@jmp and Pishtaco : aah, i see, well i guess my red method is still flawed then, thanks for pointing that out , i was under the impression that cross that appeared over the axes was a side effect of the algorithm, thanks for that link, i'll have a go later.

Maybe you're choosing a different random distance for the x and the y coordinates, rather than using the same one for both?

Think of it this way: imagine two circles, A and B, both with the same centre, but A has radius 1 and B has radius 0.5. Since B has half the radius of A, it has only one quarter of the area of A.

If you use the blue method to generate random points inside A, on average one quarter of the points will be in B.

If you use the red method, on average one half of the points will be in B. This is because this method puts a point in B if, when you choose the random distance from the centre, you choose a number <0.5.

I've tried both methods this far:

Looks like something is bugged with your red points.

Make a small easy game (Tetris or whatever) and then see if you can incorporate some of the mechanics from the games you want to make into it.

I get stuck on the bird dream. 

if you hover over the water long enough, it will go away. just stay on the same screen for a bit longer and land when the water disappears

Thanks!

I get stuck on the bird dream. 

Alternate reality? And the title alludes to there being infinite realities?

It's odd that the landscape in the trailer looks like American farmland, when the city is supposed to be lost. Perhaps the game is about immigration policy into a newly discovered, infinite version of the midwest.

Haha, when you first said Icebergvania I was imagining a metroidvania set in a giant iceberg. What you said is cool too though

Personally I want to see more real time strategy games in the vein of Sins of a Solar Empire, combining real time and 4x strategy. Possibly with an even greater focus on the economic and diplomatic aspects.

Victoria 2 just came out.

Even in the current state it is quite satisfying. With polish, it feels like it could be a money-spinner.

Also, things like neptune's pride. Long-form strategy.

There's more than enough of that.

What other real time strategy games are that slow?

Anything by Paradox.

My game right now is called Arkanoid Invaders. I gave it that name because, at first, it was nothing else than an arkanoid clone i was creating to experiment with SDL. Right now it's a real project, and gameplay has differed totally from space invaders, and looks more like arkanoid mixed with a shmup (a hard one ).

That looks really nice. How about "Noids" or "Revenge of the Noids"?

Warvelmaw RPG - by made by me and Pietepiet.

Thanks so much for the offer! If you've already got a random sample laying around that you don't need, then I would love to have it, assuming you're okay with me using it - much easier than digging around the Archives of the Internet and whatnot.

Sent you a PM.

Airborne Assault, now known as Command Ops. It's a wargame rather than a classic RTS, but still, it's real time and you strategize in it.

Its big thing is that it models the military command structure and the difficulty of organizing and moving thousands of men on a schedule. So you cannot react instantly to events, and instead have to concentrate on making robust high-level plans, and delegating details to lower commanders (run by the AI).

There should be some men singing about dwarves in Wagner's Ring cycle, and I expect there must be an out-of-copyright recording of this somewhere. However I haven't managed to find one.

I can manage a passable classical tenor on a good day; I've been taking classes in it and have done some amateur opera . I can send a sample your way if you're interested.

[game mechanics]

I think I've almost reached the point where I can say something sensible about game design.
Can I do a talk about game mechanics?

Yes please.

I should be there around 1pm on Friday.

I wish I was the kind of person who would enjoy these. Are you planning on doing more journals like that? It was an interesting read. The fact that something like this exists and is free is mindboggling.

I'm glad you found it interesting. Games like this can be really good at making you feel like you're taking part in something. And I think I now have a much better understanding of what's involved in spaceflight.

I'm tempted to install an old version and try the 60s Dyna-Soar missions. These include one where you drop a squad of space marines using the MOOSE one-man reentry system - an ejection seat with an inflatable foam heatshield stuck on the back.

[Briefing]

I've been playing around with the Hyperdart addon. This is by CigDriver, and is still being worked on, here.

The background is that the US Air Force and intelligence people, on and off since the 50s, have wanted to have something that can go up on short notice on an unusual orbit, take photographs or do whatever skullduggery needs to be done in space, and then land again quickly. A spacecraft with wings gives you more freedom to control the time and place you can land, and also potentially lets you reshape your orbits by dipping into the atmosphere and using lift. For example, this influenced the design of the space shuttle.

This addon is for a made-up spacecraft, the Hyperdart, for this kind of mission. The design is based on an old research plane for hypersonic lifting body flight, and the launch vessel is based on the prototype XB70 Valkyrie supersonic bomber. So it's designs from the 50s, updated with some optimistic ideas about what can be done with modern materials. I gather that the unlikeliest things are the pressure the fuel is stored at and the effectiveness of the heatshield; otherwise it's supposed to be realistic.

Briefing - The Russians have launched a new satellite without any fanfare.  Intel reports that it is a new IMINT Bird and there has been some type of malfunction.  The latest tracking indicates that the satellite is in a slow complex roll. Launch the HyperDart and interecpt it.  Your crew for this mission will be NSA Specialist Bill Delange, NRO Engineer Tom Harr and ARMY EOD Specialist Anthony Clerk.  Set up stationholding aproximately 5Km from the satellite and use the loaded imagery package to investigate the bird. Once approval is granted procede to a full intercept.  At this point EOD Specialist Clerk will EVA to ensure there are no anti-tampering systems present on the new bird.  Once it is deemed safe NRO Engineer Harr will EVA for a detailed investigation.

Jan 12 22:01:00 - Take off, Kennedy Space Centre, Florida. My map shows a ground track of the path of the target satellite. It recently passed overhead, so at least I'm taking off at the right time. It looks like the angle it passed at was about 130 degrees, so I will launch at that angle, since I need to match its orbit.



I take off in the Valkyrie, turn to 130 degrees and climb to 10km at just below Mach 1. Then I lower the wingtips to better handle supersonic flight, and accelerate while climbing at about 10 degrees (I don't want to go too fast too low, for heat reasons).

22:12 - The Valkyrie is flying stably at about 1km/s, 22km up. I switch over to the cockpit of the Hyperdart, separate, and fully open the throttle. It's trimmed to climb at about 30 degrees and take itself to orbit. This involves accelerating to a horizontal speed of about 7km/s, and getting out of the atmosphere.


Cockpit view, halfway there

22:16 - We're going 7km/s, 200km up. The highest point in an orbit is called the apoapsis, and the lowest point the periapsis. You can just about see these as a filled and a hollow circle on the orbit display in the screenshot above. Currently my apoapsis is 380km above the earth - this is too high, and I should have been more careful on my ascent. Fortunately I have a generous amount of fuel. My periapsis is still a few 100km below the surface of the earth, so we're not quite in orbit yet. But we're well out of the atmosphere, and still climbing, so I shut off the engine and let myself coast up to the apoapsis.

22:30 - At apoapsis. I use the attitude thrusters to turn myself prograde, that is, facing the direction of motion. Firing my main engines here will change the shape of my orbit. The apoapsis and the inclination will not change, but the periapsis will get higher. I raise it to 327km, about the average altitude of the target.

23:00 - I did a good job eyeballing the angle I launched at, since the plane of my orbit is only a few degrees away form the plane of the target. I coast around until I reach one of the two points where my orbit intersects the target plane, and do a short burn their to shift the inclination of my orbit so that the planes now line up to within 0.01 degrees.

Now I think about synchronizing orbits, to get myself in the same place as the target, with the same velocity. Currently I'm around 80 degrees behind the target. To catch up I need to be in a lower, and hence faster, orbit than it. But I can't go too much lower, or I will end up in the atmosphere. In the end I put myself into a 186x336km orbit (periapsis x apoapsis). This is a little bit faster than the target's, and my instruments say we will both be at my apoapsis position in 9 orbits, about 15 hours.

Jan 13 13:53 - I'm at apoapsis, exactly one orbit before intercept. I do a final careful synchronization burn so we will pass here at exactly the same time, next time around. Currently the target is 670km away, with relative speed 750m/s.



15:24 - Intercept the target over the south Pacific, just crossing the terminator into dawn. It looks like I set things up well, as I come withing 5km and 40m/s of it. I bring myself to a stop relative to it.

15:42 - The briefing says to inspect it with the onboard telescope. I don't know how to do that, but I reckon it looks safe enough. So I approach to within 50m and stop there, just coming up to the isthmus of Panama. I forgot to load the proper crew at the start or something, and rather than the specialists in the briefing I only have two generic crew members on board. Anyway, I send one over on EVA. Instead of the hum of the ship, I can hear just breathing and the whistle of air into the suit.



16:30 - I'm back on board, and thinking about how to get back home. This is the hardest thing in the mission, especially for a beginner like me. As I understand it, because of the shape of this thing, you can't plunge straight down through the atmosphere like a capsule without overheating. You have to fly it down, using lift to manage your rate of descent, like the space shuttle. The advantage is that you can control where you land, if you know what you're doing.

After failing and burning up several times, I ended up doing it like this, which is probably terrible (also remember that the mod isn't finished yet): My next couple of orbits will take me over the east coast of the US, and I spend half of my remaining fuel rotating my orbit so that these will go closer to Florida. I suppose it's better to lose the fuel anyway, so that I'm lighter coming down. Then I lower my orbit to around 170km, just above the atmosphere. As I pass above Florida I do a final retrograde burn, to set my periapsis to about 70km, on the other side of the world. So for the next half orbit, from here to there, I will descend gradually into the atmosphere.

As I descend I begin to feel the atmosphere affecting the ship. I trim it so that my angle of attack is around 10 degrees, which seems to provide a reasonable amount of lift at this height and speed, and try to stay at 80km up for now. This often means banking to one side so that the lift doesn't skip me back out of the atmosphere again. I don't really want to decrease my angle of attack too much, since there's presumably more heat protection on the bottom of the ship. (I think I'm probably misunderstanding something about the sim here.)

I'm all the way around the world and back over Florida before I feel that I am slow enough to safely descend into the thicker part of the atmosphere. But I'm still going at around 4km/s, so there's no way I'm going to land this side of the Atlantic.


Crossing the African coast

Finally, over the Sahara I reach a mere Mach 5. I glide down and land in the desert. The dart flies okay down to about 110m/s, so I descend at 10-20 degrees, keeping this speed, and then flare and bleed it off, landing at something like 70m/s.

This is a serious space flight simulator. It's freeware, made by one guy, with a big community that between them have made hundreds of addons - realistic ships, sci-fi ships, planet textures, bases, instruments, astronauts and missions.

I think that the first version was released in about 2000, with several updates since then. I tried it a few years ago and couldn't get into it. But I've been feeling in a simming mood recently, and have been reading about space, so gave it another look and have really been enjoying it. It also turns out that a new version, Orbiter 2010, came out very recently.

The stock game comes with a space shuttle, a fictional spaceship called the delta glider, and a couple of other ships. The delta glider has unlikely fuel, engine power and heat management but otherwise tries to be realistic. The game is about flying around, checking out the solar system, plotting intercepts with space stations and generally messing around with and learning about orbital mechanics and rocketry.

You can get it here: http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/home.php - you should download the main distribution and the hi-res earth and moon textures. This is the tutorial that got me into it. It's for an older version, but you can still mostly follow it.

The main place for addons is here: http://www.orbithangar.com/ . Two I really want to try are World of 2001 (all the spaceships and stations from the movie and book) and Tales of the Dyna-Soar (an Air Force spaceplane proposal of the 1950s) - unfortunately these haven't yet been updated to Orbiter 2010. But I have now successfully taken Apollo 11 to the moon, and from there on a voyage of exploration into the solar system (after I screwed up the burn to get me back to earth).

This week I've been trying to get back into a project I put aside a couple of months ago. For some reason the current version will not run fullscreen at the standard resolution I have been using (640x400). Windowed works, and other resolutions work, but the thing I want crashes.

I had backed up older versions by copying the directory (I haven't yet learnt how to set up a proper versioning system). The most recent backup worked fine, so I renamed it to be the current version. I don't think I changed anything else, but now it has the same resolution problem as the other one. 

I think I could finish this in a couple of week, if it didn't drive me crazy every time I look at it.