good in a RSS Reader)
So I picked some of that low hanging fruit I was talking about before, only what I picked was nothing in my list.. Still I got something done that REALLY needed to be done.
Click HERE to read more
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Tags: CRPG • Mapping • Tools
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