It's on again! (now wondering if i can post anything decent as i've been working on music/gameplay..)

btw does anyone know how to mitigate against people spamming the hashtag? One person appears to have posted 3 different pics of an Android desktop. Maybe it's a really subtle game.

Good job on this! I am crap at it, but I love the way you unlock weapons by total crates over all plays.

Some weird lock-up/ctrl-alt-del/something ended up with this happening:

Was pretty funny! Only happened once so no big problem...

What sort of terrain? What context? (e.g. do characters need to navigate over it by jumping?)

If you mean basic hills, there's this:
http://www.gameprogrammer.com/fractal.html#midpoint

There's a monster thread of side-on PG stuff, mostly caves:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5174.0

Depends on the style and what you want to use it for. Most general techniques (e.g. fractals, Spelunky-style "tinker toy" blocks) can be applied to side-on stuff.

(Is this flash? ...Judging by the flixeley font..?)

Heh didn't notice until I posted that but the font is very similar! Not exactly sure where the font is from now, but the game is in C#/OpenGL/SDL

Great to see how this is coming along! It's wonderful how the style is so coherent throughout the map, missions, briefing, etc.

An RPG/exploration game in the perspective-turnbased style of Lords Of Midnight.



(Spot the clipart - unfortunately stereotypical 1950s families will not feature)
It will probably be an open-ended questing game with battles, encounters and stuff. Trying to keep it simple to limit the scope at first.
Will start a devlog for this once it's a bit more advanced...

I vote against an "ignore poster" button - I find it really breaks forums for me - but "ignore thread" would work.

I'm serious about the "ban unless game made in X weeks" option being fundamentally important!

I voted and un-voted and now I can't decide whether to vote or not! 

That's Nth order voting!

This isn't how these polls are supposed to work! Where is the "ban if he doesn't make a game" option? I thought that was fundamental to the TIGSource legal system!

(Clearly in this special case we can vote on how what order the game should be, and generic forum RPGs don't count)

I don't really care if he gets banned or not but he has a very solipsistic style of debate and therefore is very antagonising. The IGDA thing is pretty hilarious.

(I am also guilty of being more active when there's a drama but also feeling dirty. Note to self: make more effort at "normal" times)

Emergent artwork is a lie. The designer of the pencil and paper anticipated that the pencil would be used to make marks on the paper and therefore there is no originality or meaning in the marks other than that attributable to the creator of the pencil.

This thread should have been called "RA RA RA I'M STILL ANNOYED ABOUT MINECRAFT RA RA", since I can only assume it's spurred by the dissonance of things like the Minecraft ALU, giant starship Enterprise, etc.

Games are a system of rules. What is special about a game that excludes it from having emergent behaviours, especially given that part of the system is the player's brain?

Maybe you think no systems can have emergent behaviour? I know some people do hold this view although I find it akin to solipsism or some or definition-mincing nonsense.

I want places like this to stay, no matter what:

Those rule.

HOly fuck, that's truly amazing. Someday I will get back into Minecraft.
Incidentally, what's the white feather-like thing that they pick up in that video?

Ah just noticed you got it working... anyway, here's what I typed!


The key thing about A* is the "distance-plus-cost heuristic" and the fact that the heuristic "cost to goal" value should be an underestimate, but you can bend that second point.

The open/closed lists are just a requirement for that general family of algorithms to run in a non-recursive manner. You *really* don't want to mess about with trying to avoid having either of them, certainly not before having a working implementation.

No thread on A* is complete without a link to this:
http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/

In this code...

Code:

holder_node.g_score=current_node.g_score+2;
holder_node.h_score=abs(holder_node.x-end_node.x)+abs(holder_node.y-end_node.y);
holder_node.h_score*=2.00001;

You seem to be saying that each step costs 2, but also multiplying the estimate to goal by 2 (and a bit)... Why not just make steps cost 1?
Also consider trying other heuristics instead of Manhattan distance... maybe straight line distance?

That .00001 bothers me a little bit... shouldn't really be needed til you get to fine tuning it, as it breaks/bends the rule of A* that the heuristic should be an underestimate (or exact estimate).

(Someday I hope to have an excuse to play with D*, LPA* and all those others linked on the Wikipedia page...)

When you say "breaks" do you mean that the backwards tracing through the tree of explored notes stops?

Also, you say it explores more nodes than it should, but it looks like it's explored a weird set of nodes. I'd expect it to be hugging the walls in the centre to get the shortest path...

Oh and piratepad.net gave me a "504 Gateway Time-out"

I like Pistols and Sabre as mounted weapons. You don't really have a chance to reload or aim very well in a charge so melee combat will become more important. So yes, what you see here is limited by the amount of art I have - in fact I am getting all the gameplay finished before I add more breadth to the art and units.

Cool, yeah, I guessed as much. It's a good tech level/setting for all that kind of stuff!

As for Canned Gameplay...

Ahhh ok, got it. So even the canned version would be free-roaming and non-linear, which is cool. As long as you still pick your battles and have the result of your battle feed back into the strategy game and vice versa, you don't lose too much.

Also, you can get the gameplay working and develop the world generation to fit whatever turns out to be fun: You handcrafted balanced world should be a good reference point!

PS: I hope that there is a mix of balanced/unbalanced encounters even in a balanced world. It's nice to have to make a decision about whether you can handle the battle

Yeah it's good how they cover those angles. The Humble Indie guys did amazingly out of it, but I do wonder if it would work as your "default" sales model. Maybe as you say it should just be for promotions.

It's also interesting that Humble Indie tweaked it by allowing the buyer to choose how the payment was shared between charity and developers.

It would be nice to be able to (indirectly) contribute to charity via sales, but the social pressure element would make me uncomfortable as a developer if it was a real factor. I'd hope (especially online) that it would be more like an excuse for buyers to give to charity at the same time as getting a game out of it, if that makes any sense....

Plus it's a very simple "charityware" system, unlike Glumbuster's, which was pretty baffling.

This is a good read, various pros and cons discussed:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=name-your-price-approach-boosts-cha-2010-07-15

I wonder if the Humble Indie people knew about this research?
The article and study both only really looked at sales figures rather than any other more vauge outcomes, but still interesting.

Nice to see this project still going

This is probably because of placeholder animations etc, but I hope the guys charging at eachother will be using swords or lances (to clarify: not the medival jousting type) whilst on horseback, rather than the muskets... Or at least, switching to sword/lance in plenty of time before impact.

What do you mean by Canned Gameplay? Specific scripted scenarios?

Thanks! I got the whole celestial sphere business sorted out today, and fixed all the problems with latitude being interpreted wrongly, the sky turning the wrong way, etc. Was hoping to post some screenshots but there are some bugs with the palette that I think I'll try and fix first..

Should I update this more often.... probably... anyway!

I've been working on day-night cycles for this, and a pleasingly ancient model of the heavens, about which I wrote some nonsense earlier: http://twistedtreegames.tumblr.com/post/797521853/the-celestial-sphere

Initial super-buggy screenshots of it almost working:







We have some exciting ideas for events and music tied to the day-night cycle, will post a video when they're implemented

Oh, and there's an slightly old video showing some other ideas and the dynamic soundtrack in action: