Ah, great news!! I'm really glad that you decided to do a "deluxe" version of AoTPZ. Looking forward to this one!

Can't vouch for AS but in C#, this is why it's slower (sometimes):

for vs foreach
The rumor abounds that the foreach loop is bad for performance. The truth is actually a little more complicated. Basically, foreach involves no performance penalty when used against arrays. However, when used against lists it involves the same overhead as creating an enumerator and using it within a try/catch block! Ildasm.exe may come in handy here to see what's going on. This isn't a complete killer, but if you do enough list access you may want to avoid it. Example 4 compares the two statements for access against an array and an ArrayList.

Explanation from http://dotnet.sys-con.com/node/46342

Looking forward to this

I have to leave early on Sunday morning, so if anyone would like my place for Sunday, it will be available.

Thread end! That's wonderful, Arne.
The Chrysalid looks really happy/silly, like he's just turned up to borrow a lawnmower in a ridiculous 70s sitcom.
(But still awesome - and yes I'm aware of your XCOM love  )


Oh, also, didn't see this linked already: RPS did an excellent and entertaining pair of articles:
Why I Think XCOM Will Suck
Why I Don't Think XCOM Will Suck

There isn't much (=any) development news posted on it yet, but I started a tumblr blog to provide updates and random related stuff on this project.

It's here: http://twistedtreegames.tumblr.com/

Progress has been good, we're slowly getting more of an idea of what the game will be like: "not really a game" as it turns out, but hopefully an interesting and satisfying exploration experience.

Currently working on an upgrade to the rain/clouds, linking up some sounds to in-game objects and prototyping ambient wildlife and ghosts and stuff.

If you were storing those 1's and 0's as single bits you would get a file at worst 8 (or 16?) times smaller, without using RLE. Of course, the ease of writing to a text buffer might outweigh the saving, but if size is your main concern then it's something to consider.

See LZW and Huffman coding

Lots more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomathematics

See third paragraph in section headed "Current trends in pseudomathematics"....

Right.

Have fun jamming, you lot! (Corrupt partitions aside!)
I can almost smell the heady aroma of spicy chips and warm laptops from here

Looking forward to meeting those that are going to the World Of Love weekend!

The only thing that's foolish is not taking the time to understand the proofs available of why you can't have a general purpose compression algorithm that can compress every possible file down to 36 bytes. The mathetmatical proof isn't too hard to understand; the beauty of a good proof is that they are simple enough that you can be certain there are no loopholes.

This needs quoting more. Exploring new ideas for compression is not silly. What is silly is completely ignoring/not understanding the 20+ extremely well-explained and painstakingly written explainations of the 1 or 2 fundamental reasons (Shannon entropy and maybe Pigeonhole principle) why you can't compress data beyond a certain limit.

Einstein didn't invent relativity by not understanding/ignoring physics, he stood on the shoulders of giants (Newton).

• Have you written a decompressor which works for all files? I'm suprised you're not writing the compressor and decompressor in parallel. I feel like I'm being trolled just asking.
• What did Shannon get wrong when formulating the concept of entropy?

For every file you compress, delete everything on any physical medium the program can access. Compressing a file will not only save space, it will create space.

Not only that, you could actually destroy/throw away the physical storage itself, thus creating new empty physical space. Since creating files is free (right click -> New File), you could repeat this process indefinitely to increase the internal volume of any given room far beyond its initial capacity, as long as you have a big enough hole into which to throw the discarded storage units.

Once I have perfected a method of creating large holes I will be filing a patent.

DO NOT STEAL MY IDEA YOU GUYES

(also http://www.steorn.com/)

Isn't this a system of caves?

a stream through the caves

I like the idea of making some naturalistic caves with streams and stuff*, rather than the usual island terrains.
(*Speleotherms!?)

My point about making an intermediate-step invisible flood-fill is that you can pick where you want the rivers to end up (e.g. the cave entrance). One reason you might want to do this is that if the player finds a river they immediately have a piece of intuitive information (the flow direction) about where they are in the cave. It's a bit more game-designy and less random.

Onza40 - I meant the exact opposite, GM looks great, especially for jams and prototyping. I meant that "not knowing GM" (or a similar thing) is a handicap. As you say, it clearly has limits, but so does everything.

Woodwolf - yeah I had 3DCK on the Spectrum, and then version 2 on the Amiga. Mindblowing stuff

I'm easily trolled.

I know C++ but I can't get used to GM, which I consider a handicap for making games, especially at jams.

Gotcha, I was also wondering if i could use some sort of pathfinding to run a stream through the caves. It'd be easiest with user supplied points, but maybe i could find some way to intelligently place the start and end as well..

Stream(s) sound cool. Might be a nice way to add some signposting to the world. How about randomly placing stream sources (springing from the floor or gushing out from walls) and then pathfinding to the cave exit (if it has an exit).

You could maybe flood-fill from a point (marking the squares with the number of steps from that point) and then place river start points in distant places and flow towards the "low" starting point.

Grown-ups use whatever they are most productive in

I've just been playing it a bit lot more

The tank "capsizing" thing is pretty annoying when it's a really valuable tank, although it's cool that they still attack and work like turrets. How about some system for them righting themselves, like maybe if there's no enemies attacking they slowly turn over.

I hope I get to build some multi-turreted monster tanks, if not yet then one day

Edit: Finished!  The levels are very cool, some nice different things going on! I got a bit of a better look at the backgrounds and stuff too - love the piles of skulls and frozen explosions. The bigger more stable chassis makes it a bit more understandable about the little tanks getting knocked over. I did also get the problem with big tanks exploding into the air when capturing factories.

Also, I had a scary moment before the last level when, afer randomly clicking to try and skip the score screen, the "own" text disappeared from items in the buy screen, replaced by the numbers. I checked ingame and the build options were all still there and working, and also the yellow/grey colours on the buy menu items were still correct.

Hey, only got time for a few rushed comments, but here you go:
(I've only got up to level 3 so far)

- The style is great!
- Music is very atmospheric and pleasing
- buying parts and building tanks is always good, and the interface on the factories is tight
- The tank AI modes are a nice mechanic. Sometimes I felt like I needed a "retreat" mode, but 4 would probably be too much for the interface.
- the window seems a bit small
- the push-scroll can be quite annoying, because I found it impossible to avoid trigging the scroll whilst operating the factory interface (for example), which led to a lot of uncontrolled unintentional swinging back and forth across the map.
- minor request: could the points total screen after "Victory!" either advance faster or be set up so if you click whilst it's counting up points it immediately jumps to the final totals.

A bug(?): The second time I played it, most of the time I clicked on the game (e.g. tank AI mode) took me to another webpage, e.g. http://trackaweek.tumblr.com/ or Fast Games (?)

I'm definitely thinking push-scroll for rotating the view is the way to go. That might solve that issue with normal mouselook of the screen flying around as soon as you touch the mouse.

Even for FPS players, I think there's an advantage to encouraging them not to hyperactively dash and spin around in this case. Hopefully it won't be annoying.