Haven't studied your problem in detail, but two things irk me:

Code:

// ASSuME-ing that I can just make the x component of the wall vector 1
dirXWall = 1;
dirYWall = dirXWall/(tan(wallAngle));

What's this about?

Second, you use two dot products, should only be one. The dot product of a vector with itself (your second one) produces the squared vector length, which I don't think you want. Should be one multiplication two multiplications and one dot product in your reflection formula.

Thought you were yanking my chain til I watched the video. Great concept.

Fuzzy memory for chasers would be cool. Sounds and touch alert them to the location of obstacles, but as they move about more, they become less certain of where exactly they are w.r.t. known obstacles.

Hah, I love it. You should test this IRL.

@Richard
Clear skies: too clear, even when the heat's off, it's too goddamn bright outside, particularly around high albedo surfaces.

Almost no humidity: it parches the mouth and throat. Even very humid climates are more pleasant (provided they're not hot).

we don't get hail

Except the time everyone's cars and roofs got fucked up by massive hailstones.

Also, having to walk when the dust blows in sucks. Ditto when it's hotter than hell, which is 1/3 of the year. I think a bit of property damage (barely anyone dies from extreme weather through most of the USA) is a small price to pay for a temperate, four-season climate.  Snow and rain can be a pain in the ass, but they also inspire and help ground you in nature. Driving an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned, artificially lit cavernous building, or at best walking outside but seeing everything from behind sunglasses- too much bullshit too much of the time.

The Valley is an absurd location for a city, a fact that'll catch up to its residents sooner or later. AZ in general ain't so bad though.

Once I made a simple British Bulldog simulation that was only fun as a toy, not as a game. Tackling in a game just ain't the same as IRL.

Replaying X-Operations recently made me see how fun a Z-grade FPS can be. Plus, I love FPS, and most of my first fiddlings with game dev were in the genre.

So the idea is: remake various team schoolyard games (Bulldog, nigh rules-free American Football, whatever else I have time for) as skirmish modes in a goofy barebones tactical shooter. Shooting instead of tackling.

Aiming for:

• visceral gunplay
• being a team player
• organic cooperation
• high lethality
• recklessness
• gore
• low downtime
• couple gameplay modes
• handful of basic weapons

My main criticism of soccer is it's not violent enough, so I like this direction.

Cool, I love WEGO tactics with spectacular turn playouts, like Frozen Synapse and Flotilla.

Will it be multiplayer-only? Very tight timeframe to hammer out a passable AI for such a game, unless you made it asymmetric.

My prayers go out to all those affected by this storm. I used to live in PA, and am no stranger to the kinds of trouble that come with severe weather. I still remember branches falling from the weight of collected ice, and bailing out our house's window well in two feet of slush to insure that our basement didn't flood.

At present, I live in AZ. If you ever get tired of nasty weather, move out here to AZ.

As a former inhabitant of places with famously nasty whether living in AZ...

AZ whether is brutal every single day. I wanna shoot the sun out of the sky.

football is for wimps!

PLAY BUZKASHI

Paul Eres RIP 1978-2012

In contrast, the panicked evacuation after the disaster (because ZOMG NUCLEAR DISASTER) cost the lives of roughly 600 people (and the evacuation was estimated to save ~28 people from getting cancer). The earthquake and tsunami in general caused 15,870 recorded deaths, 122 times as many as from the nuclear disaster that remained in the news for so long.

Moral of the story: NPP spews radioactivity, better to stay put than run because you might trip on your shoelaces and fatally faceplant.

Another problem with touchscreens is that your hands smudge them up.

Plus, it's kinda tiring on your arms to be moving thing around a lot with a tablet.. Have you tried playing World of Goo on an iPad? I much prefer the mouse.

I much prefer a stylus to fingers. More precise, better ergonomics, no smudges. Do they come as standard, as in the PDA days?

Note that if you use a mouse in the way recommended for your health (nobody does this; not practical for games in any case), it's tiring. A tablet's fine as long as you have an elevated surface to rest it on.

that touchscreen as it is can play with the big boys, if you drop preconceived notions about how a game should control (or just use it as a mouse substitute).

My controller/mouse doesn't get in the way of the display when I use it .. :p

Good point. 'Pointer substitute' is more accurate. Touchscreen would be great for looking around and such if we had invisible hands.

Still good for drawing, swiping, picking, dragging...

But touchscreens do have tactile feedback by definition (hence 'touch'). And it's an interesting control device, similar to but potentially better in some cases than the mouse on PC. Picking, drawing, swiping, etc. Touchscreen facilitates plenty of actions well.

No, touchscreens do not have tactile feedback. Yes, there's 'touch' in the name but it doesn't work this way. The screen reacts to your touches but it doesn't work the other way round stimulating your finger. There is no physical feedback, only in-direct visual + audible response, so it's not haptic.

The forces between stylus/finger and screen are just as tactile as a passive spring in a button pushing back against the thumbs & fingers, therefore touchscreen is capable of satisfying input. That's the point.

If you only admit active feedback, i.e. feed info to game, game itself feeds info to touch, then traditional controllers, touchscreen, keyboards, mice, joysticks, steering wheels... pretty much everything we control games with fails the test. I'm not talking about that, rather the feedback loop closed between the input device and the player, which is the one crucial to gamers at present. Springy physical buttons, springy physical analogue sticks, a physical mouse with momentum and friction. These things don't have a clue what the game's doing, yet they get the job done.

That's not to say input devices can't be improved by active haptics (always wished I could afford a Novint Falcon), just that touchscreen as it is can play with the big boys, if you drop preconceived notions about how a game should control (or just use it as a mouse substitute).

I don't like smartphones for gaming and suspect I will continue to dislike them until they gain the ability to have some kind of tactile feedback as standard. You just can't beat spring-loaded buttons for control, and having that kind of control means better games in general than simplistic touch-screen toys.

The rest of your post is solid, but this part makes no sense.

Yes, touchscreens are terrible when devs try shoehorn fundamentally flawed emulations of traditional console buttons, sticks, and such. They're also terrible when the touch-screen is used as a gimmicky control scheme in crude games. These two cases comprise the majority of smartphone games today.

But touchscreens do have tactile feedback by definition (hence 'touch'). And it's an interesting control device, similar to but potentially better in some cases than the mouse on PC. Picking, drawing, swiping, etc. Touchscreen facilitates plenty of actions well.

What you really mean is that touchscreen is bad for traditional action games, which is true. What about adventure, puzzle, or strategy? And what about building deep action games around touchscreen?

Touchscreen in itself presents an opportunity, not an affront to traditional control schemes.

You made Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles? Cool. How was the GP2X dev experience?

I really wanted a GP2X for ages, but by the time I had enough spare change for one, the PSP was around the same price.

And that's the thing: there's so much stacked against deliberate open platforms for games, versus closed platforms backed by mountains of moneybags, & it ain't just talent. Gonna go out on a limb here... full-time development leads to better games. There are a few cool original games in the PSP homebrew scene, but they're constrained by the fact that there's no potential to profit, so the devs could only work on them as strictly on-the-side projects (although Sony snapped up hombrew devs at least once). Most homebrew is just ports of PC games and emulators.

So what an indie console needs is a thriving marketplace, where people other than indie devs spend money aplenty on software, as they do for closed consoles. Hence the problem.

An indie machine needs big market penetration. GamePark never seemed to attempt this, nor the Pandora guys. Ouya did and made a good show to start with, receiving tens of thousands of preorders, including hundreds for devkits (all largely thanks to a low price point). It remains to be seen whether they can keep it up & make a successful platform (I suspect not). They've enough developer and consumer confidence for now, but they need to keep it up for the months & years following release. It's not even clear they'll hit the release date.

Anyway, if you want an indie machine, just throw your weight behind Ouya. Most of the criticism was like it won't come out / will be too little too late / all the games will suck / nobody will buy games / will collect dust after months / nobody will buy it. Such concerns are valid, though they result inevitably from seeing such an ambitious project with healthy skepticism. Any hypothetical [INDIE Entertainment System] and [IndieBoy] would fare no better. Ouya is thus far the most plausible indie machine. No point fragmenting an as-yet nonexistent market.

If nothing of the sort ever works out, there's always PC and Android. Gaming doesn't strictly *need* consoles.


I'm curious, how much did you make off W&W on GP2X? What penetration did you achieve? IIRC it was one of a handful of commercial titles for the handheld, and if you knew GP, you knew W&W.