Yay, my turn!

looks like one of the 10e4 shareware apogee games that came out in the late 90s.

I think I'll take a stab at this. Something spotted on http://www.indiegames.com/blog/ this morning. Naumachia.

[Review Starts]
Like peanut butter and chocolate, action and strategy are just better together. Mix that with sci-fi and you've got a combination so delectable, how can I resist? My favorite game of all time, Star Control 1, is a combination these elements and since that time there has not been a decent challenger to it's throne, barring, perhaps, Dragon's 3D remake of the same.

But a new competitor has entered the ring. Naumachia: Space Warfare revives the badly undernourished space flight simulator genre and promises a tactical element by having the game switch to a RTS mode as you gain rank, moving from pilot to general.

[insert video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL8usuG0avM]

[more tag]
Naumachia is being produced by a team of 3 developers who's previous experience together produced the popular HL2 mod The Specialist. Its visual style makes the promo video above look like a trailer for a sci-fi channel original (I hope it's not all just prerenders). Plus the feature list promises customizable ships, which is always a good thing.

My only possible complaint with the game is it's looking heavily online oriented, and given the team's resume I fear there will be no single player mode. This may be less of a problem to some, but to me this is a serious sticking point. I plan on watching this project closely, but the moment it's announced as being multi-player only it's back to Star Control for me.

Actually I dislike games that mix action and strategy too much. Pure action games and pure strategy games work pretty well. There are a few exceptions (like Starcraft), but generally strategy games work best without action, and action games work best without strategy -- although action games work okay with some "strategic elements" like deciding which stats/weapons to upgrade, like in Iji, but Iji is still primarily an action game, it's not a mix of action and strategy gameplay, the gameplay is 95% action and 5% strategy. 50-50 mixes don't seem to work very well. Unless they alternate, like in Actraiser (although the "strategy" part of that game was incredibly simplistic compared to real strategy games).

Wait a minute. I submitted an article for TIGSource, and you couldn't wait until it hit the front page before commenting on it?

Hey, 0 votes for me!

And I voted.

But not for myself.

Obviously.

Clearly 1000 words is not enough to contain a story like this. I will commense to writing the novel.

They need to make a PC port.

 :D

I think I'll take a stab at this. Something spotted on http://www.indiegames.com/blog/ this morning. Naumachia.

[Review Starts]
Like peanut butter and chocolate, action and strategy are just better together. Mix that with sci-fi and you've got a combination so delectable, how can I resist? My favorite game of all time, Star Control 1, is a combination these elements and since that time there has not been a decent challenger to it's throne, barring, perhaps, Dragon's 3D remake of the same.

But a new competitor has entered the ring. Naumachia: Space Warfare revives the badly undernourished space flight simulator genre and promises a tactical element by having the game switch to a RTS mode as you gain rank, moving from pilot to general.

[insert video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL8usuG0avM]

[more tag]
Naumachia is being produced by a team of 3 developers who's previous experience together produced the popular HL2 mod The Specialist. Its visual presentation makes the promo video above look like a trailer for a sci-fi channel original. Plus the feature list promises customizable ships, which is always a good thing.

Now for the bad news. It's been stated on the forums that the game is slated to be multi-player only, which is second only to goiters on my list of turn offs. So unless that changes I guess all I can do is wish this game does well with it's share of the Eve Online crowd, hope they change their mind, and go back to Star Control.

I actually did look at alleytris before, but didn't really learn anything from it.

Can't blame you for that.

Rotation for Tetris pieces is pretty easy. If you have the coordinates of each each block in the piece in a list, you just go through the list and transform every pair of coordinates like:

(x, y) -> (-y, x)

That corresponds to a 90 degree rotation.

That's the gist of it, at least.

It's not quite that easy. Or at least if it is I went the long way on Alleytris. The problem with that idea is it rotates around a center point at the corner.

For the panda of it I'll try to recreate the thought process that ended in the rx function in alleytris.

What you need to do is adjust how you're reading the data, so when you write it the normal way it appears rotated. In otherwords for a 4x4 block 90^o clockwise rotation means you start in the lower left corner and read bottom to top. For 180^o start in the lower right and read right to left, bottom to top. For 270^o start in the upper left and read top to bottom, right to left.

You following so far?

So when I was writing alleytris I started doing some drawings and ended up with this table and stared at it until I got the last line:

X,Y	90	180	270
(0,0)	(0,4)	(4,4)	(4,0)
(1,0)	(0,3)	(3,4)	(4,1)
(1,1)	(1,3)	(3,3)	(3,1)
(4,4)	(4,0)	(0,0)	(4,0)
(x,y)	(y,4-x)	(4-x,4-y)	(4-y,x)

So I figured I needed 2 rotations functions which would take the rotation given (which by then I had simplified to 0,1,2,and 3) and the x, y coordinate and return either the x or y. At first I used a case statement, and that's when I noticed the similarity between rx (for rotation x) and ry (for rotation y), that was that ry(rot,x,y) was the same as rx(rot+1,x,y). So deleted ry (which in retrospect I should have kept and just rewritten ry to call rx) and changed all calls to ry to calls to rx.

Then someone on the cprogramming forums pointed out a way to do away with the case statement and I ended up with the current version of rx :

Code:

int rx (int r, int y, int x) { /* Used for piece rotation. */
  int n;

  n = (r % 2 ? y : x);
  if(r / 2) n = 3 - n;
  return n;
}

clip() and drawpiece() use rx to read the data rotated as it draws the piece.

Now you know why alleytris was not as instructive. It was the tail end of a long thought process which works, but doesn't educate much.

So even if alleytris wasn't informative I hope this was.

My problem is I keep running across stuff and can't remember if i rand into it here or somewhere else. And when I can remember I wouldn't think to write a front page post.

Plus my writing style is sometimes a bit of a bad match for this place.

I hate requests like then when I'm contemplating the same thing.

And Hideous. I don't know if it would help you, but you can always peek at my code for alleytris, tho the rotation aspect ended up being a bit obfuscated.

I like it.

I don't think game engines go obsolete in 5 years. People still use old engines like the ZZT and the Ohrrpgce (which came out in the 90s). Even GM came out around 2001 or so. Besides, even if you make your own engine using pure programming, that engine too might go obsolete technologically in 5-10 years -- Id doesn't still use the Doom 1 engine for instance, they have to make a new engine every 5 or so years too. The danger of something going obsolete is no higher for game creation software than it is for pure programming.

Just because someone is using them doesn't mean they're not obsolete. And even ZZT's fan support is waning.

And there's nothing wrong with using those environments. There've been numerous examples of really cool stuff being done with those tools.

However, the polls show that most people prefer to go the do it yourself route, and why not? More control, more flexibility, less limitations, and if something goes wrong or doesn't go as you want it to you can fix it, instead of trying to manipulate someone else's system to do what you want to.

Thank you Neon.. er, Willy. I have seen the light. Your indecipherable accent and slang coupled with unquestionably sincere pose has shown me the way. Truly you are a

among men.

A guy on my site wants to use Lua in one of his programs. Just one more thing I should be checking out. Man I wish I could do this for a living. Or at least the way I used to when I was a student.

Latest example: buttons.c.

I find that very, very dense and hard to read. I personally don't like to write an entire do/while loop in one line, or to keep the if condition and the following statement on one line. Sure, you save some vertical space, but in my opinion at the expense of readability. I mean, vertical space is practically free; it's not like we print out our code on paper all the time. And as long as you keep your functions within one page of code (actually I prefer keeping them even shorter), you don't have to scroll to read any one function in its entirety anyway.

It is very dense, but I'm from the old school where BASIC was even denser!

But you want to know the beauty thing? Load up Code::Blocks and you get a style formatter. At the push of a button any code can be as dense or as spread out as you like. Works great for de-obfuscating code.

Funny that as it stands coding your own is more than all the other options combined!

Of course, I'm all for self coding. No point learning an environment that won't be valid in 5 years. (Klik 'n Play anyone?)

Darn this game. i don't think I'd keep at it if it weren't for the fact that the protagonist was bleeding all over like a hemophiliac in a slasher movie.

EDIT: What the? When does he get blue blood?

EDIT: EDIT: Nevermind. I didn't know you could do different characters if you collected enough bandaids.

Septerra Core had a really neat storyline and characters, but after a certain point in the game all there was were huge mazes housing find-the-key, open-door "puzzles".
Also, the enemies attacks were scripted, so they'd do the same thing every time. o_O;  (For each particular enemy if you left and came back, not the same types on one map)

Man, I still own Septerra Core. It looked good so I bought it, got to the first industrial pipe desert thing and never turned it on again. It sucks, there's no 2 ways about it.

Cymon's Games. 33 programs and rising. >3k view per week and rising. $20 in donations months ago and holding steady. (Which you'll be seeing half of when I decide to withdraw it, Bob.) Google Ads has been much better for the site, tho I still haven't broken $100 yet, so it's still theoretical cash.

Let him run on my desktop for about a minute. Problem is all my widows are always maximized. Would it be possible for him to identify any horizontal line long enough for him to stand on and jump up and down the "platforms"?

do this

Code:

int function(int awesome, float rockin)
{
    callthishit();  //fuck yes
    rockin = lol + awesome;
    return rockin;
}

format it like that and call the functions understandable names and I'm happy.

I do this:

Code:

// @a first value
//@b second value
template <typename T>
T add(T a, T b) {
// lets do stuff
T temp = a + b;
return (temp);
}

Fairly standard, although I seem to be the only one who likes his starting squiggly brackets at the end of the statement. :D

All my code does that. It saves on so many lines, and I just can't stand formatting that takes up so many lines that when you print a 3 command function that between commenting and gratuitous spaces takes a page to print. No sir. I go the other extreme. Okay, maybe not extreme, but I do it all the time.

Latest example: buttons.c. For more examples see the rest of Cymon's Games.

Here in Turkey, on the pirated copies of Brokeback Mountain, the title is translated as Faggot Cowboys.

That's what I called it here in America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVEqmjuiyo
Fast forward to 2:20 for relevance. Funny the whole way, tho.